In his detecting debut, larger than life lexicographer Dr. Gideon Fell is entertaining young American college graduate Tad Rampole at Yew Cottage, Fell's charming home in the English countryside. Within sight of his study window is the ruin of Chatterham Prison, perched high on a precipice known as Hag's Nook. The prison's land belongs to the Starberth family—whose eldest sons must each spend an hour in the prison's eerie "Governor's Room" to inherit the family fortune. Rampole is especially interested in the family, having met the young and beautiful Dorothy Starberth on the train from London. He readily agrees when Fell and the local reverend, Thomas Saunders, ask him to accompany them as they watch and wait for badly frightened Martin Starberth to complete 'his hour' in the prison. Martin has every reason to be afraid; more than one Starberth heir has met an untimely end. Will his turn come tonight?

The newspapers dubbed the thief the 'Mad Hatter,' and his outrageous pranks amused all London. but the laughter turned to horror when a corpse with a crossbow through the heart was found at the Tower of London in a top hat. As Dr. Gideon Fell was to discover, the whole case turned on the matter of hats—in fact, threatened to become a nightmare of hats. For the victim was none other than Sir William Bitton's nephew, dressed in a golfing suit and wearing Sir William's stolen opera hat. And tying Sir William to his murdered nephew with a scarlet thread was the stolen manuscript of a completely unknown story said to be the handiwork of Edgar Allan Poe. In a tale as freighted with menace as the Traitor's Gate, portly Dr. Fell unravels a crime unique by even his standards of the bizarre.

Dr. Fell, detective extraordinary, is back again, more amusing and omniscient than ever. In The Eight of Swords he is faced with the sort of problem in which his acute and devious mind delights. When a gay spirit took to playing strange pranks in the haunted bedroom at the Grange and the Bishop was seen sliding down the banisters, Scotland Yard was more amused than disturbed. But when Depping, the harmless old scholar and connoisseur of wines and foods, was found murdered in his study, they sent Dr. Fell down to investigate. As soon as Dr. Fell saw the card representing the eight of swords, the partially eaten dinner on the tray, and the button-hook which had been used to blow the fuses, he knew the murderer. But there was a great deal to be explained before he could prove it, and his solution will remain a classic example of deductive reasoning combined with thrilling plot. The book is also filled with a subtle type of humor that makes it something different in the way of detective novels.

The bunk’s mattress was soaked wit blood. The old-fashioned razor was folded shut. But it had been recently used. It was smeared with blood. A voice broke the terrible stillness in the stateroom: “The Blind Barber Has Been Here Tonight!” On an Atlantic crossing of the good ship Queen Victoria, a vicious killer is loose, and four high-living characters are hellbent to pin him down. Dr. Gideon Fell soon finds himself up to his chins in misadventure as he wades into a comedy of terrors that boasts a reel of compromising film, an emerald elephant, and a lethal razor for props, murder as the evils deed, and unmitigated mayhem as the comedy relief.

In this Golden Age British-style mystery, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master John Dickson Carr presents Dr. Gideon Fell’s most chilling case, in which a clock-obsessed killer terrorizes London A clockmaker is puzzled by the theft of the hands of a monumental new timepiece he is preparing for a member of the nobility. That night, one of the stolen hands is found buried between a policeman’s shoulder blades, stopping his clock for all time. The crime is just peculiar enough to catch the attention of Dr. Gideon Fell, the portly detective whose formidable intellect is the terror of every criminal in London. Working closely with Scotland Yard, he finds that the case turns on the question of why the clock hands were stolen. And learning the answer will put Dr. Fell squarely in the path of a madman with nothing but time on his hands. Death-Watch is the 5th book in the Dr. Gideon Fell Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Two murders are committed in such a fashion that the murderer must not only have been invisible - but lighter than air! According to the evidence, this person killed his first victim and literally vanished, and then struck again in the middle of an empty street - with watchers at either end who saw nothing and no footprints in the snow. It was a problem that Dr. Gideon Fell - huge, rumpled, with flowing cloak, eyeglasses and cane - regarded as one of devilish illusion and impersonation. 'Mr Carr has a sense of the macabre which lifts him high above the average run of detective story writers' - J. B. Priestley

On exhibit at the marble-pillared Wade Museum of Oriental Art is an enormous black-hooded carriage, and when an inspector opens one of its doors to investigate some strange goings-on, out falls a corpse. But it is not just an ordinary corpse—this one has an elaborately decorated Persian dagger protruding from its chest, fake whiskers on its chin, and a cookbook clutched in its hand. These bizarre components have Dr. Gideon Fell temporarily baffled, but not overwhelmed, as he unravels the clues to reveal the solution to a chillingly horrendous crime.

Gideon Fell searches London for a gilt-painted creature who was present at the scene of a murder

Wealthy young Christopher Kent has undertaken a bet: that he cannot work his way from South Africa to England without recourse to his own bank account. With less than twenty-four hours left before he can reveal himself and win the bet, Kent arrives at a London hotel he knows, hoping to scam a meal—only to find himself trapped in a room with a half open trunk and a dead woman's body.

Book by Carr, John Dickson

The corpse of Frank Dorrance is discovered in the center of a tennis court and Dr. Gideon Fell searches for the killer

From back They didn't believe in ghosts! What happens when six rational people are invited to Longwood House and one of them is murdered by a gun that comes off the wall by itself and hangs in mid air! Only Dr. Fell can solve the perplexing problem of who shot the man who could not shudder, and what he finds makes him destroy the evidence!

