The audience most likely to enjoy the whole enterprise consists of those willing to overlook the claims that Holmes had any...
Seventeen stories, originally published between 1837 and 1913, test the sweeping assertion by editor Davis (More Deadly Than the Male, 2019, etc.) that the period constituted “the mystery story’s first golden age.”
The results are less than consistently convincing. The most successful detective in the earliest tale, Williams Evans Burton’s windy, plodding “The Secret Cell,” is the kidnapped heiress’s dog. Scotland Yard’s pursuit of horse thief Tally-Ho Thompson in Charles Dickens’ “The Detective Police” is much more confidently presented but still forgettable. The excerpts from novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Felix, and Emile Gaboriau are nothing more than efficient ways of allowing fans to skip the books from which they’re taken, and reprinting the climactic chapter from Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room provides major spoilers for one of the seminal locked-room novels. Leslie Klinger’s well-documented introductory essay notes that Arthur Conan Doyle himself acknowledged few forbears and that those he did note, Edgar Allan Poe (whose widely reprinted “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” makes still another appearance here) and Gaboriau, did not come off well. Doyle’s gifts for economical exposition, epigrammatic dialogue, and solutions that were ingenious without seeming labored set him far above most of his rivals. Of the entrants here, top prizes go to the derelict police officer’s dying confession of his most signal failure in Wilkie Collins’ “Mr. Policeman and the Cook,” the death of one sister and the disappearance of another solved by the determined Lady Molly of Scotland Yard in Baroness Orczy’s “The Ninescore Mystery,” The Thinking Machine’s brisk investigation into the death of a woman soon after she demanded to have her finger cut off in Jacques Futrelle’s “The Superfluous Finger,” and the bright debuts in the careers of blandly efficient private investigator Martin Hewitt (“The Lenton Croft Robberies”) and blind consulting detective Max Carrados (“The Coin of Dionysus”).
The audience most likely to enjoy the whole enterprise consists of those willing to overlook the claims that Holmes had any truly successful rivals and that his career coincided with a golden age. Bronze, maybe.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-071-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A middling mystery with telling historical details and the usual pleasures provided by the regulars’ interpersonal dynamics.
A plucky group of early-20th-century detectives (Murder on Trinity Place, 2019, etc.) takes on the Black Hand.
The leads include Frank Malloy and Gino Donatelli, former police officers who started a detective agency after an unexpected legacy made Malloy a wealthy man; Malloy’s wife, Sarah, the daughter of a wealthy society family who runs a maternity clinic for the poor; and their nanny, Maeve, a budding sleuth who works in Malloy’s office. All of them leap to attention when Gino’s sister-in-law Teodora reports that Jane Harding, a worker at the settlement house where Teo volunteers, has been kidnapped by the Black Hand, who are notorious for abducting the wives and children of anyone who can afford to pay ransom. The New York Police Department is corrupt, and the local Italian immigrants never report crimes. Mr. McWilliam, who runs the settlement house, had asked Jane to marry him, but she’d asked him to allow her to experience more of the single life before deciding. Seeking clues, Sarah visits Mrs. Cassidi, an earlier kidnapping victim who’s refused to talk to anyone, in hopes that her nursing experience and sympathetic manner will get results. Mrs. Cassidi admits to being raped but knows little about where she was held captive, a quiet place in a house where she could hear children. Soon after Nunzio Esposito, a leader of the Black Hand, tells Malloy that no one’s been taken from the settlement house, Jane suddenly reappears but refuses to discuss where she’s been. Lisa Prince, Jane’s well-to-do cousin, reluctantly agrees to take her in even though Jane’s jealous of her wealth and can be unpleasant to deal with. When Esposito’s found murdered in a flat he rented for his mistress, Gino, who’s just arrived on the scene, is arrested. Now the clever sleuths must solve both the murder and the abductions to clear Gino’s name.
A middling mystery with telling historical details and the usual pleasures provided by the regulars’ interpersonal dynamics.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0574-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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