Have you read Papa Là-Bas? If the answer is "no" please DON'T try to repair that gap in your knowledge, as it is one of the most dreadfully bad books I have ever read, a painful experience that led me to give up on Carr for nearly five years. I guess there were existential reasons for Carr escaping into the past but he shouldn't have set the results for publication.
Xavier
Yes, Papa La-Bas wasn't great, but making Senator Judah Benjamin into a detective in pre-Civil War New Orleans was a clever idea that could have been better done.
Warren
Papa Là-Bas is the novel in which John Dickson Carr defends slavery: the low-point of his fiction. Carr's spokesman insists slavery was no worse than Northern financial low pay for workers. What he omits: Northern workers could quit their jobs, own property, learn to read and write, could marry freely, and had religious freedom - all of which would lead to punishment, mutilation or death for slaves.
Mike Grost
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