Dr. Douglas G. Greene is a highly respected scholar in several fields. He taught English history (Tudor and Stuart period) for over four decades at Old Dominion University. He has also won many awards for his groundbreaking scholarship on mystery and fantasy. His work on Golden Age (and earlier) detective fiction has included collections of works by understudied authors like Ngaio Marsh and R. Austin Freeman, anthologies such as Detection by Gaslight: Fourteen Victorian Detective Stories, and various works on John Dickson Carr. Carr was a prolific writer of locked-room stories and one of the only Americans to join the Detection Club. Greene explored Carr’s life in the acclaimed 1995 biography John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles.

The year before his Carr biography appeared, Greene founded Crippen & Landru, which publishes a range of mystery fiction, including little-known or unpublished stories by classic writers like Carr, Mickey Spillane, and Gerald Kersch.

His work in fantasy has focused on L. Frank Baum’s Oz series, including numerous essays in The Baum Bugle, co-writing a biography of W.W. Denslow (with Michael Patrick Hearn), and also the reference work Bibliographia Oziana (with Peter E. Hanff). A founding member of the Oz Club, he was one of four interviews for the 2017 Baum Bugle profile “Anniversary Recollections: Sixty Years in the Oz Club.”

He was kind enough to answer a few questions. The following is the first part of an interview with him, focusing on his mystery fiction scholarship. The second part will focus on his Oz scholarship.

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

How did you become interested in studying John Dickson Carr?

As a kid, I read Hardy Boys, Ken Holt, and (say it not in Gath!) Nancy Drew, and as a teenager, I gravitated to Doyle, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, G.K. Chesterton. In my first year of college, a dear friend, the late Jim Haff, sent me Carr’s Death-Watch in a Dell Mapback.[1] I was hooked, and bought bunches of Carr in paperback, though I balked—briefly—at the 95-cent price of Collier editions.

It’s been said many times that Carr had an interesting approach to detective stories. What would you say made it unusual?

Unlike his contemporaries, who wrote in the comedy of manners style, Carr began in the gothic world of Poe. He added a touch of the supernatural, as his locked-room murder and vanishes and footsteps in the snow implied that demons had escaped from the pit, until Carr’s detectives presented rational explanations.

Have any writers followed in his footsteps since then?

His contemporaries Anthony Boucher and Clayton Rawson wrote similar novels, and Hake Talbot’s Rim of The Pit is the finest impossible crime novel not by Carr. Recent writers include the late Ed Hoch (a very good friend of mine)—especially his Dr. Sam Hawthorne short stories, which Crippen & Landru has published in a series of books, each with a title including the word “Impossible.” Another friend, Bill Pronzini, has also written locked-room novels. The French Paul Halter has made it a specialty. Two of my other friends, Gigi Pandian and Tom Mead, also write in this sub-genre. The late Christopher Fowler’s Peculiar Crimes Unit books (Bryant & May) comes close.

It’s not unusual to write a biography and find there are things you wanted to include but had to trim. Were there any side topics about Greene that you weren’t able to cover in the book?

My biography contains almost everything I know about Carr. I was lucky when I began the research, for many of his contemporaries were still alive and supplied information. People now writing about Golden Age detective mavens don’t have that advantage.

My book editor did knock out some stuff as not worth the space—I thought it was interesting to describe how Carr made scrambled eggs. The editor x’ed all that with the comment “Eggs! Out!” She was right.

There’s a theory that religion went hand-in-hand with the Golden Age of Detective Fiction: G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Freeman Wills Crofts were all religious. Then, of course, there’s Catholic priest Ronald Knox, who wrote ten famous rules for detective fiction. Any thoughts on this theory?

The element of mystery is part of the best detective novel, and—I hardly need add—religion.

Carr seems to take an agnostic approach to religion in his books, yet they all start with the possibility that something supernatural could exist—crimes where it seems like only magic or ghosts could have killed the victim, etc. Is there maybe a religious tension or impulse there?

Carr himself was not religious; he found Puritanism hypocritical, though he had no strong objections to the Church of England. I argue in the biography that Carr’s major theme is the challenge to an ordered universe, which he resolved in his books by the natural solutions, but I also think that was a deeply held fear.

There’s an interesting article Carr published early in his career, “The Detective in Fiction,” in Writer’s Digest, where he argues that Sherlock Holmes is immortal because Doyle lets him be a little sinister—“He caught from London fog a terrible ghost of retribution.”[2] Do we see that darkness in Carr’s early detectives—characters like Henri Bencolin, for example?

Yes, Bencolin is indeed sinister—another point I made in the biography. But Carr’s later detectives—Dr. Fell, Sir Henry Merrivale, and Colonel March—are comic characters. Even Bencolin is softened in the later novel The Four False Weapons.

In that same article, Carr argues that “detective stories are only fairy stories for those who have grown up.” Was he a fan of fantasy?

