Murder for Pleasure by Haycraft Howard;

Author:Haycraft, Howard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2019-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

III

It is perhaps inevitable that any evolutionary study of a literary form must give most of its attention to the innovators and experimentalists. The very number of the conventionalists, if nothing else, precludes admitting them to the same detailed consideration, enjoyable as their works may be. Occasionally, however, a writer appears, who, utilizing only conventional and accepted techniques, nevertheless raises those techniques to so high a level of excellence that he stands out above his fellows and merits special mention. Such an author in the field of the detective story is John Dickson Carr (1905?- ), who also writes as "Carter Dickson." Though he qualifies as an English writer by residence and subject matter, John Dickson Carr is by nativity an American. He was born at Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of Wooda N. Carr, later a United States Congressman, and at the time of this writing Postmaster of Uniontown.

"At the age of eight," John Dickson Carr writes, "I was hauled off to Washington. While my father thundered in Congress, I stood on a table in the members' anteroom, pinwheeled by a God-awful collar, and recited Hamlet's Soliloquy to certain gentlemen named Thomas Heflin and Pat Harrison and Claude Kitchin and others whom I have apparently since inspired along that line." Inasmuch as the elder Carr served in Congress from 1913 to 1915, this statement would seem to place the year of the author's birth—which he has never directly revealed—at about 1905. His other activities in the nation's capital, Carr adds, included asking Woodrow Wilson what his name was, sitting on Uncle Joe Cannon's lap listening to ghost stories, and learning the rudiments of crap-shooting from the legislative page boys. Among his earliest heroes were Sherlock Holmes, D'Artagnan, and the Wizard of Oz, and at fourteen he was writing for an unnamed newspaper. Also unnamed are his schools and colleges, with the exception of Hill School, which he mentions "with pride because it is the only institution from which I wasn't fired. My college career—or shall I say careers—turned out with more notoriety than fame. Harmless matters, such as staging fake murders with a dummy. . . . " Another academic stumbling-block was mathematics, which he still calls with characteristic vividness "that last refuge of the half-wit." He was intended for the law, but scholastic difficulties plus the call of journalism frustrated his family's designs.

Sometime in the late 1920's he went abroad, traveling and living in England and on the Continent. "I wrote a novel: an historical romance with lots of Gadzookses and sword-play. Somewhat later I wrote It Walks by Night [1930]. I think it's pretty terrible, but I hope it's entertaining—to me the one unforgivable sin is being dull. The characters split bottles, heads and infinitives with equal zest. It is melodramatic, like birth and death and love and all honest, fundamental things. And, thank heaven, it is not 'significant.' But if it gives the nervous reader a bad night or the puzzle-connoisseur a headache, I shall be satisfied."

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