A Deed of Dreadful Note

The scene of the crime is Scamnum Court, seat of the Duke of Horton. As for the crime itself, it is one of the most bizarre in all of detective fiction. Someone has shot the Lord Chancellor in the middle of a production of Hamlet. The Lord Chancellor was playing the part of Polonius in a production that attempted to reproduce Hamlet as it would have been originally performed. So when Hamlet is supposed to stab Polonius through an arras, a gunshot sounds. When “Hamlet” reaches the curtained-off rear stage, he finds “Polonius” very much dead of a gunshot wound, the weapon nowhere in sight.

In due course, a document vital to national security goes missing, and so the Prime Minister himself asks Inspector John Appleby to investigate the goings-on at Scamnum Court. And investigate he does—it turns out to be a complex case. The killer took several foolhardy risks, but all of them seem to have paid off! Are there accomplices? Was the killer working alone? And when a second murder takes place, suicide seems most unlikely indeed…

All aboard the S. S. Van Dine!

I’m afraid that readers of this blog will begin to think that I’m simply stealing my reading list off of other blogs. Once again, today’s book was inspired by a previous review—and yet again, it was Bill from Traditional Mysteries who inspired it. The book is Murder in Pastiche by Marion Mainwaring, and after the enticing review Bill wrote in January, the book flew near the top of my to-be-read pile… and now that it’s April, I figured it was about time to give it a read. (Yeah, I’m not sure how to explain the physics behind that… Apparently, the last few months on this blog have been a massive game of Jenga with my to-be-read pile, and nobody was aware of it.)

But I digress. We find ourselves on board the R. M. S. Florabunda as it sails from Liverpool to New York. And, by an astonishing coincidence, nine prominent detectives have all come on board the same ship! These sleuths are parodies of some of the most famous detectives of all-time: M. Atlas Poireau (Hercule Poirot), Sir Jon. Nappleby (Sir John Appleby), Jerry Pason (Perry Mason), Broderick Tourneur (Roderick Alleyn), Trajan Beare (Nero Wolfe), Miss Fan Sliver (Miss Silver), Spike Bludgeon (Mike Hammer), Mallory King (Ellery Queen), and Lord Simon Quinsey (Lord Peter Wimsey). With any one of these detectives on board, a mystery is bound to explode— but with nine? That’s just tempting fate.