John Dickson Carr (1906-1977) is one of the most well-known Golden Age mystery writers. He also wrote under the names Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairbairn. He is celebrated for his beautifully complicated plots, often considered locked room crimes or impossible crimes in which the crime appears to have been committed when no one was near. His two main series characters were Sir Henry Merivale and Dr. Gideon Fell, although he wrote a number of stand-alone novels. See a lengthy analysis of his work on the Golden Age Detection wiki: http://gadetection.pbworks.com/w/page/7930179/Carr%2C%20John%20Dickson
To Wake the Dead (Hamish Hamilton, 1938) is the eighth or ninth Dr. Gideon Fell, depending on the bibliography referenced. It begins with Christopher Kent longing for breakfast outside a London hotel and no money immediately available with which to buy it. Quite against his usual modus operandi, he enters the hotel and boldly orders breakfast and bills it to a room in the hotel. He assumes that by the time the hotel understands he is not the paying occupant of that room, he will be long gone. Instead, he is asked by the hotel manager to go to the room he is believed to occupy and retrieve a bracelet the previous tenant left behind. Upon entering the room, instead of a bracelet he finds the battered body of a woman.
Not wanting to be arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, he slipped out the other door to the opposite corridor and made a beeline for the residence of Dr. Gideon Fell. There he finds Superintendent Hadley of the Criminal Investigation Division, who is consulting Dr. Fell about the woman’s death, just reported to him, which is a duplicate of a murder committed two weeks earlier.
Kent can easily prove he was on a ship at the time of that first murder and nowhere near the hotel at the time of the second. That being the case, Hadley does not hesitate to share the details of the investigation with Kent. The country house party was made up of Kent’s friends and both murder victims were well known to him. Hadley wanted Kent’s impressions of them and his help in identifying possible motives.
Admirers of locked room puzzles will adore this book as it offers two separate murders that apparently were carried out invisibly. Fell and Hadley work through timetables and witnesses and alibis at the London hotel and the country house in Sussex and arrive at a completely unexpected conclusion. This is a fine story with an ingenious solution.