The Hollow Man (written in 1935) is a famous locked room mystery novel by John Dickson Carr (1906 - 1977). It was published in the USA under the title The Three Coffins and has frequently been hailed as the best of all locked room mysteries.
The plot goes like this - One wintry night in London, two murders are committed in quick succession. In both cases, the murderer has seemingly vanished into thin air.
In the first case, he has disappeared from Professor Grimaud's study after shooting the professor -- without leaving a trace, with the only door to the room locked from the inside, with people present in the hall outside the room. Both the ground below the window and the roof above it are covered with unbroken snow.
In the second case, a man walking in the middle of a deserted cul-de-sac at about the same time is evidently shot at close range, with the same revolver, but there is no one else near the man; this is witnessed from some distance by three passers-by -- two tourists and a police constable -- who happen to be walking on the pavement. It takes Dr Gideon Fell, scholar and "a pompous pain in the neck", who keeps hinting at the solution without giving it away, some 200 pages to finally condescend and minutely reconstruct the two crimes and thus solve the mystery.
This novel is especially famous for Dr. Fell's explanation of the various ways a person can commit a near-perfect murder. Thus, it became one kind of a "textbook for crime writers."
The Hollow Men is the name of a poem, written by T. S. Eliot.
But it is meaningful that the hollow men are not bound to such a torment as theirs: to follow the whirling ensign, goaded by hornets and wasps.
As the hollow men grope together, form prayers to broken stone, and whisper meaninglessly, so the poem itself gropes toward a conclusion only to end in hollow abstraction, broken prayer, and the meaningless circularity of a child's rhyme.
Though primitive man may be something of a mystic, the distant voices and fading star in Eliot's poem show no 'prelogical mentality' from a golden age of childlike innocence.
But ultimately, HollowMan is simply a paean to some dazzling special effects, the sophistication of which I don't think I've ever seen -- mind-bending in their complexity, blood curdling in their goriness, and almost unthinkable in their realism.
There's water-covered invisible man, burning invisible man, and blood-spattered invisible man. The capper of course is the phase shift process, one of the more gruesome events ever put to film, and not merely because of the prominence of Bacon's skin-stripped male member.
HollowMan is disturbing enough to be fun, and utterly dumb enough to not get in the way of the former.
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