Finally, there are the masters who still enjoy wider name recognition: Conan Doyle, G. Others, like Freeman Wills Crofts and Anthony Berkeley, have been revived of late through superb recordings from Soundings, Detective Club Crime Classics and HarperCollins’s growing “Bodies from the Library” series. Wodehouse’s publisher, while The Scarlet Pimpernel overshadows the Baroness Orczy’s criminal output. True, Herbert George Jenkins is remembered now as P. Beyond the playful banter between our two heroes, each yarn is also a good natured parody of a popular crime writer of the time. Lucky for us after all, Robert Frost’s dictum, “no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader” is just as true when we’re talking about laughter. And it’s obvious that that’s exactly what Christie was doing here. The Golden Age of Crime Fiction was about more than little-known Asiatic poisons and how long it takes parsley to settle in the butter dish. But then, I suspect that expectation misses the point of this collection. So, if I can figure out the broad general outline of a crime before Tommy or Tuppence have a clue, these stories can’t be the puzzlers one might expect from the Queen of Mystery. My ingrained obtuseness when confronted with bodies in libraries is well-established. With whodunits, my wife usually has the killer tagged well before the detective reveals all in the drawing room, while I’m happy to wait until all the suspects have found their seats there. The Lighter Side of Murder, Theft & Counterfeiting
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |