The golden age of detective fiction has given us many famous names. The works of such writers as Agatha Christie, Gilbert Chesterton, Earl Stanley Gardner, and Rex Stout developed and perfected the detective genre, and their novels, which are unconditionally recognized as classics, are still loved by readers and are a standard of quality for subsequent generations of detective story authors. A place of honor in this galaxy rightfully belongs to John Dixon Carr (1906-1977), a virtuoso master of perfectly constructed "impossible crimes in a locked room." In 1933, in the novel The Witch's Lair, John Dixon Carr introduced the amateur detective Dr. Gideon Fell to the public for the first time. The character's appearance was presumably copied from another leading figure of the detective genre, Gilbert Chesterton, and his achievements in the history of the detective genre, according to most admirers of Carr's work, truly command respect. Thus, the writer Kingsley Amis, in his essay "My Favorite Detectives," called Dr. Fell "one of the three great successors to Sherlock Holmes."
This collection includes the seventh, eighth, and ninth novels from the series chronicling the adventures of Dr. Fell: The Case of the Thousand and One Nights (1936), Don't Wake the Dead Man (1938), and The Curved Loop (1938).