Henri Bencolin is a fictional detective created by John Dickson Carr.
In later decades, Carr did not return to the Bencolin character, but instead focused on creating English sleuths such as Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale.
Bencolin is a juge d'instruction (examining magistrate) in the Paris judicial system, and occasionally takes private cases.
The narrator of the stories, American writer Jeff Marle, describes him as looking "Satanic", and characterizes his manner with witnesses and suspects as sometimes very harsh.
[1] The short stories in which Bencolin appears were all originally published in the Haverfordian: Bencolin is mentioned in Carr's book Poison in Jest (1932), but does not appear in it.