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

Let me know when you’ve found another book that throws down the gauntlet in the opening stretch like this one does.  The Problem of the Wire Cage?  The Judas Window?  The Red Widow Murders?  Maybe.  I scan my bookshelves and I struggle to find a book that comes out with as solid of an opening as The Hollow Man.

There are plenty of mystery novels that start strong.  I’ll write you a whole post on the first sentence of Rim of the Pit or The Red Right Hand if you want.  Those are perfect opening sentences, and the paragraphs that follow them are fine as well.  There are also books with storming opening chapters; see the suffocatingly impossible hellscape we’re confronted with in chapter one of The Judas Window.

That’s all well and good, but the absolute barrage that Carr lays out in the first fifty pages of The Hollow Man is why we read these books.  Other mysteries may surpass it in terms of the opening chapter, but damn, the entire conceit that The Hollow Man opens with is near perfection.  And it keeps going.  And it keeps going.  And maybe now I know why this book is so famous…

I’ve read enough of Carr that I’ll ramble on about the weak points in his writing towards the end of his career.  But what about the strong points of the beginning?  The Hollow Man is that strength embodied.  The ability to describe a scene with a single sentence.  The agility to stack more intrigue into a chapter than most of his revered contemporaries managed in their complete output.

It’s a homecoming of Carr for me, and I’m conscious as to whether I can fairly review this one.  I’ve read them all… almost, right? Clever me would have left Carr’s “classic” as my last Carr novel, and yet I leave this as my second to last.

“What, you haven’t read The Hollow Man?” you ask.  Well, yeah, but not on purpose.  I spoiled this one for myself a year or so before I ever took the leap into the impossible crime genre.  The notion of a locked room murder sounded really intriguing nine years ago, and not to be bothered with actually committing to reading a novel, I made the idiotic decision to skim what sort of solution there might be.  I’ve never been able to find the actual post that spoiled this for me, but it was a thorough one.  Like probably the length of what I’m about to write.  And it was incredibly well written, in that it gave me an abbreviated sense of the entire novel; not just explaining the tricks behind the multiple impossible crimes, but also the whole backstory and motive (the brothers, the coffins, etc).  I’d regret reading it to my dying day if it hadn’t also spurred me into actually diving into impossible crime novels.  It taught me that the solution of these puzzles went miles beyond “the killer snuck down the chimney” or “the killer hid behind a painting that was painted to look like the rest of the room” (no clue where I get the last impression, but it stands out as a solution from a story I read as a child).  This was some deep misdirection, and although I realized immediately that The Hollow Man had some controversy regarding aspects of the solution, it was enough to get me to make that next step.  Follow on with short stories The Wrong Problem and The Blind Man’s Hood by Carr.  Follow that with dozens of respectable, if not impressive, stories from The Black Lizard Book of Impossible Crimes.  Follow that with my monumental $2.50 commitment to the genre by actually purchasing a book on eBay (a Dell map back edition of Hag’s Nook, not even knowing at the time what a map back was).

It was in the likes of The Problem of the Green Capsule, The White Priory Murders, The Judas Window, The Emperor’s Snuff Box, and He Who Whispers that I realized how much I had to go all in on these mysteries.  And here I am eight years later finally getting around to the book that you’ve all already read.

But, daaaamn, that opening.  It’s a slow burn – let’s be honest, Carr’s opening mostly with strong slow burns at this point in his career (The Burning Court, hello) – but this one buuuuurns.  This isn’t the slow opening that I fear I may be implying – Carr’s pounding quality scene description and intrigue into your brain with the fidelity of a meat mallet – rather it builds and builds and builds like few others I can think of.  It’s those books in my opening paragraph that maybe contend in terms of opening salvo.  I beg you to throw out other examples because either I haven’t read them or I’m just blanking at the moment.

The setup, for those of you haven’t read this, involves the eccentric Dr Grimaud inviting a masked stranger into his study in the presence of several witnesses.  Minutes later, a shot rings out, and when the door to the study is finally battered down, Grimaud lays moribund from a gunshot wound, just in time to leave a garbled dying message that will be dissected and reinterpreted multiple times throughout the length of the novel.  Inexplicably, there is no way that the assailant could have escaped the room, as the chimney is too tight to fit through, and the only window leads out to an expanse of untouched snow.

