I've developed a bit of a fondness for John Dickson Carr. He was a prolific author of pulp detective novels back in the mid-twentieth, best known for his detective lexicographer, Dr. Gideon Fell (fairly obviously based on dear old GK Chesterton). He's also known as the acknowledged master of the locked door mystery, the subgenre in which the detective has to figure out how a seemingly impossible crime was committed. Think Jonathan Creek.

The books themselves are beautifully written stories, deeply atmospheric and redolent of their time, and often (as in the case of Hag's Nook and The Waxworks Murder) with more than a touch of the Gothic. He's even got a time-travelling detective: in Fire, Burn! the hero, a police detective, finds himself transported back in time after a car accident, using his modern techniques to solve a murder while wondering about his own sanity. Sounds familiar?

The Fell stories in particular would make wonderful Sunday night feature length TV dramas, but apparently no-one is interested because Carr was not British - despite having married an Englishwoman and having spent much of his time in London.

He's long out of print, except for the Fell story The Hollow Man (also known as The Three Coffins), which is currently part of the Crime Masterworks series. Shame, it's not his best work. It does, however, contain the famous 'locked room lecture', in which Dr Fell explains the various ways someone can commit an apparently impossible crime, which has made it a source text for crime writers. In the course of the lecture, Fell mentions in passing that he and his listeners are just characters in a book...

"Because... we're in a detective story, and we don't fool the reader by pretending we're not. Let's not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories."

These books have never failed to please me - like reading the Holmes stories, they're far more evocative of other worlds and times than any fantasy novel - so I'm starting a little collection of the green Penguin editions. They do seem to be oddly frequent in the charity shops of more affluent towns; Bath, Malvern... going on Ebay feels like cheating at the moment.