Henri Bencolin

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Henri Bencolin is a fictional detective created by John Dickson Carr. He is Carr's first series detective, appearing in five "locked-room" and "impossible crime" mystery novels of the 1930s, and four short stories from an even earlier date. He is a juge d'instruction (examining magistrate) in the Paris judicial system.

The books in which he appears are:

  • It Walks By Night (1930)
  • Castle Skull (1931 - not published in the UK until c. 1980)
  • The Lost Gallows (1931)
  • The Waxworks Murder (1932)
  • The Four False Weapons (1937)

He is mentioned in Poison in Jest (1932), which shares the same narrator--Jeff Marle--as the Bencolin novels, but does not appear in the book.

The short stories in which he appears (all originally published in the Haverfordian) are:

  • "The Shadow of the Goat"
  • "The Fourth Suspect"
  • "The End of Justice"
  • "The Murder In Number Four"
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