Jolly Good Detecting by Bruce Shaw

Author:Bruce Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2013-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

Critics

Book cover blurbs are chosen to make the new publication attractive so that it will sell and are often written by the authors themselves at the behest of their publishers. They are not necessarily reliable indicators of a book’s literary or commercial worth. However, standard quotations in brief from reviewers may hit upon qualities important for our understanding of a particular writer, demonstrated readily from the work. For example, Nicholas Blake in the Spectator in, 1937 notes Carr’s “skill at blending the normal with the bizarre.” Hacklehorn comments on a similar pairing of “high comedy cheek-by-jowl with passages of spine-chilling terror.” Agatha Christie observes that “very few detective stories baffle me, but Mr. Carr’s always do” (back cover blurb for the Zebra Books 1950 edition of Night at the Mocking Widow). Similarly, Dorothy L. Sayers in the single back cover blurb for the Four Complete Dr. Fell Mysteries (1988): “Mr. Carr can lead us away from the small, artificial, brightly lit stage of the ordinary detective plot into the menace of outer darkness.” Julian Symons on The Hollow Man in the 2002 Orion edition states: “The best Carr is the most ingenious.... The conjuror’s illusion here is marvellously clever,” and T. J. Binyon for the same edition says: “Probably the most ingenious of all detective story writers in the creation of puzzles.”

Kingsley Amis has more considered opinions. In his 1981 review of The Door to Doom (1980)—1981 being the same year in which Amis was awarded the CBE—he paraphrases Julian Symons’ critique of Carr’s puzzle writing whether unconsciously or intentionally, saying that it has “excessive reliance on formula and lack of human warmth amounting to an absence of characterization.” Amis may have been referring to this paragraph in Symons:

The trouble with exploiting a formula like that of the locked room is that everything else becomes subservient ... genuine feeling in many of Chesterton’s short stories, but very little in any of Carr’s writing after his first half-dozen books.... Since the whole story is built around the puzzle there is no room for characterization.... What one remembers about them is never the people, but only the puzzle [110].

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