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The Hollow Man

As seen in KNIVES OUT: WAKE UP DEAD MAN

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The Hollow Man

By: John Dickson Carr
Narrated by: Peter Noble
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About this listen

 The most famous of all locked-room mysteries - a classic in the crime genre.

'The first deadly walking of the hollow man took place when the side streets of London were quiet with snow and the three coffins of the prophecy were filled at last...'

The murderer of Dr Grimauld walked through a locked door, shot his victim and vanished. He killed his second victim in the middle of an empty street, with watchers at each end, yet nobody saw him, and he left no footprints in the snow.

And so it is up to the irrepressible, larger-than-life Dr Gideon Fell to solve this most famous and taxing of locked-room mysteries. Amateur Sleuths Crime Fiction Mystery Suspense Thriller & Suspense Crime Fiction

Critic reviews

John Dickson Carr was a master of the locked room mystery ... a murder takes place in circumstances that make it seem impossible for the killer to have escaped undetected ... The sheer ingenuity of the plot is a delight
Very few detective stories baffle me nowadays, but Mr Carr's always do (Agatha Christie)
A key influence on Wake Up Dead Man ... It's renowned for both the ingenuity of its central locked-room mystery - whereby a murderous visitor seemingly disappears into thin air - and a fourth-wall-stretching speech by sleuth Dr Gideon Fell, who lays out the various methods often used by writers to explain such "impossible crimes".
Carr's 1935 locked door mystery still rivals any present day crime novel and its status as a textbook for writers in the genre means it is a necessary read
The best Carr is the most ingenious, and my vote would go to THE HOLLOW MAN ... The conjuror's illusion here is marvellously clever (Julian Symons)
Probably the most ingenious of all detective story writers in the creation of puzzles (T J Binyon)
No one in the history of the genre could match him for sheer sustained ingenuity when it came to devising reader-bamboozling locked rooms and other impossible crimes
All stars
Most relevant
Difficult to follow for my lazy brain that had been softened by more accessible material .

obsessed with details

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

Classic whodunnit

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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!).

An outstanding work of (crime) fiction

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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.

The importance of narration

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I really struggled with this. The writer's style is a block to such a tale of twists and characters. I had to listen to some chapters many times to try to establish what exactly is going on.
The narration, whilst not bad in tone, also makes it difficult to know who's talking and when.
There were several instances where the scene and characters had changed but there had been no break in the narrator's accent nor the writing to make it clear that we were now in a different location with different people.

As a result of this much of the enjoyment is lost.

A struggle. overly complicated

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