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"Fiendishly ingenious...originally published in 1946, Carr upends the standard locked-room mystery by setting a murder in a totally exposed space: the top of a tower, in broad daylight, and with witnesses below." --Booklist, Starred Review
Carr considered this novel one of his best works, and it is easy to see why when experiencing its ingenious plot delivered with an astounding pace and masterfully drawn characters including none other than the great detective Dr. Gideon Fell.
"It almost seemed that the murder, if it was a murder, must have been committed by someone who could rise up unsupported in the air..."
When Miles Hammond is invited to a meeting of the Murder Club in London, he is met instead with just two other guests and is treated to a strange tale of an impossible crime in France years before; the murder of a man on a tower with only one staircase, under watch at the time at which the murder took place. With theories of levitating vampires abounding, the story comes home to Miles when he realises that the librarian he has just hired for his home is none other than Fay Seton, a woman at the heart of this bizarre and unsolved past murder.
John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) was one of the most popular authors of Golden Age British-style detective novels. Born in Pennsylvania and the son of a US congressman, Carr graduated from Haverford College in 1929. Soon thereafter, he moved to England where he married an Englishwoman and began his mystery-writing career. In 1948, he returned to the US as an internationally known author. Carr received the Mystery Writers of America’s highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and was one of the few Americans ever admitted into the prestigious, but almost exclusively British, Detection Club.
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