I’m giving a scant flyover on the setup, because like one of those children’s fortunetelling thumb contraptions made out of paper, Carr unleashes an ever-changing mystery that mesmerizes as it folds and contradicts over a number of chapters.

The metamorphosis of the puzzle just doesn’t stop, and it eventually evolves into another impossible crime featuring a man shot point blank in the back by an invisible assailant in front of three reliable witnesses.  On top of that, the body is surrounded by an expanse of snow touched only by the victim’s footprints.

The Hollow Man is infamous for Chapter 17 – titled The Locked Room Lecture – which involves Dr Fell breaking the fourth wall and giving a lecture on locked room murders.  It’s every bit an impossible crime fan’s fantasy, with Fell providing seven distinct solutions to a locked room murder, and an additional five methods solely focusing on tricks involving the locked door.

“I will now lecture” announced the doctor, with amiable firmness, “on the general mechanics and development of that situation which is known in detective fiction as the ‘hermetically sealed chamber.’”

As famous as Chapter 17 is, I was just as swept up by chapter 14, in which another character lectures on the techniques of magicians, revealing the solution behind a number of classic magic tricks.  Having gone into this book knowing the solution, I enjoyed seeing how both Chapter 14 and 17 brush lightly on the true solution to the impossibilities, and at one point, Carr practically dangles the solution in the reader’s face.  There are also some “junk” solutions that Fell dismisses as cheats for locked room mysteries during The Locked Room Lecture, and it’s interesting to note that Carr used ingenious variations of them in some of his most famous novels that he wrote later.

The Hollow Man is a locked room fanboy’s dream, and that’s more so on account of Carr’s writing and plotting than the actual impossible crimes.  There’s absolutely brilliant misdirection in the vein of Death Watch or The Four False Weapons, and yet the mechanics behind key parts of the solutions are out of the realm that any reader could conclude on their own.  Indeed, I went into this book knowing how the tricks were worked, and despite paying studious attention during a key scene, I felt like my memory was deceiving me, as things seemed to be described in such a way that the solution I remembered couldn’t have worked.

That’s a minor quibble though in an outstanding story.  The Hollow Man was an absolute joy to read, and it triggered the memory of what I experienced years ago when I was making my way through Carr’s novels from the 1930s.  I almost forgot just how much stacking of mystery that Carr was capable of, and the way in which every minor quirk of the story comes together at the end for an explanation that makes complete sense.  In that sense, The Hollow Man is as good as the best of them.  I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to fairly rank this book because the fact I had spoiled it meant I didn’t get to experience the puzzle nor the enlightenment.  Still, there were so many details that fit together perfectly that I was still in awe and experienced a number of surprises.

Throughout this post I’ve referred to this book as The Hollow Man, which was my preferred title going into it.  Having read it, I’m drawn more to The Three Coffins, which is a hauntingly appropriate title.  I guess it’s just force of habit at this point that I still use The Hollow Man.  My favorite passage comes at the end of chapter 18, but it would have made a gut-punch of a final line for the novel.

“He turned away, but he did not immediately go.  As the muddy light deepened to purple, and dust-colored shadows swallowed up the room, he remained for a long time staring at the slashed picture which caught the last glow with its turbulent power, and the three coffins that were filled at last.”

It triggers a memory of the final beautiful passage at the end of Anthony Boucher’s The Case of the Crumpled Knave.

As a final bit, you may be intrigued to note that although The Hollow Man is the sixth Gideon Fell novel, it is the first one to feature an actual impossible crime.  It would be four more novels until Fell featured in another impossible crime novel, with The Problem of the Wire Cage.  As I’ve noted elsewhere, although Fell is often associated with locked rooms and other impossibilities, it was actually the Sir Henry Merrivale novels of the 1930s where Carr was focusing on that type of puzzle.  Fell shifted to an impossible crime focus starting in 1939.