The Great Detectives
John Dickson Carr's
Dr. Gideon Fell
by Pasquale Accardo, M.D
Gilbert  Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) and his most famous detective creation, Father Brown, have both recently reappeared in the world of mystery fiction, the former in Kel Richards' Murder in the Mummy's Tomb: A G. K. Chesterton Mystery (2002) and the latter in Stephen Kendrick's Night Watch: A Long-Lost Adventure in Which Sherlock Holmes Meets Father Brown (2001). The most prolonged and impressive homage to Chesterton's place in the history of detective fiction, however, has to have been that of the Anglo-American mystery writer John Dickson Carr (1905-1977) who idolized this British literary lion. Through a writing career that spanned four decades and saw the creation of several notable sleuths (the blind Lieutenant Rene Lamar, the drunk John Gaunt, the Mephistophelean Henri Bencolin of the Surete, Colonel March of Scotland Yard, and the Mycroftian Sir Henry Merrivale, among others) as well as the employment of a number of pseudonyms (Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairborn), Carr's most enduring detective creation remains Dr. Gideon Fell. From 1933 to 1967 the immensely overweight and utterly inimitable Dr. Fell wheezed his way through 23 full-length mystery novels as well as several short story collections and radio plays. Actually, inimitable may not be the correct word since Fell was, in fact, a fairly exact imitation of G.K. Chesterton. The Fell paperback cover illustrations even resemble photographs out of a Chesterton biography.
Yet despite the fact that Fell was based on Chesterton, he has never been a favorite among Chestertonians. This would seem to be related to several factors. First, Fell's resemblance to Chesterton is almost purely external, if not superficial—he physically looks like Chesterton, has many of his habits and mannerisms, and even uses some of his anecdotes and verses. But of Chesterton's wit, and of Chesterton's overriding interest in religion and politics, there is nary a trace. Since the latter are the reasons why most people read Chesterton's non-detective fiction, these are also the reasons Chestertonians don't go out of their way to read Carr's Dr. Fell. In a complementary vein, there is a tendency among Chestertonians to downplay the preeminent place of Father Brown, not only the world's first clerical detective but also one of the masters of detective fiction. The place of Chesterton's detective fiction and his pioneering criticism of mystery tales are inadvertently and inadvisedly belittled as unimportant. In fact, acknowledging Chesterton's influence on and contributions to the mystery genre and to the literary criticism of mystery fiction is considered almost demeaning in some circles. Carr and the millions of readers who persist in reading the Father Brown tales consider otherwise. 
As a young American writer entering the charmed circle of authors active during the Golden Age of the classic British mystery, Carr took all his lessons from GKC. He understood that the detective narrative is essentially a logical puzzle, and he abided by the famous rules of fair play outlined in London's famous Detection Club oath, rules similar to a code first vigorously championed by Chesterton in response to Conan Doyle's innumerable imitators who had outdone themselves in creating outlandish characters ever more bohemian, specialized, and preternaturally gifted man the redoubtable Sherlock Holmes. Plots were concocted more to confound the reader with the detective's presumed (rather than demonstrated) brilliance than to allow the reader to actually solve the crime along with the detective. Readers were reduced to gawking and befuddled Watsons.
Having understood the puzzle nature of the game, Carr set out to create a detective hero. The character had to be memorable enough to ensure reader loyalty, but his striking characteristics could never be allowed to interfere with the development and denouement of the all-important plot. In a sense, Carr chose the easy solution. Why create a brilliant personality de novo when he could model his detective on one of the most brilliant minds of the early twentieth century—Gilbert Keith Chesterton? Chesterton's public persona had been developed over decades, was exceedingly well known, and could almost stand as a type—if not a caricature— of the overweight, absent-minded genius. The name Fell probably came from a well-known facetious translation of the thirty-third Epigram of Martial given by a student named Thomas Brown (1663-1704) to Dr. John Fell (1625-1686), Dean of Christ Church and Bishop of Oxford: 

Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare; Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te.

I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, I know full well,
I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.

