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The Moonflower

Page history last edited by Jon 11 years, 7 months ago

Nichols, Beverley -- The Moonflower (1955) aka The Moonflower Murder

 

The amateur sleuth Horatio Green (somehow he reminded me of Prof. T L Westborough) who has a super sense of smell and a love of gardens is in the vicinity of Mrs. Faversham's estate to witness the blossoming of the very rare moonflower which has been brought in from Uruguay and is being monitored and cared for in a regulated environment. When Horatio sets eyes on this flower for the first time, the experts give him an estimate that the flower would blossom any time after 48 hours. But strangely, within the next 12 hours, the owner Mrs. F is found strangled in her room and the flower is found to have blossomed - prematurely! Why did it blossom so early and how exactly is the premature blossoming relevant to the death of its owner forms the rest of the book.


The reader who picks up this book for its locked room/impossible crime would have to wait till the end of the book to get a glimpse of it! It's one of those books where the murder is meticulously planned to be of an impossible kind (a perfect crime in the author's word) but the circumstances after the event turn it out into an ordinary looking death. And for the first 240 pages, the reader has no reason to even suspect it as anything but ordinary. In the final 30 pages, there is a detailed explanation of this very complex problem with twists and surprises galore. There are a few clues sprinkled across the length of the book (as to whodunit) but they are far too less compared to the facts which are hidden from the reader to arrive at these stunning revelations of complex relations, motives and the events preceding the denouement. But fair enough, it's a sound plot and impossible crime or not, IMO, it can be solely enjoyed on its own merit as a good GAD genre novel.

 

Arun.

 

See also: http://moonlight-detective.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/at-night-moonbeam-kisses-flower-petals.html

 

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