The Hollow Man (The Three Coffins)

⚖The case for it

Carr can “stack more intrigue into a chapter than most of his contemporaries,” and the first fifty pages hook readers before the puzzle has finished assembling itself. Chapter 17 is the famous one: Dr Fell stops the book, turns to the reader, and catalogues every way a locked room has ever been faked, which readers say is worth the price on its own. The fog does real work, producing “aching terror that crept deeper into your bones,” and Carr can “describe a scene with a single sentence.” Small planted details click at the end. Readers call it a “perfect locked room murder mystery.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The plotting is “excessively complex, absurd, and humorless” to readers who lose the thread among too many characters, and the middle bogs down into suspects trading theories instead of anybody investigating. Dr Fell wheezes and lumbers and grunts on every appearance until reading him is “being shouted at by a fat man in a cape.” The secondary cast is puzzle furniture and the city around them a “lifeless London.” One character’s introduction “makes him sound freakish.” Fair-play purists object that the explanation runs on technical grounds no reader could have reached alone.

— the honest librarian

6h

honest hours

9

sittings