The Man Who Could Not Shudder, first published in 1940, is a detective story by John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr was an American author of detective stories, who also published under the pen names Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson and Roger Fairbairn....

 featuring his series detective Gideon Fell

Gideon Fell

Doctor Gideon Fell is a fictional character created by John Dickson Carr. He is the protagonist of 23 novels from 1933 through 1967 as well as a few short stories. Carr was an American who lived most of his adult life in England; Dr. Fell is an Englishman who lives in the London suburbs.Dr...

. This novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 is a mystery of the type known as a locked room mystery

Locked room mystery

The locked room mystery is a sub-genre of detective fiction in which a crime—almost always murder—is committed under apparently impossible circumstances. The crime in question typically involves a crime scene that no intruder could have entered or left, e.g., a locked room...

(or more properly a subset of the locked room mystery called an "impossible crime" story).

Plot summary

Martin Clarke is celebrating his acquisition and refurbishment of an old stately home by inviting a number of guests to stay for the weekend. The house has an unsettling history; two decades ago, the butler, a frail man of over 80 years, was killed when he uncharacteristically decided to swing back and forth from the chandelier, which then fell and killed him. Another report features a chair which leaps off the wall at the viewer. Clarke's guests have been selected as a cross-section of "ordinary, skeptical human beings" and have been invited to investigate the rumours of ghostly hauntings. The weekend begins when, as the guests are entering the home, one woman screams and claims that something has clutched at her ankle—something "with fingers". The host immediately tells the story of a former owner of the home whose death was met with such suspicion of witchcraft from the servants that the body lay as it fell for days, and the servants reported that something seemed to clutch at their ankles. The weekend is off to a spooky start but proceeds spectacularly when three witnesses agree that a gun jumped off the wall and killed a seated guest, with no hand holding it. Famous crime-solver and debunker of impossible crimes Gideon Fell is called in to explain matters and does so in a way that leads to a spectacular and fiery finish.