The Witch's Lair

The golden age of the detective genre gifted us with many star names. Works by such writers as Agatha Christie, Gilbert Chesterton, Earl Stanley Gardner, and Rex Stout developed and refined the detective genre; their novels, unequivocally recognized as classics, are still beloved by readers today and set a standard of quality for subsequent generations of detective story authors. A distinguished place in this constellation rightfully belongs to John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) — a virtuoso master of perfectly constructed "impossible crimes in locked rooms." In 1933, in the novel "The Witch's Lair," John Dickson Carr introduced the amateur detective Dr. Gideon Fell to the public for the first time. The appearance of the character was presumably based on another luminary of the detective genre — Gilbert Chesterton, and his contributions to the history of the detective genre, according to most admirers of Carr's work, truly command respect. For instance, the writer Kingsley Amis, in his essay "My Favorite Detectives," called Dr. Fell "one of the three great successors of Sherlock Holmes." In the first novel of the series about Gideon Fell's investigations, the eccentric detective is tasked with unraveling the mystery of the curse haunting the men of the Starbert family...