Unconvincing.
An Irish novelist’s copious recasting of the sensational Crippen murder hunt.
Boyne’s coarsely textured Edwardian page-turner teems with characters but reduces them to cartoonish dimensions. Crippen himself, American and mousey but with a fascination for dissection, emerges as the frustrated product of various pushy women, starting with his mother, whose religious obsession denied him the medical education he craved. After his first wife’s death in a traffic accident, he takes up with a music-hall singer named Cora, who turns out to be as overbearing as his parent. Crippen’s historical reputation was informed by not only Cora’s murder and dismemberment in London but his flight back to North America aboard the SS Montrose, accompanied by his lover Ethel Le Neve. From these events Boyne plaits a triple-strand narrative that loops around in time, effectively leeching suspense from the murder. Instead, the novel’s central focus falls on shipboard events, as suspicions mount regarding the identity of a certain John Robinson (Crippen, who shaved off his moustache) and his “son” Edmund, in fact Ethel in a suit and wig, setting aflutter the heart and possibly the latent lesbianism of another young passenger. A snobby matron (one of many in the story), a stiff captain, a brutish youth and other caricatures spend the 14-day voyage gossiping, leering and bristling. The captain, however, seeing through Edmund’s disguise, famously takes advantage of the new-fangled Marconi Telegraph equipment onboard the ship to communicate his suspicions to the police. The plodding Inspector Dew races aboard another vessel to overtake the ship, and both Crippen and Le Neve are arrested off the coast of Canada. Boyne’s light tone diffuses any seriousness and his late and highly improbable twist to the murder scenario transforms the story, already damaged by its loose attention to period style, into something resembling farce.
Unconvincing.Pub Date: March 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34358-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A murder is committed in a stalled transcontinental train in the Balkans, and every passenger has a watertight alibi. But Hercule Poirot finds a way.
**Note: This classic Agatha Christie mystery was originally published in England as Murder on the Orient Express, but in the United States as Murder in the Calais Coach. Kirkus reviewed the book in 1934 under the original US title, but we changed the title in our database to the now recognizable title Murder on the Orient Express. This is the only name now known for the book. The reason the US publisher, Dodd Mead, did not use the UK title in 1934 was to avoid confusion with the 1932 Graham Greene novel, Orient Express.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1934
ISBN: 978-0062073495
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1934
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.
In Archie Goodwin's 15th adventure since the death of his creator, Rex Stout, his gossipy Aunt Edna Wainwright lures him from 34th Street to his carefully unnamed hometown in Ohio to investigate the death of a well-hated bank president.
Tom Blankenship, the local police chief, thinks there’s no case since Logan Mulgrew shot himself. But Archie’s mother, Marjorie Goodwin, and Aunt Edna know lots of people with reason to have killed him. Mulgrew drove rival banker Charles Purcell out of business, forcing Purcell to get work as an auto mechanic, and foreclosed on dairy farmer Harold Mapes’ spread. Lester Newman is convinced that Mulgrew murdered his ailing wife, Lester’s sister, so that he could romance her nurse, Carrie Yeager. And Donna Newman, Lester’s granddaughter, might have had an eye on her great-uncle’s substantial estate. Nor is Archie limited to mulling over his relatives’ gossip, for Trumpet reporter Verna Kay Padgett, whose apartment window was shot out the night her column raised questions about the alleged suicide, is perfectly willing to publish a floridly actionable summary of the leading suspects that delights her editor, shocks Archie, and infuriates everyone else. The one person missing is Archie’s boss, Nero Wolfe (Death of an Art Collector, 2019, etc.), and fans will breathe a sigh of relief when he appears at Marjorie’s door, debriefs Archie, notices a telltale clue, prepares dinner for everyone, sleeps on his discovery, and arranges a meeting of all parties in Marjorie’s living room in which he names the killer.
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5988-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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