152 • DICKSON CARR, JOHN
forces in London and was appointed by General Charles de Gaulle
as the head of his intelligence organization, the Bureau Central de
Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA), using the nom de guerre ‘‘Col-
onel Passy.’’ The BCRA, which liaised closely with theSecret Intel-
ligence Service’sClaude Danseyand the RF Section ofSpecial
Operations Executive(SOE), was wracked with dissention and its
headquarters at 10 Duke Street and its training camp at Camberley
were both centers of political intrigue.
In January 1943 Dewavrin returned to France with Forrest Yeo-
Thomas of SOE’s RF Section, and he remained de Gaulle’s chief of
intelligence until February 1946. Three months later he was arrested
of misappropriating BCRA funds during the war but, having resigned
his commission, he was cleared. He later wrote three volumes of war
memoirs.DICKSON CARR, JOHN.A very successful detective thriller writer,
John Dickson Carr served in the Security Service before and during
World War II. The American-born son of a barrister of Scottish de-
scent, he traveled to Paris after coming down from university and,
instead of becoming a lawyer like his father, took up the life of a
writer. Aged 21 in 1927, Dickson Carr’s first success wasIt Walks by
Nightin 1930, a detective novel that was widely praised. Soon after-
ward, the thriller writer moved to Hampstead, married an English
girl, and had three children. He divided his time between his homes
in London and Long Island and became one of the most prolific writ-
ers of his generation, using at least two pen names to write nearly 50
books. His novels were tremendously successful but his public never
guessed that he had worked for thecounterespionagebranch of the
Security Service before and during the war and had successfully pen-
etrated theCommunist Party of Great BritainforMI5. Quite how
many of his novels, which includedThe Lost Gallow,The Case of
the Constant Suicide,Till Death Do Us Part,Below Suspicion, and
The Third Bullet, depended upon his own experience as an MI5 agent
and officer is unknown. Certainly Dickson Carr had worked forMax
Knight, MI5’s star agent-runner, until 1942 when he joined the BBC
as a playwright, writing radio thrillers ‘‘to take listeners’ minds off
the blitz.’’ Dickson Carr, eschewing personal publicity and avoiding
the limelight, died in February 1977.