In Norway there’s a peculiar literary tradition. Just as the winter snows start to recede, Norwegians will pack into the car and drive off to the mountains for the pleasure of sitting in the snow and reading mystery novels, so called “Påskekrim,” or “Easter Crime Stories.”

The internet is a wonderful invention, allowing instant access to more information and entertainment than anyone could digest in a lifetime. But the lack of that invention, in a time that now seems like ancient history, but is barely two decades for most, did have its advantages. One of those advantages was that it forced you to interact with that earlier, and in some respects still superior, medium of communication, the book.

Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, if you were sick, or perhaps just faking it, and got to spend the school day home in bed or propped up on the couch, there really wasn’t that much to do. Ubiquitous video rental was still a few years off. There were three channels on the television and during mornings and early afternoons they broadcast a test picture, or at best that riveting precursor to present day reality TV: live transmission from a gold-fish bowl. The world wide web was but a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye.

So there I was, bored out of my gourd with nothing to do, and there was no going to the library for something featuring dinosaurs. I’d have to make do with the books already on the shelves in the living room. They were hardbacks with nondescript imitation leather bindings. I ended up trying a volume by John Dickson Carr at random. I’ve made my share of flip-of-the-coin decisions in my time that turned out badly. This was not one of them. I really was sick that day. I faked it the next.

John Dickson Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, on Nov. 30, 1906. But, like his compatriot, the poet T.S. Eliot, he was one of those Anglophile Americans who jumped the pond and became “more English than G.K. Chesterton.”

At school and college, he immersed himself in the adventure novels of Alexandre Dumas and Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as well as the ghost stories of Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and even the pulp phantasmagoria of H. P. Lovecraft. Following a rather stillborn turn as a student, he briefly went to Paris. Upon his return he published his first novel, It Walks by Night (1930), featuring the detective Henri Bencolin of the Surete.

In 1932, he married an English woman, Clarice Cleaves, and settled there in 1933, and began his most prolific period, churning out novels and short stories featuring the obese anti-Sherlock detective in a floppy hat, Dr. Gideon Fell, modelled on Carr’s icon, G. K. Chesterton. He was so prolific he had to invent an alias, Carter Dickson, who wrote stories featuring another rotund detective, Sir Henry Merrivale, a figure not unlike Winston Churchill, so as not to accused of being a mere cookie-cutter author. For a while he was actually suspected of being the pseudonym of another prolific writer, P. G. Wodehouse, of Jeeves and Wooster fame.

He’s one of the great masters of the golden age of the English detective novel and followed the rule that no vital clue available to the protagonist should be hidden from the reader. By the end, he should know everything needed to unravel the crime on his own. He was also the undisputed master of the locked-room mystery subgenre, in which a murder is committed under seemingly impossible circumstances. In one of his masterpieces, The Hollow Man (1935), a man is murdered inside a room locked from the inside, with no obvious exits for the assassin who was seen entering it, while another is killed at close quarters, surrounded by an empty expanse of pristine snow.

“Let there be a spice of terror,” he wrote, “of dark skies and evil things.” His Romantic sensibilities populated his books with hints of vampires, ghosts, and people being buried alive. It’s no wonder one of his finest short stories features Edgar Allan Poe as the hero. But in the final analysis, when the detective holds court on the final pages of the book, and explains how the impossible crime was committed, the light of reason blows away the cobwebs and reveals a perfectly rational explanation for how the deed was done.

There are one or two exceptions, one being the novel I came across that day when home sick from school, The Burning Court, which is still to my mind one of the finest mystery novels ever written. As in the other books, you’re given all the clues and a logically coherent resolution to the mystery, only to have the whole thing thrown into doubt again at the very end.

During World War II, he worked as a propagandist for the BBC. But he also wrote a number of radio plays, some of which are classics of their kind; though the format, which burdened the dialogue with a lot of physical description, was arguably a detrimental influence on his prose. But by the end of the war, England and the world that Carr loved was fading. In 1948, he and his wife moved back to the United States. Though they returned following the Tory victory in the 1951 elections, the spirit that had animated his burst of creativity in the pre-war years had faded, too.

In this later period, he alternated writing contemporary detective novels with historical mysteries and romances of wildly varying quality, such as the smashing 17^th-century swashbuckler The Devil In Velvet (1951). His retreat into the past may not have been an accident, as Kingsley Amis mused when writing about Carr in The Times Literary Supplement in 1981. “There may or may not be a link between the traditional detective story and the pre-war world, ” Amis wrote, “but there can be no doubt that, after the final departure of that world, Carr showed a loss of energy and imagination in the […] tales and others with contemporary settings.”

Never quite finding peace with the modern world, Carr moved restlessly from London to Tangier to Mamaroneck, New York, before finally settling in Greenville, South Carolina, where he died on Feb. 27, 1977.

As inevitably is the case with such a prolific writer as Carr, there is a fair share of dross sprinkled throughout his bibliography. But at the heights of his powers, he produced mystery novels that few, if any, have ever surpassed. And if you can get your hands on one, or more, of his now mostly out-of-print books, there are few experiences more congenial than to sit, propped up on a couch, or in a comfy chair, with a hot cup of chocolate, reading John Dickson Carr—whether you’re ill or not.