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A Blunt Instrument

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 12 months ago

Heyer, Georgette - A Blunt Instrument

 

I see where Nicholas panned this one. Oops! Well, of all the Mitchell material I have read (novels and short stories), I only liked Mr. Fuller's introduction to the C&L collection, so maybe that is fair.

 

I loved the who-done-it angle of ABI because I read this first in the Bantam edition of the 1960s with an introduction by Anthony Boucher. I was young in my readings of other authors apart from the big 3 (Christie, Queen, and Carr) and Erle Stanley Gardner, so although I guessed who did it I appreciated it. On rereading it in the 1980s, I appreciated that it was an early novel (1930s) and was still very clever as to this. And well clued. It seems to me that it is later that us readers of this type of book would find the murderer so obvious.

 

But the book has, apart from this "defect according to moderns", great charm and wit, and one of the nicest romances I have ever found in a detective story.

 

Incidentally, I do not know if anyone ever pointed this out, but the basic plot idea as to the killer seems to me to have been greatly copied in the first Reverend Randolph mystery, "Reverend Randolph and the Wages of Sin", from the 1970s. This was a fun book, but the author never equalled his success in any of the subsequent Reverand Randolph books and his detective never reached classical status or anything like that. Perhaps he should have used more Golden Age plot ideas?

 

Enrique F. Bird

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