Colonel March

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Colonel March is a fictional detective created by American writer John Dickson Carr. He appeared in a number of short stories written in the 1930s and 1940s of "impossible crime" mysteries. [1] He was an official attached to Scotland Yard in the so-called Department of Queer Complaints.

Carr based March on Major John Street, MC, OBE [2] with whom he had co-written the novel Drop to His Death . [3]

Colonel March was portrayed by Boris Karloff in the 1950s British TV series, Colonel March of Scotland Yard .

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Colonel March of Scotland Yard is a British television series consisting of a single season of 26 episodes first broadcast in the United States from December 1954 to Spring of 1955. The series premiered on British television on 24 September 1955 on the newly opened ITV London station for the weekends Associated Television. It is based on author John Dickson Carr's fictional detective Colonel March from his book The Department of Queer Complaints (1940). Carr was a mystery author who specialised in locked-room whodunnits and other 'impossible' crimes: murder mysteries that seemed to defy possibility. The stories of the television series followed in the same vein with Detective March solving cases that baffle Scotland Yard and the British police. The department itself is sometimes referred to as "D3". Boris Karloff starred as Colonel March.

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References

  1. Joshi, S. T. (1990). John Dickson Carr: A Critical Study. Popular Press. pp. 76–77. ISBN   9780879724771.
  2. Evans, Curtis (2012). Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961. McFarland & Company. p. 90. ISBN   978-0786470242.
  3. Penzler (editor), Otto (2014). The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries. Black Lizard. p. 101. ISBN   978-0307743961.{{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)