But the point is, as you know, Doctor, that we know our friends rather by their mannerisms than by their exact appearance; for if their mannerisms are not always the same, that is the thing that surprises us, and we say, 'Why don't you seem like the same person.' The physical appearance, unless it bears to us a psychic signicicance, is vague.
John Dickson Carr, It Walks by Night (Harper and Brothers, 1930)
Carr had no interest in writing realistically. If his characters do not speak the way real Frenchmen do, what does that matter? It Walks By Night is a puzzle story in the form of a Poe-esque fantasy, set in a Poe-esque France, colored by an imperially purple imagination.
Douglas G. Green, John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (Crippen and Landru 2019)
It Walks By Night is the first of Carr's eighty novels and the first of his many "locked room" mysteries, in which a murder takes place in a locked room where no one other than the victim has seemed able to get in. It Walks By Night is considerably influenced by Poe, with its nightmare of Paris, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle, as American Jeff Marle, in the role of Watson, narrates the grusome murders solved by detective Henri Bencolin, who is rather like the cerebral Sherlock Holmes. I have to admit that I found Bencolin's solution to the two decapitations he is investigating quite ingenious, though somewhat strained in its reality and believability but beautifully imagined by Carr. The film takes place almost entirely at night, in gambling dens, country houses and opium dens, all described in fascinating detail.
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