Shoot! We Forgot the Hallmark Cards

Master of the locked-room mystery, John Dickson Carr, was born on this date in 1906 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. The son of a lawyer and one-term Democratic U.S. congressman, Carr saw his first novel, It Walks By Night, published in 1930, when he was
just 23 years old. He went on to produce several dozen more books (many written under the pseudonyms Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairbairn) as well as plays and short-story collections. Carr wrote tales featuring sleuths Sir Henry Merrivale and Henri Bencolin, but he’s best known for his works featuring Dr. Gideon Fell, a “corpulent former schoolmaster, lexicographer, and chronicler of the history of drinking in England,” who was also an amateur sleuth in London. Supposedly based on G.K. Chesterton, author of the Father Brown mysteries, the caped and cane-clutching Fell was called upon by the police to help solve myriad abuses of the law. However, he specialized in locked-room mysteries, or “impossible crimes,” which he solved amid only brief episodes of frustration (during which he would shout the eccentric “Archons of Athens!”). Of the almost two dozen Fell novels, the best-known is certainly 1935’s The Three Coffins (published in the UK as The Hollow Man). Elizabeth Foxwell reminds us today that Carr was “the first American member of the famed Detection Club, received an Edgar in 1950 for his biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, and was selected as a Grand Master in 1963. Ellery Queen called him ‘a master of deliberate, yet completely honest, misdirection’ (Queen’s Quorum 98).” John Dickson Carr died in 1977.

The second birthday deserving of mention is that of Efrem Zimbalist Jr., the son of a renowned concert violinist and composer, who will be remembered by fans of crime fiction best for his starring roles in the TV shows 77 Sunset Strip and The F.B.I. Zimbalist also appeared in the colorful role of “Dandy Jim Buckley” on Maverick and as a homicide detective in the 1975 teleflick Who Is the Black Dahlia?, based of course on the gruesome, 1947 murder in Los Angeles of wannabe starlet, Elizabeth Short. More recent years have seen him featured on Murder, She Wrote and Babylon 5, and providing the voice of Batman’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth, in several animated TV series. Not incidentally, Zimbalist is also the father of Stephanie Zimbalist, who starred as private eye Laura Holt (opposite future James Bond portrayer Pierce Brosnan) in the 1982-1987 crime drama Remington Steele. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. turns 89 years old today.