The Hollow Man (The Three Coffins) 1935 - John Dickson Carr

Category: Adults, Classic, Mystery, Thriller
Language: English
Keywords: Gideon Fell Mysteries

Written by John Dickson Carr
Read by Peter Noble
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Series: Dr. Gideon Fell, Book 6
Length: 10hrs 15min
Publidher: North Hobart : Hear a Book, 1988

Professor Charles Grimaud was explaining to some friends the natural causes behind an ancient superstition about men leaving their coffins when a stranger entered and challenged Grimaud’s skepticism. The stranger asserted that he had risen from his own coffin and that four walls meant nothing to him. He added, ‘My brother can do more… he wants your life and will call on you!’ The brother came during a snowstorm, walked through the locked front door, shot Grimaud and vanished. The tragedy brought Dr Gideon Fell into the bizarre mystery of a killer who left no footprints.

“Locked room mysteries are just really magic tricks. This book cleverly and overtly acknowledges this fact. The beauty of the book lies in misdirection; it lies in presenting all the facts but conning the reader into following the wrong ones; it lies in creating a design which produces gasps of amazement and then nods of satisfaction. (All mystery stories do that, obviously, but this is a howdunnit wrapped up with a whodunit and so playing at a higher level than your standard mystery.) Of course, as this book also acknowledges, a locked room mystery has to pull off a trick that most magicians never dare – it has to expose the workings”