Rating: 4/5
Review:
Hugely enjoyable
This is a hugely enjoyable Golden Age mystery, in which Anthony
Berkeley both produces an excellent puzzle and satirizes the very
form he is using.
The set-up is that a
group of six well-to-do amateur sleuths in 1930s London – authors,
a barrister and so on – who have crime as a hobby, all attempt to
solve a murder which Has The Police Baffled. The entire book is
composed of an exposition of the crime and then the six attempts to
identify the murderer, each one resembling the scene at the end of a
story in which the Great Detective gathers the suspects together to
reveal their own brilliance and (often almost incidentally to that)
the identity of the murderer. It’s beautifully done, with witty,
elegant prose and some wry skewering of both personalities and that
style of crime story. I found touches of Dorothy L. Sayers and
Margery Allingham in the prose and characterisation, which is very
high praise.
Although it is
perhaps just a little laboured in places, I thought this was a real
treat. Warmly recommended.
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