Carr, John Dickson

American author of detective stories born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. His father was a criminal lawyer and politician who possessed a comprehensive collection of detective stories, so John Dickson Carr read books by authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton from an early age. He soon decided he wanted to write his own stories, and made some of his first attempts while he attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania where he spent more time writing and editing The Haverfordian than he dedicated to his studies. A number of Carr's early stories has been found again, and subsequently published in the short story collections The Door to Doom (1980) and Fell and Foul Play (1991). The volume The Kindling Spark (2022) contains only such, carefully reviewed and commented by literary scholars.