Hag's Nook dgf-1
Page 20
Dr. Fell has left me the pistol as a kindness. I do not want to use it yet. The man has too much power at Scotland Yard....
I wish, now, that I had shot him. When death is so close I think I could stand the idea of hanging, if it were only a few weeks away. The lamp gives not too much life, and I should have preferred to kill myself in a gentlemanly way, with a suitable flourish and at least more prepossessing clothes.
The fluency which has animated me in writing my sermons seems to desert my pen. Have I done blasphemy? A man of my parts, I tell myself, could not possibly do so, since my precepts -even though I am not ordained or likely to be ordained - were of the most approved order. Where was the flaw in my plans? I asked Dr. Fell. That was why I wanted to see him. His suspicion of me became a certainty when I, in a too rash moment, to cover up any doubts in their minds, said that Timothy Starberth on his death-bed had accused one of his own family of killing him. I was rash, but I was consistent. if I had been given the opportunity in this life, some chance for my brilliance - I am a great man. I can with difficulty bring myself to take the pen from the paper, because then I must pick up the other thing.
I hate everybody. I would wipe out the world if I could. Now I must shoot myself. I have blasphemed. I who have secretly not believed in God, I pray, I pray ... God help me. I can write no more; I am sick.
THOMAS SAUNDERS.
He did not shoot himself. When they opened the door to the study, he was trembling in a fit - the pistol halfway to his temple, without courage enough to pull the trigger.
JOHN DICKSON CARR
The man many readers think of as the most British of detective story writers was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania in 1906. After attending Haverford College, Carr went to Paris where, his parents hoped, he would continue his education at the Sorbonne. instead he became a writer. His first novel, It Walks By Night, was published in 1929. Shortly thereafter, Carr married and settled in his wife's native country, England.
The Thirties were a highly prolific period for Carr, who was turning out three to five novels a year. Some of these were published under what became his most famous nom de plume, Carter Dickson. (Because the Dickson novels contain a great deal of a certain type of comedy, many of their earlier readers attributed them to P.G. Wodehouse. Could an American write like this? Never!)
In 1965 Carr left England and moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where he remained until his death in 1977.
In his lifetime, Carr received the Mystery Writers of America s highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and was one of only two Americans (the other was Patricia Highsmith) ever admitted into the prestigious-but almost exclusively British-Detection Club. In his famous essay "The Grandest Game in the World", Carr listed the qualities always present in the detective novel at its best: fair play, sound plot construction, and ingenuity. (He added, "Though this quality of ingenuity is not necessary to the detective story as such, you will never find the great masterpiece without it.") That these qualities are prevalent in Carr's work is obvious to his legions of readers. en the words of the great detective novelist - critic Edmund Crispin, "For subtlety, ingenuity, and atmosphere, he was one of the three or four best detective-story writers since Poe that the English language has known."
__________________________
INTERNATIONAL POLYGONICS, LTD. NEW YORK CITY
NOOK
HAG'S NOOK
Copyright © 1933 by John Dickson Carr. Copyright renewed 1960 by John Dickson Carr.
Introduction and cover: Copyright © 1985 International Polygonics, Ltd.
Library of Congress Card. Catalog No. 85-81384 ISBN 0-930330-28-5
Printed by Guinn Printing, Inc., Hoboken, N.J.
Printed and manufactured in the United States of America First IPL printing November 1985 10987654321
HAG'S NOOK
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