The Mad Hatter Mystery

by John Dickson Carr, Otto Penzler (Introduction)

Overview

A corpse in a top hat leads Dr. Gideon Fell to a killer with a sick sense of humor in this mystery by the celebrated author of Hag’s Nook.

At the hand of an outrageous prankster, top hats are going missing all over London, snatched from the heads of some of the city’s most powerful people―but is the hat thief the same as the person responsible for stealing a lost story by Edgar Allan Poe, the manuscript of which has just disappeared from the collection of Sir William Bitton? Unlike the manuscript, the hats don’t stay stolen for long, each one reappearing in unexpected and conspicuous places shortly after being taken: on the top of a Trafalgar Square statue, hanging from a Scotland Yard lamppost, and now, in the foggy depths of the Tower of London, on the head of a corpse with a crossbow bolt through the heart. Amateur detective and lexicographer Dr. Gideon Fell is on the case, and when the dead man is identified as the nephew of the collector, he discovers that the connections underlying the bizarre and puzzling crimes may be more intimate than initially expected . . .

Reprinted for the first time in thirty years, the second novel in the Dr. Gideon Fell series, which need not be read in any order, finds the iconic character investigating one of the most extraordinary murders of his career. A baffling whodunnit with menace at every turn, The Mad Hatter Mystery proves that Carr is the “unexcelled master of creepy erudition, swift-moving excitement and suspense through atmosphere” (New York Times).

“Every sentence gives a thrill of positive pleasure. [The Mad Hatter Mystery] is the most attractive mystery I have read for a long time.”―Dorothy Sayers

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613161340
Publisher:	Penzler Publishers
Publication date:	06/15/2022
Series:	American Mystery Classics , #2
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	84,127
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

John Dickson Carr (1906-1977) was one of the greatest writers of the American Golden Age mystery, and one of the only American authors to be included in England’s legendary Detection Club. Though he was born and died in the United States, Carr began his writing career while living in England, where he remained for nearly twenty years. Under his own name and various pseudonyms, he wrote more than seventy novels and numerous short stories, and is best known today for his locked-room mysteries. His beloved series character, Dr. Gideon Fell, was based on author G. K. Chesterton and appeared in twenty-four novels.
John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) was one of the most popular authors of Golden Age British-style detective novels. Born in Pennsylvania and the son of a US congressman, Carr graduated from Haverford College in 1929. Soon thereafter, he moved to England where he married an Englishwoman and began his mystery-writing career. In 1948, he returned to the US as an internationally known author. Carr received the Mystery Writers of America’s highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and was one of the few Americans ever admitted into the prestigious, but almost exclusively British, Detection Club.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/04/2019

Carr’s series sleuth, Dr. Gideon Fell, shows off his brilliance in this sterling entry in the American Mystery Classics series, originally published in 1933. Chief Inspector Hadley consults Fell on the case of Sir William Bitton, a book collector who stumbled on the find of a lifetime, the manuscript of a lost Edgar Allan Poe story, believed to have been the first the author wrote. Someone has stolen the document from Bitton’s London study, but before Fell and Hadley can investigate, they learn that one of the possible suspects has been found murdered at the Tower of London, killed with a crossbow bolt. The body was adorned with an opera hat that was stolen from Bitton previously, the second hat that had been stolen from him in a week. The hat robberies were part of a series of thefts committed by the person dubbed the Mad Hatter by Bitton’s journalist nephew. Could the Mad Hatter also be the thief who stole the Poe manuscript? Readers may be moved to reread the book to note how artfully Carr (1906–1977) plants the clues to the killer’s identity in plain sight. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Very few detective stories baffle me nowadays, but Mr. Carr’s always do."

Agatha Christie

"Every sentence gives a thrill of positive pleasure. [The Mad Hatter Mystery] is the most attractive mystery I have read for a long time."

Dorothy Sayers

2019-03-18
Dr. Gideon Fell, that beloved, avuncular detective from the genre's golden age, returns in this reprint of his second case, originally published in 1933.

Otto Penzler's brief introduction, which emphasizes Carr's unrivaled reputation nearly 50 years after his death as the master of the locked-room mystery, hails this one for including "an impossible crime." The murder here doesn't involve a locked room; instead, it pushes whimsical absurdities to a sinister extreme. As the tale begins, Dr. Fell, just arrived in London, hears of two notable thefts: the disappearance of an original Poe story from the possession of Sir William Bitton, who'd unearthed it in one of Poe's homes in Philadelphia, and a rash of thefts of headgear—a police constable's helmet, a barrister's wig, Sir William's top hat—by some wag who relocates his prizes to new places sure to offend the victims and amuse everyone else. News swiftly follows that Sir William's nephew, journalist Philip Driscoll, who's been milking the Mad Hatter story for all it's worth, has been found dead at Traitors' Gate, in the densely fogged-up Tower of London, stabbed or shot by a crossbolt Sir William's brother and sister-in-law, Lester and Laura Bitton, had recently brought home from a trip abroad. As usual with Carr (The Hungry Goblin, 1972, etc.), the plotting is denser than a London particular. But this time there's nothing impossible about the mystery, just plenty of outré details. In truth, this is middling Carr, unable to sustain its atmosphere through the increasingly labored revelations of its second half, and its principal red herring, the theft of all those hats, is more vivid, more baffling, and more logically satisfying in its elucidation than the murder of Philip Driscoll—a flaw Carr duly corrected in the masterpieces that followed: The Three Coffins, The Burning Court, The Crooked Hinge, and, as Carter Dickson, The Judas Window.

Even so, fans won't, and shouldn't, hesitate to dive back into a past in which whodunits could be so unsettlingly evocative in their setups and so unabashedly brainy in their solutions.

Kirkus Reviews