3.5 for the humour

This was an enjoyable Carr, just not quite up to his standards. Mind you, this would be a really strong title in most other GAD authors' bibliographies. I enjoyed the "crime that doesn't make sense" aspect of this one, the same way I had in Emperor's Snuff-Box or Punch & Judy Murders. The first 100 or so pages of this book has a lot of detection and by the midway point we seem to have the whole solution besides who killed Mr. Depping and a couple of smaller points. We have some further developments which keep the interest going, and then about 40 pages of useless spy-capering before the murderer becomes active again and is quickly apprehended. The plotting of this book could definitely have been more solid, much like in The White Priory Murders. However, the characters were still enjoyable. I loved the Bishop of Mappleham, the amateur detective whose strange actions start the plot. Henry Morgan serves as Carr's window into the book, telling us his qualms with the "realist" school of detective fiction, a.k.a. the proto-police-procedurals. It seems that not everyone is fond of the solution as a whole, but I had no problem with it. It surprised me, and I think that it plays fair with the reader. For reasons I cannot say for fear of spoilers, I would have despised this solution a couple of years ago. I think that I've either matured or become complacent. An unlikely, yet worthy inclusion in the American Mystery Classics collection.

Pretty terrible, especially as Carr can be so good. It's hard to write meta narratives well, and Carr falls short here and only manages to get to smug.

Also, there are at least four superfluous characters, and most of them are obnoxious.

Unread shelf project 2020: book 12.

This was a golden age mystery by a contemporary of Agatha Christie. However, I can see why (at least if this is a fairly generalized example of his work) Carr is not as well-known and well-loved as Christie. There were far too many characters in this book to easily keep straight (at least for me), and there were a lot of farcical scenes that made me struggle a bit.

This is definitely not a cozy mystery but I will be real, I didn’t guess the whodunit and it was quite a clever one. The mystery was decent but I did get swamped with all of the characters and the speed at which they were introduced. It felt a bit like I needed to do a genogram to keep all of them and their family members and other relations straight! This was the biggest thing that detracted from my enjoyment.

However, I liked the character of Fell; I have a few other books by Carr on my shelf, so I’ll probably meet Fell another time, during another murder investigation. This was not so difficult a book to make me refuse to read others by Carr.