Gideon Fell

Dr. Fell is a corpulent man with a moustache who wears a cape and a shovel hat and walks with the aid of two canes.[1] His age is not specified; in his first appearance, in a 1933 novel, he is said to be "not too old" but with a kind of ancient quality about him. He is frequently described as bringing the spirit of Father Christmas or Old King Cole into a room.[1] In his early appearances he was portrayed as a lexicographer, but this description gradually disappeared and he was thereafter mostly referred to as working on a monumental history of the beer-drinking habits of the English people.

He is an amateur sleuth, frequently called upon by the police, whom he frustrates in the usual manner of fictional detectives by refusing to reveal his deductions until he has arrived at a complete solution to the problem. The most frequently recurring police character was Superintendent Hadley. Most of Fell's exploits concern the unravelling of locked room mysteries or of "impossible crimes". When he himself becomes frustrated, he is likely to cry out, "Archons of Athens!"

When Dr. Fell is not traveling, he lives with his wife in a somewhat cluttered house. The wife's name is never given, and little of her character is revealed, except that she is rather eccentric as well. She goes unmentioned in many of the books, but an allusion to her late in the series indicates that the couple's domestic life is unchanged. The Fells have no children.[3][4] [5]

Chapter 17 of the novel The Three Coffins contains Dr. Fell's "locked room lecture",[6] in which he delineates many of the methods by which apparently locked-room or impossible-crime murders might be committed. In the course of his discourse, he states, off-handedly, that he and his listeners are, of course, characters in a book.

1. 1933, Hag's Nook
2. 1933, The Mad Hatter Mystery
3. 1934, The Eight of Swords
4. 1934, The Blind Barber
5. 1935, Death-Watch
6. 1935, The Hollow Man (The Three Coffins)
7. 1936, The Arabian Nights Murder
8. 1937, To Wake the Dead
9. 1938, The Crooked Hinge
10. 1939, The Problem of the Green Capsule (The Black Spectacles/Mystery in Limelight)
11. 1939, The Problem of the Wire Cage
12. 1940, The Man Who Could Not Shudder
13. 1941, The Case of the Constant Suicides
14. 1941, Death Turns the Tables (The Seat of the Scornful)
15. 1944, Till Death Do Us Part
16. 1946, He Who Whispers
17. 1947, The Sleeping Sphinx
18. 1949, Below Suspicion
19. 1958, The Dead Man's Knock
20. 1960, In Spite of Thunder
21. 1965, The House at Satan's Elbow
22. 1966, Panic in Box C
23. 1967, Dark of the Moon
24. 1991, Fell and Foul Play

The Seat of the Scornful was adapted as a 1956 episode of the BBC Sunday Night Theatre. Fell was portrayed by Finlay Currie.

Donald Sinden played Fell in a series of BBC Radio adaptations.

• Mystery list Dr. Fell books