To Wake the Dead

This a book about unexpected pleasures. Carr's 'locked room' mysteries are a kind of self-reflexive chess game. This one has a particularly satisfying reveal towards the end. Up to that point, everything has been deliciously wrong-footed, especially the reader. The hotel set of the twenties is well drawn and there are plenty of magic tricks throughout.

Almost up to the standard of Carr's best books, this one opens with a typically intriguing situation. The central character has worked his way across the world for a bet and finds himself temporarily penniless and hungry in London. A chance find allows him to have breakfast at someone else's expense in a large hotel, but he then finds that the room he has claimed to occupy has a dead body in it. The action moves later to a small Sussex village, where Dr. Fell as usual traps the killer. Recommended to lovers of Golden age mysteries.

Not his best. I found it difficult to engage with the characters. I also have the audiobook. It will be interesting to see whether this draws me in more

Presents an interesting mystery; but the ultimate solution is something of a cheat, and thus unsatisfying.

Full review (with spoilers) on my blog.

Do Not Disturb. Dead Woman.
Review of The Murder Room eBook (November 19, 2012) of the Harper and Brothers hardcover original (1938)

‘Let me understand this,’ he said. ‘Things have come to a fine pass. You don’t know what people are thinking even when they tell you. What do you call that?’
From the head of the table Dr. Fell put down his glass and spoke.
‘I call it,’ he said, ‘a detective story.’

'A master magician ... the King of the Art of Misdirection.' - cover blurb by Agatha Christie for this edition of To Wake the Dead.

To Wake the Dead is another one of John Dickson Carr's "impossible crime" novels featuring Dr. Gideon Fell as the amateur sleuth who explains it all when the police authorities are baffled. This one show more involves a dead body being found in a Piccadilly Circus hotel room with a sign hanging on the door saying "Do Not Disturb. Dead Woman."

See cover at https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/...
The front cover of the original 1938 Harper and Brothers hardcover. Image sourced from Goodreads.

Various individuals had been seen entering the room earlier in the evening but there was also a side door which allowed for unobserved exits. The woman was travelling as part of a tour group and her husband had been murdered a few weeks earlier. Now she herself has fallen victim. A bracelet has gone missing but then mysteriously reappears. A pair of mismatched women's suede shoes have been left outside the hotel room for 'polishing.' An unknown hotel employee was apparently seen outside the hotel room door with a pile of towels hiding their face. A drunken man insists that he saw a hotel employee at the country estate where the husband died. The drunk himself is arrested on suspicion, and is locked up at the time of the 2nd murder. How can it all be explained?

Dr. Fell figures it out of course, but the explanation is pretty outrageous and felt like cheating i.e. someone who couldn't have committed the crimes is still proved to be the perpetrator. It was a definite 10 out of 10 on the Berengaria Ease of Solving Scale i.e. impossible to solve by the reader.

Trivia and Links
John Dickson Carr (1906-1977) is one of the 99 authors listed in The Book of Forgotten Authors (2017) by Christopher Fowler. He is No. 20 in the alphabetical listing which you can see towards the bottom of my review here.

John Dickson Carr took the inspiration for Dr. Gideon Fell's appearance from that of author G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), writer of the Father Brown mysteries and other works.

See photograph at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Gilbert_Chesterton.jpg...
Photograph of G.K. Chesterton. Image sourced from Wikipedia.

The source of the name Dr. Fell is apparently from the apocryphal epigram:

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why – I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

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The cover illustrates a bizarre scene from the novel in which a man in full traditional British police uniform with helmet is using a poker to attack a man in a graveyard. N y favorite Fell partly because the victims seem to be decent people.

War-time edition.