The Perfect Impossible Crime: John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man

John Dickson Carr was the undisputed master of the locked-room mystery, creating puzzles that seemed to defy all logic. His crowning achievement was the 1935 masterpiece, The Hollow Man (published in the US as The Three Coffins), which is widely regarded as the greatest example of this subgenre.

The novel presents not one, but two impossible crimes. In the first, a prominent professor is shot dead inside his sealed study, a room with a single entry and exit that was under constant surveillance. No one entered or left. The second crime is even more perplexing: a magician is stabbed in the middle of a deserted, snow-covered street, with no footprints but his own leading to his body.

The genius of The Hollow Man lies in how Carr confronts the reader directly. Midway through the book, his eccentric detective, Dr Gideon Fell, delivers his now-famous “locked-room lecture”. He categorizes and explains the classic methods used to commit impossible crimes, from hidden passages to spring-loaded traps. By doing this, Carr seemingly gives away all his tricks, daring the reader to solve the puzzle before he does.

The solution, of course, is none of the textbook methods. It’s a breathtaking piece of misdirection that uses psychology, a clever manipulation of space, and an audacious lie to explain the impossible. Carr’s brilliance wasn’t just in creating a baffling puzzle but in teaching us how to appreciate its construction. The Hollow Man remains the definitive guide to the impossible crime, a mind-bending puzzle that has never been surpassed.

Serling Lake’s ‘Impossible Crime Classics’ collection of fiction from the early 20th century is available on Amazon, Google Play and Barnes & Noble.