Yes, especially, the Oz books. The unmasking of the humbug Wizard is almost detectival. Later, he enjoyed the fantasies of James Branch Cabel. Carr also cites Alice in Wonderland in his writings.

You give a great summary of the detective story’s history in your Carr biography, where you note detective stories innovated by making crimefighters instead of criminals the heroes.[3] Does Carr play with that distinction—detectives who bend the rules, things like that?

As I imply above, Carr’s detectives restore order—not in the sense of crimes but in the fundamental cosmic order. He did occasionally let criminals walk free.

In 1934, Carr takes a new direction when he published The Devil Kinsmere, a historical fiction novel under the name Roger Fairbairn. What drew him to write historical fiction?

He read Dumas and other historical adventure writers as a lad, and at his high school and college he wrote historical short stories—much of which will soon be collected in a Crippen & Landru book. He was fundamentally a romantic.

Some of these historical fiction novels, like The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, are a hybrid of detective story and historical fiction. Did Carr innovate with that combination?

Edmund Godfrey is non-fiction told as a detective story. Yes, he was an innovator, and Lilian de la Torre, in her Dr. Sam Johnson stories,[4] consciously copied his methods—and she told him so. (She told me the same thing).[5]

One figure that appears prominently in your biography is another Detection Club member, Dorothy L. Sayers. How was she important to his career?

Certainly important in the reviews she gave for his novels, which he said made his career. They were friends in the Detection Club, but her style was quite different.

What can you tell us about Carr’s friendship with Clayton Rawson?

Sadly, nothing more than is in the biography. They lived near each other in Mamaroneck, New York, and he helped Clayton put on magic shows.[6]

One of the more surprising facts I came across in your biography was his friendship with crime writer William Lindsay Gresham. How much do we know about their friendship?

Unfortunately, little. I included all the information I have on Carr-Gresham in the biography—and it wasn’t much.  My main source, New York Times contributor Mary Cantwell, died a few years ago.[7] All that I know is that Carr and Gresham shared an interest in magic, and sometimes met for lunch.  From what little (very little) I know about Gresham, their personalities were quite different.

You probably know that Gresham wrote a brief essay on how reading The Scarecrow of Oz rescued him in a low moment—perhaps after Joy Davidman left him. The essay appeared in the Oz Club’s magazine some 60 years ago.[8] Gresham’s loss was C.S. Lewis’s gain—something that has been said before.

Curtis Evans wrote in his introduction to Mysteries Unlocked about the work you’ve done to revive people’s awareness of understudied mystery writers like Carr, Ngiao Marsh, and various anthologies published by the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box. Who are some understudied mystery authors you would especially like to see more people explore?

Quite a few, many of whom are being revived in the British Library’s reprint series, edited by Martin Edwards. Curt is also writing about little-known writers of the past, and Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics includes many nearly forgotten writers of the classic age. Others who are almost unknown and shouldn’t be, include Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet, Clyde B. Clason, Patricia McGerr, Hake Talbot, and the Lockridges.

Readers can find out more about Greene’s work through Crippen & Landru’s website, the Oz Club’s website, his Oz fandom page and Wikipedia page.

[1] During the 1940s-1950s, Dell published paperback novels which became known as Mapbacks for their back covers showing map-like illustrations of the settings where the mysteries took place.

[2] See p. 49 in “The Detective in Fiction” in Legends of Literature: The Best Articles, Interviews, and Essays from the Archives of Writer’s Digest Magazine edited by Phillip Sexton. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writers Digest Books, 2007, pp. 48-53.

[3] See “Interlude—John Dickson Carr and Detective Fiction,” chapter 4 in John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles by Douglas G. Greene. New York, New York: Otto Penzler Books, 1995, pp. 95-110.

[4] One of these Sam Johnson stories appeared alongside Carr’s short story “The Wrong Question” in the Mystery Writers of America anthology Four-and-Twenty Bloodhounds, edited by Anthony Boucher (New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950).

[5] The story of de La Torre telling Carr how he influenced her work appears in John Dickson Carr, pp. 195-196.

[6] For some details on Rawson and Carr’s mutual interest in magic and how it led to them befriending Gresham, see “William Lindsay Gresham, The Inklings, and Magic: An Interview with Diego Domingo.” Fellowship & Fairydust, February 7, 2024.

[7] Cantwell met Carr in 1959 through Gresham, and discussed her impressions of Carr in “Close to Home,” published in The New York Times on April 27, 1989. Cantwell was married at the time to Gresham’s book editor, Robert Lescher (1929-2012). Cantwell passed away in 2000. Further details recorded in her conservations with Greene appear in John Dickson Carr pp. 400-401, 519.

[8] See “The Scarecrow to the Rescue,” The Baum Bugle, Christmas 1960. No page numbers.