Classic whodunnit

Great story from the master of the locked room mystery and with the famous chapter/essay about the tropes of this genre.

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obsessed with details

Difficult to follow for my lazy brain that had been softened by more accessible material .

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2 people found this helpful

An outstanding work of (crime) fiction

The book published in 1935 is one of JDC's outstanding works created during the peak period of his production. In my opinion (IMO) after 1939 the quality of his fiction diminished significantly with a few exceptions. However, JDC made a major contribution to the emerging field of radio thrillers then developing.
JODC's standout-quality? 'Mr Carr has a sense of the macabre which lifts him high above the average run of detective story writers' - J. B. Priestley'
Peter Noble's highly differentiated reading manages to create different voices that amply reflects the various vivid personalities which the author has put into little more than 200 pages. I know of no other work from 'the Golden Age of Whodunnits' which has so many credible and lively personalities in it e.g. Burnaby, Dr Grimaud, Pierre Frey, Ernestine Dumont, Pettis, Rosette Grimaud, Mills, the acrobat O'Rourke.... not to mention the two detectives. From the side of the ever-irritable Superintendent Hadley flows a realistic stream of impatience and common-sense directed at the humane private agent Dr Fell, a heavy drinking freelance scholar of enormous girth
This is a book about illusions and lost hopes; this is not a book with a happy ending a la Agatha Christie; the latter nearly always revolve at the end around who marries whom - as Edmund Wilson perceived.. 'The Hollow Man' shows genuine class: it is also a detective story about writing detective stories i, e. a mise en abyme (Andre Gide's phrase). That means 'a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence. e.g. two mirrors facing each other.
Most crime fiction fails to transcend the genre; nevertheless this text could be taken as a novel which has two murders in it. would bracket it with Graham Greene's works from the 1930s e.g. 'The Confidential Agent' (1939) another masterpiece. 'The Hollow Man' could be seen as a milieu study given the distinctive characterisations (s above).
BTW the BBC radio version of 'The Hollow Man' can now be heard on Audible. It is the only one of the eight that fully succeeds. But the Norwegian radio version shows how it should be done: without any Norwegian, the sound of ppl buried alive trying to escapee, of dying men coping w/ pain of being shot, the sound of terrified ppl...
Let's hope that more JDC masterpieces will be read and placed on Audible e,g 'The Judas Window' (1938 courtroom magic), or 'The Reader is warned' (1939!).

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The importance of narration

An ingenious story from the Golden Age, sadly squandered by poor narration. Noble's Dr Fell sounds like a schoolchild woodenly impersonating an old man, and several other characters have accents that veer so wildly I sometimes thought they were supposed to be somebody else entirely.

With such a theatrical and artificial story, a little realism in the presentation would have helped tremendously. As it was I had to struggle through the wobbly accents to follow the story beneath.

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