Having lost all his money in hare-brained get-rich-quick schemes, old Angus Campbell has nothing to leave his heirs but the proceeds of his life insurance policies. After he falls to his death from a locked bedchamber in the tower of Shira Castle in the Scottish Highlands, his family gather. They are joined by amateur sleuth Dr Gideon Fell, who tries to solve the mystery. Is it suicide, or is it murder? From Shira to Glencoe Gideon Fell trains his forensic intelligence on trying to discover the truth behind events. In the meantime a tabloid press reporter endlessly falls foul of the redoubtable lady of the house, two young people fall in love while arguing incessantly, and a cast of locals come and go as if this is all a normal days occurrence. And all the while bodies continue to pile up . . . The Case of the Constant Suicides is a masterfully plotted locked-room mystery from the master of the art.

Judge Horace Ireton didn't care about the letter of the law. He was interested in administering absolute, impartial justice as he saw it. To some, his methods of meting out justice made him seem hardly human, for they were coldly calculated - the same type of "cat and mouse" technique that he used in his chess games with Dr. Gideon Fell, the elephantine detective. The system, as he explained it, consisted in "letting your opponent think he's perfectly safe, winning hands down: and then catch him in a corner." But the system was not infallible. One day Judge Ireton was found with a pistol in his hand, beside the body of his daughter's fiancé, a man he had every reason to dislike, as many people knew; and he found that when one was on the inside looking out, the game had to be played differently.

Crime author Dick Markham is in love again; his fiancée the mysterious newcomer to the village, Lesley Grant. When Grant accidentally shoots the fortune teller through the side of his tent at the local fair – following a very strange reaction to his predictions – Markham is reluctantly brought into a scheme to expose his betrothed as a suspected serial husband-poisoner. That night the enigmatic fortune teller – and chief accuser – is found dead in an impossible locked-room setup, casting suspicion onto Grant and striking doubt into the heart of her lover. Lured by the scent of the impossible case, Dr Gideon Fell arrives from London to examine the perplexing evidence and match wits with a meticulous killer at large. First published in 1944, Till Death Do Us Part remains a pacey and deeply satisfying impossible crime story, championed by Carr connoisseurs as one of the very best examples of his mystery writing talents.

At the edge of the woods by the river stands the tower. Once part of a chateau since burnt down, only the tower remains. The inside is but a shell with a stone staircase climbing spirally up the wall to a flat stone roof with a parapet. On that parapet the body of Howard Brooke lay bleeding. The murderer, when Brooke's back was turned, must have drawn the sword-cane from its sheath and run him through the body. And this must have occurred between ten minutes to four and five minutes past four, when the two children discovered him dying. Yet the evidence showed conclusively that during this time not a living soul came near him.

Was the madwoman dead or alive. The two beautiful Devereaux girls came from an old and distinguished family—with an old and unfortunate streak of madness in it. Now Cecilia was still alive and Margot was dead . . . murdered. And it was up to Dr. Gideon Fell to discover as quickly as possible which of them was (or had been) a sexually twisted, dangerously cunning madwoman.

A terrifying cult of devil-worshippers makes murder part of its evil ritual. An arrogant lawyer cynically defends a woman he's sure is guilty and finds himself helpless to clear one he knows is innocent. Here is a chilling story of horror and brutality told in the heavy atmosphere of marihuana-filled chapels of the Devil.

Who was she? Where had she come from? Nobody was sure. But everyone agreed Rose Lestrange had had a morbid streak, an undefinable atmosphere of evil and depravity about her. She had meddled in other people's business, toyed with other people's husbands, laughed at other people's torments. But what were Rose Lestrange's own secrets? Behind a garish death mask of frozen violence lay the answers.

Hate! Jealousy and humiliation twisted and warped Eve Ferrier. Filled with hate she conceived a plan for revenge - a plan so corroded with evil and malevolence it defied human imagination. Then suddenly brutal murder was done. Only Gideon Fell could unravel the complicated cross-currents of malignancy that shrouded Eve Ferrier's circle. But when the job was done he had stripped the mask from one of the vilest killers the great detective had ever known.

Pennington Barclay, master of Greengrove, is murderously attacked in his library by something that exits from a completely locked room. The entire household - including Pennington's beautiful young wife, and his nephew, who is the heir to Greengorove by virtue of a newly discovered will - is in an uproar. Estelle Barclay, Pennington's spinsterish and psychically inclined sister, insists the attack was the work of Greengrove's ghost. Enter Dr. Gideon Fell. Armed with his everlasting cigar and a wicked cane, this obstreperous extrovert succeeds in frightening everybody. For as horror piles on horror throughout the night, Gideon Fell evidences interest in one person only - the spirit of the long-departed Mr. Justice Wildfare. But Fell was not up to any supernatural hijinks, as someone well knew... the one who was most frightened of all.

Sailing from England to America with a writer friend, Philip Knox, Dr. Gideon Fell, that eminent crime solver, encounters some odd characters, who are fated to have a volcanic effect on his stay in the U.S. Prominent among them is the imperious Lady Tiverton (the former actress, Margery Vane), her latest young lover, and her longtime female companion. All wind up at a dress rehearsal in a Connecticut theater endowed by Miss Vane. Murder stops the show, but provides Dr. Fell with a superb opportunity to display his own singular talents.

When Dr. Gideon Fell finds himself at a party where guests are in a state of deep agitation, all the faculties of his detective genius are called into play. Why is the host of the party, southern aristocrat Henry Maynard, so cryptic about the strange goings-on in the mansion? And how is the theft of the scarecrow linked to a diabolical and ingenious murder?