[3] Dr. Fell is a corpulent man with a moustache who wears a cape and a shovel hat and walks with the aid of two canes.

[1] In his early appearances he was portrayed as a lexicographer, but this description gradually disappeared and he was thereafter mostly referred to as working on a monumental history of the beer-drinking habits of the English people.

He is an amateur sleuth, frequently called upon by the police, whom he frustrates in the usual manner of fictional detectives by refusing to reveal his deductions until he has arrived at a complete solution to the problem.

[4] Chapter 17 of the novel The Three Coffins contains Dr. Fell's "locked room lecture",[5] in which he delineates many of the methods by which apparently locked-room or impossible-crime murders might be committed.

The Clock Strikes Eight, written by Carr was broadcast on On 18 May 1944, for the anthology series Appointment with Fear.