The Hollow Man (The Three Coffins) – John Dickson Carr (1935) – The Green Capsule

There's this move that writers of fiction sometimes make. I've seen it in novels, movies, tv shows. It's most often a little thing. A throwaway line. And I hate it so much.

It's when a character says something like "It's not like it is in the movies"

or "This isn't one of your fairy stories"

or "Things might work like that in a mystery novel, but this is real life"

You've heard some version of this a hundred times in different works of fiction. I can't stand it.

I think they (the writers) think they're being clever? Giving a sly wink to the reader. But it's not clever. It's a weird tick, and all it achieves is to remind you that the events of the story ARE a fiction, and to pull you out of it and back into the world.

This is directly counter to the first job of fiction, which is indeed to make you forget that you're a reader, consuming fiction.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Carr's Hollow Man / Three Coffins, and he did a little version of this. That's actually what prompted me to start writing this earlier post, but I never got to round to kvetching about this thing there. Christie is also sometimes guilty of this, a rare lapse from the queen.

I've now finished Carr's book.

And something happened towards the end that was frankly shocking. Mild, non-plot spoilers for the book incoming!
In the last quarter, Carr indulges in the mother of all immersion breakers.

So, the reason I started reading the book is because of the famous "locked room lecture" that's what the book is known for. This is mentioned in the third Knives Out Movie. In the lecture, the detective Gideon Fell gives a run down of every possible kind of solution to a "locked room murder."

This kind of murder was Carr's stock in trade, and it is of course quite an interesting idea: someone is found murdered in a locked room, with no obvious way that anybody else could have gotten in or out. (Fun fact, the earliest well known locked room mystery is "The Mystery of the Yellow Room" by Gaston Leroux, who also wrote the novel "The Phantom of the Opera". I read both a long time ago. Phantom is quite fun, I don't remember anything about Yellow Room).

So I was looking forward to hearing a lecture from a master of this genre, about all the possibilities. And when it arrives, here's how he sets it up:

“I will now lecture,” said Dr. Fell, inexorably, “on the general mechanics and development of the situation which is known in detective fiction as the ‘hermetically sealed chamber.’ Harrumph. All those opposing can skip this chapter. Harrumph. To begin with, gentlemen! Having been improving my mind with sensational fiction for the last forty years, I can say—”
“But, if you’re going to analyze impossible situations,” interrupted Pettis, “why discuss detective fiction?”
“Because,” said the doctor, frankly, “we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters in a book."

Carr, John Dickson. The Three Coffins (The Hollow Man) (pp. 210-211)

!!!

So, the first line, he commits the sin I started this post discussing; he refers to the existence of detective fiction within a piece of detective fiction. I rolled my eyes.

But then, he commits the much more egregious, and frankly insane, move of having his characters just start talking about the fact they're characters in a novel. For no reason. It's a completely unforced error. He could have delivered the lecture through the mouthpiece of Fell, completely in fiction, and it would have worked fine.

And, to add insult to injury, the lecture is not that great. He rattles off a bunch of different ideas, but it's just a laundry list, he doesn't really extract general principles or broader conclusions.

After this, the characters go back into character, never acknowledging again that they're in fiction. The resolution of the mystery IS very clever, but the book as a whole is chaotic, long winded, self-indulgent, psychologically unconvincing, and transparently artificial. So, idk if I recommend it.

Now, The Hollow Man was published in 1935, 6 years before Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths", which I think is the earliest stirrings of postmodern, deconstructivist, fiction writing. (Honestly it's pretty upsetting to mention Carr in the same sentence as Borges).

So you could say that Carr was ahead of his time with this move, a move that anticipates the postmodern, fourth wall breaking antics of Wes Craven's Scream, the Deadpool franchise, or (most interesting) the work of comic writer Grant Morrison.

But Morrison, and Craven, and even the writers of Deadpool, are breaking the fourth wall deliberately, purposefully, to create a new kind of experience, a new kind of fiction.

Carr's book is squarely in a modern, generic mode, chugging along, promising to deliver one thing, and then just randomly breaking the fourth wall for a chapter, before going back to it's completely conventional format.

Anyway, it made me mad. I'm back to reading Christie, and having a lovely time. Read Borges, Christie, and Morrison. Skip Carr.

ps - Every jacket illustration of Fell makes it look like the character was modeled on GK Chesterton (another comparison that does no favors to Carr)

mystery genre

How to really tick me off as a fiction writer, and part 2 of my review of Carr's multiply named novel.