"Detective Dick Martin is leaving Scotland Yard. His final job is to bring in Lew Pheeney, who is wanted in connection with a bank robbery. When Lew confesses to trying to open a dead man's tomb, however, Martin must unravel a mystery. He races to find the connection between an attractive librarian, a mad scientist and the vanished heir to a vast fortune, as everyone becomes entangled in a web of fraud, deceit, torture and murder".
This started off as a standard murder mystery and then segued into a Gothic horror and then back to a plain old 'who dunnit', which was all very strange.
The story is interesting enough but there are some strange quirks about the writing. The 'hero' Dick Martin is known on the force as 'Slick', a nick name, Wallace refers to him in some paragraphs as 'Dick' and other's as 'Slick'. I've never come across this before and for me it was annoying, having the major character known under two different names.
The way the chapters are constructed, they are very episodic,would make for a great television adaptation which was unlikely to have been the authors intention seeing as this was published in 1926.
As stated above it try's to be a horror story and a murder mystery and falls a bit short on both accounts. The highlight was some great dialogue between characters but this wasn't enough to save this from a 5/10.
No comments:
Post a Comment