All fair points and a good reminder to better contextualize my arguments. I will stick to my praise of the lead’s performance though. The faults you found with it are what I liked about it. As you mentioned, this is a slight story so there is not much time to fill in the idiosyncratic nooks and crannies of Fell’s character so a broader performance makes sense to me. As you say, the tone, pitch, intensity, etc. of a voice cannot specifically convey a love of beer, but it can convey more generic traits such as physical size and temperment and, in that respect, I think the performance very much suceeds. If I remember correctly, Carr once compared Fell to Old King Cole which is certainly an aspect of the character captured here, particularly the merriment expressed upon solving the case.

I agree that the story, like most of Carr’s radio scripts, is too truncated to capture the intricacy of his novels. I said something to the effect of “this is not the best example” of Carr’s work and did not call it a classic by any means. I will cop to abusing the term “impossible mystery” by expanding it to include mysteries that are joyfully artificial and contrived (such as this one).

As always, thank you for your comments and, more importantly, keeping me on my toes!

It was as if the actor had never read a Fell novel and had no actual knowledge of the character, and just portrayed his own concept of a stereotypically pompous Oxbridge scholar with an extremely plummy voice. But Fell is not a stereotypical scholar; he’s an iconoclastic figure. He smokes cigars constantly and drinks beer copiously. His great scholarly work, which he’s continually working on but apparently never finishes, is a history of beer-drinking among the English people. In Death-Watch (which is the one I read most recently, so it was handy for me to go to and grab a quote), he explains his nervousness at one point by saying “It’s the result of going until noon without the strengthening influence of beer.” Now, I’m not saying that the actor’s performance was bad because he didn’t mention beer (after all, Fell does spend much more time talking about things other than beer; and the lack of beer references would be a matter of the script anyway, not the performance), but the actor’s portrayal didn’t seem like the sort of character who would say things like that or behave like Fell.

And aside from being unlike Fell, it just wasn’t a very good performance. It got better toward the end, as Fell prepared to demonstrate the solution, but for most of the episode, he didn’t seem to be portraying a character so much as just reciting his lines, like the stereotype of a ham English thespian with a rich, mellow voice. Carr frequently describes Fell’s speech as “Dr. Fell growled.” This guy didn’t growl; he just orated. I do disagree with Eric on one point — the actor did not sound like the “Where did the fishy go?” guy (which was a higher-pitched voice) — but he did sound like he could have been playing Lord Generic Upperclass.

As for the story itself, it was rather slight. The entire case against the condemned woman is that another character said he saw her commit the murder. If we’re to believe that the condemned woman is innocent, then there’s really only one person who could be guilty. (There couldn’t have been much of an investigation. I’m imagining the police saying, “Well, we don’t have any real evidence against her, but this guy who stands to inherit the victim’s money says he saw her do it, so it sounds open-and-shut to me.”)

And Joshua said “My favorite type of mysteries are these, the impossible mysteries or locked-room mysteries” — but this isn’t one of those. There was no locked room or impossible aspect to this. The victim was shot, and one character said he saw another character commit the crime. The lack of a locked room is not in itself a criticism (after all, Carr didn’t exclusively write locked-room mysteries, but they’re what he’s most renowned for), but even for a non-locked-room mystery, there really wasn’t any puzzle to this, or much of a mystery.

The plot deficiencies may have been result of it having been highly condensed from its original form. Prior to listening to this, I did some googling to see if this was adapted from a book that I haven’t read yet (and if it had been, my plan was to read the book first, and then listen to the episode). It turned out it was not adapted from a book, but it was adapted from an earlier radio play that Carr wrote, which was a three-part story. Carr re-wrote it for Appointment With Fear, condensing it from three episodes down to one. No recordings exist of the original version, but the script survives. According to this blog, the three-part version had a lot more twists and turns and red herrings, with a surprise ending (although the blogger feels that the Appointment With Fear version is more atmospheric). Now my goal is to try to find the script of the original version and read that for comparison.

Now, having said all of that, let me add that I didn’t hate it. It was still kind of entertaining, but it was a disappointment. When I read your Patreon email, I was eager to listen to a Gideon Fell story, but the actor’s performance was so unlike how I envision Fell, and the story was not one of Carr’s best.