Lines from this jingle were cited in Hag's Nook (1933) and "Fell and Foul Play" (1991). With both name recognition and a ready-made character pattern, Carr could focus his energies on the most important aspect of the mystery novel, the plot. Here too, he imitated Chesterton. Most crimes were introduced with a set of bizarre circumstances, so seemingly impossible of rational explanation as to almost suggest supernatural influences at work. By following Chesterton's formula with Father Brown, however, Carr's detective always presented a rational solution.
A brief biography of Gideon Fell would note that he was born in Lincolnshire as the second son of Sir Digby and Lady Fell. His date of birth of 1884 would stretch his recorded detective career over three decades from when he was introduced at age 49 in 1933's Hags Nook to his last appearance at age 83 in 1967's Dark of the Moon. While he attended Balliol and received degrees from Oxford, Harvard, and Edinburgh, the subject of his doctorate is never specified. "I thought he was an ordinary medical doctor like Nick, but it seems he's a doctor of philosophy." (Problem of the Wire Cage, 1940) His strong aversion to mathematics would have made any of the hard sciences unlikely, while his published titles (The Drinking Customs of England from the Earliest Days, Romances of the Seventeenth Century, The History of the Supernatural in English Fiction, and The Effect of Kings' Mistresses on Constitutional Government) suggest the fields of history and literature. His fellowship in the Royal Historical Society gives the nod to history. "The talent for deduction developed by judicious historical research can just as well be applied to detective work," he confessed in The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941). "I learned it at an early age."
Like Chesterton, Fell's unlimited capacity for food, alcoholic beverages, and all forms of tobacco was legendary. As a distinguished scholar he confessed to several careers: lexicographer, visiting lecturer, former schoolmaster, and journalist. He read extensively in detective fiction "of the Bloody Hand variety" but remained curiously ignorant of modern criminals and of modern methods of criminology. His hobbies and interests were legion. He was married to a long-suffering wife who never appeared in the stories.
Unlike Nero Wolf, who sends Archie Goodwin out to collect testimony and observations, Gideon Fell (who had no consistently recurring second banana, and no member of the official police who called on his help any more frequently than Flambeau shared the adventures of Father Brown) propels his vast bulk (upwards of twenty stone or 280 pounds) forward with almost obligatory clumsiness to hunt down evidence at the scene of the crime. "I am not of bodily shape ever to be a skeleton at a feast," he noted in Dark of the Moon (1967). Over the years Carr searched for new adjectives to describe his monumental detective's size and movements. Comparisons to mountains and ships, various mammoths, and leviathans abound. The earth, the floor, and various pieces of furniture quake, shake, and creak in response to his lumbering steps. He has three chins, wheezes asthmatically, uses two walking sticks, brandishes a bandit's mustache, sports a mop of hair that almost seems to be alive, and dresses in a disreputable old black shovel hat and black box-pleated cape with accompanying broad black ribbon for his eyeglasses. His absent-mindedness is frequently mistaken for sleep. 
He is criticized for always lecturing but his only recorded lecture is the classic discussion of the possible solutions to the abstract problem of the locked room in The Hollow Man (1935) (The Three Coffins in the USA). Similar critiques about his constant cryptic mystification and use of paradox are entirely unsupported by the record. For a character modeled on G. K. Chesterton, the complete absence of paradox is itself almost paradoxical.
The fact is that Fell has no distinctive methodology. Along with numerous false clues, all the evidence necessary for a solution is presented to him, to the police, and to the reader. He has a happy knack for focusing on just the right elements to yield the correct solution and identify both the culprit and the modus operandi, while remaining perfectly oblivious as to just why he succeeds where others fail. "Now there is a good old English phrase to describe ME, and the phrase, in its literal sense, is a scatterbrain," he confesses in The Arabian Nights Murder. "These old wits really do scatter all over the place. I am like the cross-eyed hunter who fired all over the landscape and left no game for anybody else. I am the man in the old wheeze who searched diligently in Picadilly for a shilling lost in Regent Street, on the grounds that there was more light to see by in the former place. But there is often a great deal to be said in favor of looking for a clue in the place where you know it isn't."
By 1949 Carr was probably growing tired of Dr. Fell and ready to put the old boy out to pasture at the not unreasonable retirement age of 65. In the much-underrated Below Suspicion he introduced the flamboyant Patrick Butler, K.C. (the "Great Defender", also known as "that damned Irishman"), who, according to Douglas Greene's biography John Dickson Carr: The Man Who ExplainedMiracles, was probably being groomed as Fell's replacement. Since Patrick Butler was the name of a lawyer character in one of Chesterton's Father Brown stories, "The Man in the Passage" (1914), Carr's homage to Chesterton would have continued through this new detective. For a variety of reasons, the substitution or succession wasn't to be, and while Butler later appeared in Patrick Butler for the Defense (Patrick Butler the Defence in the UK), Fell continued lumbering his way through one murder mystery after another.
Except for body size, Patrick Butler shared many Chestertonian traits with Dr. Fell and most of Carr's other detectives, but he was probably too distracting a character to serve as a good vehicle for Carr's intricate plots. In what was probably a premature valedictory, it was given to Butler to pronounce one of the most perceptive critiques of Fell's incoherent ramblings: "You see a link between two pieces of evidence; the link would seem obvious if you pointed it out. But your mind darts off to some other aspect of the case. And you've quite sincerely forgotten what we're talking about when we ask questions about that link."
For an author, it is a marvelous thing to be an important part of a glorious tradition and Carr solidly positioned himself in the mystery genre with his Gideon Fell stories. While acknowledging his immense debt to Chesterton, he also paid his respects to the greatest detective of them all. In addition to working (and quarreling) with Adrian Conan Doyle on the Edgar-winning The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1949), he again collaborated with Doyle's son on a new series of Holmes stories, The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954), one of the best attempts ever in this typically overworked subgenre. Carr thus forged impressive links with two of the most famous of his predecessors. Car published over 70 books, won the Edgar, the Ellery Queen Prize, and was elected a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. His writing was highly esteemed by his peers, and his books sold very well in his lifetime. But it is not so much Gideon Fell (colorful as he is) as it is Carr's meticulously crafted "locked room" plots that seem destined for immortality—or at least a place of honor in the history of detective fiction. Readers go back to Carr as they do to Chesterton because of the particular kind of intellectual thrill that each writer provided.