"In the seventeenth chapter of John Dickson Carr's mystery novel " The Three Coffins " (1935), the story pauses so that Dr. Gideon Fell, a brilliant sleuth, can deliver the "Locked-Room Lecture," an elaboration of all the various methods by which a person might be found murdered in a "hermetically sealed chamber," a room locked from the inside. It's one of the most justly celebrated passages in the history of detective fiction,"
"Even among the great Golden Age detective novels, his work stands out for its cheeky humor, baroque invention, and macabre spirit. The director and screenwriter Rian Johnson has made no secret of his own fandom-he wrote an introduction for a recent re-release of the author's novel " The Problem of the Wire Cage " (1939)-and although Agatha Christie is an obvious inspiration for Johnson's "Knives Out" murder-mystery movies, Carr has always struck me as the more profound, if less acknowledged, influence."
Rian Johnson's latest whodunnit stars Josh O'Connor as a Catholic priest attempting to restore moral order at a church tarnished by murder. John Dickson Carr's locked-room tropes and his "Locked-Room Lecture" exemplify methods for seemingly impossible murders and the genre's self-awareness. Carr mastered plotting impossible crimes, treating murder as a magic trick in which victims appear to have been killed by supernatural means. Carr's novels combine cheeky humor, baroque invention, and a macabre spirit. Rian Johnson has acknowledged Carr's fandom by writing an introduction for a re-release and blends influences from both Carr and Agatha Christie in modern whodunnits.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]