Hollow Man

John Dickson Carr was a master of the locked room mystery ... a murder takes place in circumstances that make it seem impossible for the killer to have escaped undetected ... The sheer ingenuity of the plot is a delight ― Daily Mail

Very few detective stories baffle me nowadays, but Mr Carr's always do -- Agatha Christie

A key influence on Wake Up Dead Man ... It's renowned for both the ingenuity of its central locked-room mystery - whereby a murderous visitor seemingly disappears into thin air - and a fourth-wall-stretching speech by sleuth Dr Gideon Fell, who lays out the various methods often used by writers to explain such "impossible crimes". ― Radio Times

Carr's 1935 locked door mystery still rivals any present day crime novel and its status as a textbook for writers in the genre means it is a necessary read ― Big Issue in the North

The best Carr is the most ingenious, and my vote would go to THE HOLLOW MAN ... The conjuror's illusion here is marvellously clever -- Julian Symons

Probably the most ingenious of all detective story writers in the creation of puzzles -- T J Binyon

No one in the history of the genre could match him for sheer sustained ingenuity when it came to devising reader-bamboozling locked rooms and other impossible crimes ― Encylopedia Mysteriosa

John Dickson Carr was a master of the locked room mystery. In The Hollow Man, one of his earliest novels, written when he was just 29, a murder takes place in circumstances that make it seem impossible for the killer to have escaped undetected. ... The sheer ingenuity of the plot is a delight. ― DAILY MAIL

Carr's 1935 locked door mystery still rivals any present day crime novel and its status as a textbook for writers in the genre means it is a necessary read ― BIG ISSUE IN THE NORTH