by Ngaio Marsh, James Saxon
All build-up, then -- fizzle.There's this crazy cast of (to me rather annoying and unlikable) characters: the family of rich eccentrics, lounge musicians, drug dealers, magazine columnists... and then once we get the relationships and plot all worked out, it's over. Disappointing. I felt bad for the...
I absolutely love British mysteries. True, they are not realistic: more an exercise in cerebration than realistic criminal investigation. It is a sort of magic trick-literary sleight of hand. We try to guess - without success - "whodunit"; and we are delighted when in the last chapter, the detect...
My reading of this book is coloured by my extreme hatred of Lord Pastern, of the type of person who is at core a spoiled child masquerading as an adult: selfish, uncaring, manipulative. Pastern's failings then taint a second character, Ned Manx, who is aware of a particular secret of Pastern's, and...
[These notes were made in 1985:]. A sleazy accordion-player in a fashionable swing band is shot at (as part of the act) by the guest drummer, an eccentric peer, whose daughter the accordion-player - Carlos - is courting. The accordion-player dies of a steel dart (part of an umbrella) through the he...
Very good but, as usual, for me it took too long for Alleyn to appear and I thought the ending too abrupt. But the mystery was EXcellent.
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