Henri Bencolin is a fictional detective

Detective

A detective is an investigator, either a member of a police agency or a private person. The latter may be known as private investigators or "private eyes"...

 created by John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr was an American author of detective stories, who also published under the pen names Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson and Roger Fairbairn....

. 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. He is a juge d'instruction (examining magistrate

Examining magistrate

In an inquisitorial system of law the examining magistrate or investigating magistrate is a judge who carries out investigations into cases and arranges prosecutions....

) in the Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

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)

He 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"