Henri Bencolin

Henri Bencolin is a fictional detective created by John Dickson Carr. He is Carr's first series detective, appearing in five "locked-room" and "impossible crime" mystery novels of the 1930s, and four short stories from an even earlier date. Bencolin is a juge d'instruction (examining magistrate) in the Paris judicial system.

The books in which he appears are:

• It Walks By Night (1930)
• Castle Skull (1931 – not published in the UK until c. 1980)
• The Lost Gallows (1931)
• The Waxworks Murder (1932)
• The Four False Weapons (1937)

Bencolin is mentioned in Poison in Jest (1932), which shares the same narrator—Jeff Marle—as the Bencolin novels, but does not appear in the book.

The short stories in which he appears (all originally published in the Haverfordian) are:

• "The Shadow of the Goat"
• "The Fourth Suspect"
• "The End of Justice"
• "The Murder In Number Four"