Oddly enough, with frequent analyses of Carr's work, Greeene makes it clear that Carr was not a hundred-percent locked-room man, even before he turned to writing historical romances in the 'fifties. After graduating in the late 'twenties, where he had kept the college magazine going with close plotted thrillers, Carr lead something of the life of a jazz-baby, with hard-partying and wild drinking. He paid for this by dashing off his first novels in intense bursts of energy. Ideas would come to him anywhere and he would run in to write, but these early stories are all intense, over-wrtten gothics, alternating with others written as screwball comedies (an odd style for a murder mystery).

As the twenties ended and the thirties began, Carr created Dr Fell, and then for a second publisher, Sir Henry Merrivale, and contained his style into something more humdrum. Carr wrote for the money, and Greene makes it clear that his relations with his various publishers were problematic at times, because he overcommitted himself, even though he enjoyed enormous sales. Marrying an English girl he met on a trans-atlantic liner, Carr settled (for a short time) in Bristol. It was there that he built the models that allowed him to study sight-lines and all the paraphernalia that underlie his locked rooms. The hard drinking went on betweentimes.

What we perhaps forget is that it was Carr, working with Val Gielgud, who created the Man In Black whose horror stories on the BBC became a paradoxically essential part of Britiain's experience in the Blitz. And Carr was able to take the series to the US too. SPEAK OF THE DEVIL re-prints a play in eight parts broadcast on the Home Service in 1941.

Later, though, the quality of his output dropped off and he began to re-use plots and methods. With his drinking growing worse and then a stroke he was never in as bad a way as Cornell Woolrich but their written-out ends were similar. One feels not They Should Have Died Hereafter, but They Should Have Died Before.