"I then ladled a big load of violent intrigue into my already simmering, tres personal plot -- and the result is the novel you are about to read."
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Avon, 1999 originally published 1982 paperback, 328 pp |
"I then ladled a big load of violent intrigue into my already simmering, tres personal plot -- and the result is the novel you are about to read."
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Avon, 1999 originally published 1982 paperback, 328 pp |
"much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust"
that truly fits the atmosphere, the setting, and the overall action in The Corpse in the Waxworks.
"A Dead Girl in a Satyr's Arms -- A Club Devoted to Nocturnal Orgies"
and then on the back the salacious detail of a "notorious club ... whose masked members revel in carefully planned orgies," as well as mentioning "nocturnal debauches."
Seriously, who could resist?
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frontispiece, the Square (oh! the map!!) |
"the murderer either had his intended victim playing right into his hands, or ... was waiting there like a watchful, blood-lusting spider for some innocent sacrifice to come along."
Even worse, there is a third victim, and yet no one knows if these people had been randomly chosen or if there was some sort of link between the three in a "larger prearranged plan." The killings have caused people to remain in their homes causing havoc for the shopkeepers, and while the police are starting to make connections, the question of who is responsible remains a mystery and leaves the Paulsfield Sniper to remain at large.
As this is my first experience with Clifford Witting's mystery novels, I have no idea whether or not he does this in all of his books, but here he leads the reader on quite a merry chase through the police investigation before we realize at the very end that we've been had in a nice bout of misdirection. And I was fine up until that point, enjoying the mystery, putting the clues together in my head and even taking notes while reading. Normally the author's sort of "gotcha" moment is a good one, meaning that he or she has put together a story whose solution I never would have guessed because I was following the trail of red herrings. And while that happened here, when the killer was disclosed it was so out of left field that I had to go back and reread certain chapters just to try to figure it out. Still, it was fun up to that point so I can't complain too much, but somehow that final moment just didn't seem fair. Be warned that this book ends so abruptly that I was looking for evidence that some of the pages had been torn out of my copy.
Not great, but not bad, sort of middle of the road with an interesting lead character. In my mind, not quite as nicely done as the previous Séptimo Círculo books, but still a good read.
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probably my favorite cover image of this novel, from Coverbrowser |
"sick and tired of all these mysterious murders, these detectives' artful ruses, the phenomenal quick-wittedness of investigating magistrates."
The particular story under consideration is called The Shooting Party, and eventually the Editor agrees to read it, telling Kamyshev to come back in three months' time during which he'll make his decision. What follows is the story-within-the-story, as the Editor offers Kamyshev's story for the reader's "perusal" after reading it, assuring that it is "a page-turner." That it is, and it begins as the local magistrate, here named Sergey Petrovich Zinovyev, goes to visit his old friend Count Alexei Karneyev at his country estate that has for some time been in a state of decline. Karneyev's world is largely defined by debauchery, and Zinovyev is quickly sucked in to that space of drinking and partying, where an orgy is not an unusual event. But the estate is also where Sergey Petrovich meets the beautiful Olenka, daughter of the forester Skvortsov, now living in a state of madness from perpetual drinking, and is immediately drawn to this "girl in red." The problem is that the same is true of Urbenin, a widower with two children serving as Karneyev's estate manager, and the Count himself. Olenka, who has "aristocratic pretensions," surprises everyone with the news that she has agreed to marry Urbenin, setting off a chain of events that will end in murder one fine day during a shooting party on the estate. Motives are plenty, as are suspects, but the question of the actual murderer has to wait until the very end.
read in March
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original 1943 cover from Wikipedia |
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from emojiterra |
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original 1962 cover, from Goodreads |
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original 1965 cover, from Amazon |
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from Black Past |
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from Wikipedia |
Detective Inspector Andrew MacAndrew Elliot of Scotland Yard's CID has been assigned to look into a case in the village of Sodbury Cross, where someone has been poisoning chocolates in Mrs. Terry's tobacco-and-sweet shop, somehow substituting strychnine-laced confections for the chocolate creams kept on the shop's counter. Sadly, eight year-old Frankie Dell died after he'd "wolfed down the lot" he'd bought, while the children of another family and their "maidservant" who had also picked up a half pound of the tainted chocolates became very ill. The young niece of local businessman Marcus Chesney, Marjorie Wills (for reasons I won't go into here), is the main suspect. As Elliot begins to work with the local police on that case, word arrives that Marcus Chesney is dead. After arriving at the Chesney home, the detectives hear a fantastic story: as it happened, Chesney's murder not only occurred in front of a small group of people, but that
"every one of 'em saw the murderer and followed every move he made."
Even more surprising is that "they can't agree on anything that happened."
What comes next is unlike anything I've ever read before.
Chesney, who has as a hobby "the study of crime," had earlier invited his niece, her fiancé George Harding, his brother Joe and a friend of theirs, a professor Ingram, to a "performance," a sort of "psychological test" to start at midnight. His helper Wilbur Emmet, one of the men who worked at the Chesney home, was to have a role in this scene, and after it was over, Chesney would have a list of questions that the participants were to answer, based on what they'd seen. George was to film the entire thing as well. What happens next went according to plan, except for the fact that Chesney was murdered and Emmet was found severely wounded outside next to a bundle of clothing and other props used during Chesney's little game. The problem is that the potential suspects were all together at the time, never out of sight of one another. When another murder occurs, a rather mystified Elliot turns to Dr. Fell, who is staying in a hotel in nearby Bath, enlisting his help to solve this rather baffling crime.
I mentioned earlier that the original UK title, The Black Spectacles, turns out to be more appropriate than its American counterpart. In a letter from Marcus Chesney written earlier to Fell which he doesn't hand over right away to the police, Chesney had noted the following:
"All witnesses, metaphorically, wear black spectacles. They can neither see clearly, nor interpret what they see in the proper colours. They do not know what goes on on the stage, still less what goes on in the audience. Show them a black-and-white record of it afterwards, and they will believe you; but even then they will be unable to interpret what they see."
As Dr. Fell says before he goes off to observe George's film record of that strange night, "that, together with what we are going to see and hear to-night, should complete our case."