The Man Who Could Not Shudder

Carr is the master of the impossible crime genre, but it’s not his clever twists that make him compelling but the deftness and atmosphere in his work. He can be genuinely eerie and funny at the same time, I would very much have liked to have known him. The Man Who Could Not Shudder is the story about an ancient haunted house, a ghost party and the murder of one of the guests. I can’t say more without giving anything way, other than if you like haunted houses and creepy atmosphere, revelations during storms, casts of characters all with something to hid, then you will love this book. Read it as soon as you can.

Very ambivalent about this book. The solution to the mystery seemed so unbelievable. On the other hand, sometimes I'd stop in admiration for the writing.
Like: Vast and beaming, wearing a box-pleated cape as big as a tent, (Dr. Gideon Fell) sat in the center of the gaudy swing with his hands folded over his crutch stick. His shovel hat almost touched the canopy overhead. His eyeglasses were set precariously on a pink nose; the black ribbon of these glasses blew wide with each vast puff of breath which rumbled up from under his three chins.
Or: As Huckleberry Finn once put it, it even smelt late. (But I guess that's really a compliment to Mark Twain's writing.)
Or: The tide was out. ... A vast expanse of gray pitted mud, looking rather show more like the end of the world as imagined by Mr. H.G. Wells, took up the beach and apparently a good deal of the ocean as well. Even the pier, a white centipede with black legs, hardly reached to the end of it. show less

Starts with a great opening --a young man tells skeptical friends about a haunted house in which an old butler allegedly killed himself by swigging from a chandelier till it fell and killed him --this is followed by the announcement that an expatriate recently returned to Britain (and fascinated by ghosts) has bought the house. He has a party of guests in the house, and one guest is shot in the presence of his wife, who says that a pistol hanging on the wall came off the wall, hung in the air, and shot him.