Review by Booklist Review
This is a satisfyingly strange locked-room (and nailed-shutters) thriller by golden-age-of-crime-fiction master Farjeon, about whom Dorothy L. Sayers wrote: Jefferson Farjeon is quite unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures. A neophyte burglar, out on the prowl in a deserted portion of the English coast, stumbles upon an unoccupied-looking house. In a chapter worthy of Hitchcock, the burglar searches through a series of malevolent-seeming rooms. The drawing room is locked from the outside; inside are seven corpses, six men and one woman, on the furniture and floor. In the drawing room, the portrait of a child has been shot through the heart. Farjeon's series hero, Detective Inspector Kendall, takes over from there, seeking the owners of the abandoned house and the identities of the dead in a search that extends across the English Channel to Boulogne. This 1939 puzzler is a worthy addition to the British Library Crime Classics series.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Originally published in 1939, this reissue in the British Library Crime Classics series from Farjeon (1883-1955) is a standout, with a particularly horrifying opening. Ted Lyte, a small-time thief who usually contents himself with picking pockets, enters an apparently unoccupied house near the British coast only to encounter a grotesque tableau behind a locked door. The room he enters, whose shutters are not only bolted but nailed shut, contains seven emaciated corpses, six of them male; a mantelpiece is adorned by a silver vase supporting an old cricket ball. Lyte flees the scene in terror, only to run into the police. When Inspector Kendall arrives, along with freelance reporter Thomas Hazeldean, who saw Lyte run from the house, Kendall discovers further unsettling oddities, including a crumpled note under one of the dead men bearing the message: "with apologies from the suicide club." Kendall and Hazeldean complement each other nicely as they work toward a satisfyingly logical solution to this ingenious locked-room mystery. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Farjeon's gift for striking hooks (Mystery in White, 2016, etc.) reaches a perverse pinnacle in this reprint from 1939 by the British Library of Crime Classics.On a whim, Ted Lyte, a minor-league pickpocket with ambitions above his station, breaks into a house off Havenford Creek, Benwick. It's not until he's let himself in through an obliging window that he wonders whether he should look downstairs for silver or upstairs for jewelry. At any rate, the question is moot, for moments after he opens the wrong door, Ted is fleeing in terror, closely followed by freelance journalist and amateur yachtsman Thomas Hazeldean, who's struck by the stranger's suspicious behavior. But who wouldn't run away from Haven House when he finds the corpses of six men and one woman decorously arrayed around the drawing room? There's no immediate indication of the cause of all these deaths or even of the identities of the dead people; the only clues are a bullet through the portrait of a young girl hanging in the drawing room, a dead cat on the path outside, and a paper inscribed "WITH APOLOGIES FROM THE SUICIDE CLUB" on one side and "Particulars at address 5916s 46e G" on the other. To indulge in Farjeon's own brand of dry understatement, it's quite a riddle for DI Kendall and Sgt. Wade, and it's lucky for them that Hazeldean has taken such an interest in the case. And lucky for the reader as well, since his adventures when he pursues a lead to the Pension Paula, the house in Boulogne that's currently home to John Fenner, the master of Haven House, and his niece, Dora, the original of the defaced portrait, are a good deal more interesting, if more helter-skelter, than Kendall and Wade's straight-faced attempts to discover the pattern beneath the chaos in Benwick.Readers won't be surprised to find the answers less compelling than the memorably baroque riddle of the opening tableau. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
