Kendrick, Baynard -- The Iron Spiders

I've passed the halfway mark of Baynard Kendrick's "The Iron Spiders Murders," and one suspects he wrote it as a lark. A slightly dysfunctional family? Check. Household made up of potential murder suspects? Check. A holiday residence on a private island? Check. Murdered family patriarch in a locked room? Check. Several days of isolation due to a storm? Check. More bizarre murders? Poisonous spiders, vicious barracudas and lurking panthers? Double Check! :)

Sadly, it's not Duncan Maclain who's called in to take up the part of detective, but the far less interesting (and rather colorless) Miles Standish Rice. Nevertheless, he does a fine job in coming up with a simple and workable solution to how the murderer could've entered and left a completely secured room. It's not quite up to par to many of Carr's best, but then again, who is?

While the plot so far is fun and pleasantly bizarre, there are a few characters that can only be described as embarrassing stereotypes of the era and probably won't go down well when taken in combination with an overly sensitive PC attitude. But in defense of Kendrick, one of the black characters, Sam Knox, is described and treated very positively – especially for the 1930s ("...no better butler than Sam ever lived, nor any man with a finer character"), however, I'm afraid that a lot of people won't be able to look pass one of them hysterically moaning, "Oh lawdy–lawdy–lawdy (...) Dat's death acomin' when de panther screams thataway. Mo' death acomin' to dis heah key," but, yes, it does make you cringe.

This probably makes Kendrick an unlikely candidate to be reprinted anytime soon, probably not until his works fall into the public domain and is picked up by those online print-on-demand presses, which is a shame because we should put these parts down as a product of their time and enjoy the mystery – if it's any good, of course!

And keep in mind that the people of tomorrow will look back at us with questionable frowns, and condemn us for things that seem completely normal, or even hysterically funny, now, and being unenlightened.

LastCenturyDetective