Author Dana Stabenow sent her review of Tom Mead’s latest Joseph Spector locked-room mystery, The House at Devil’s Neck. You can order a signed copy of the book through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/41kXb1T
Thank you, Dana.
The House at Devil’s Neck
by Tom Mead
Talk about a throwback–Tom Mead is channeling basically every Golden Age English crime fiction writer from Conan Doyle on here. Nothing is omitted, including the befuddled detective (named Flint, because of course), the always-smarter-than-everyone-else amateur, and a cast of characters with collectively more motive than everyone in that sleeper in Murder on the Orient Express, every single one of whom has a hidden identity. They are marooned together in a storm-bound haunted house (sticking with my Christie comparisons, shades of And Then There Were None) with secret passageways, spooky caretakers, a medium, a magician determined to expose them as a charlatan, and a generator that keeps going out at exactly the wrong moment. Or is it the right one?
Mead is good at channeling Golden Age writing, too, and uses vocabulary in the manner of Michael Gilbert Himself, as in
Like every other aspect of her life, she tended toward maximalism. Her dress was tentlike and funereal; her astrakhan coat as heavy as mammoth hide; a scarf was tied around her head and her throat was cluttered with paste jewellery.
and
Her hair was a tight, cinereous snare of curls, her eyes ringed by crow’s feet like cracked porcelain.
and
Mr. Lennox was bald and unimpressive, with a pinkly sclerotic face and a toothbrush moustache.
I had to look up a word in every sentence.
In Golden Age mysteries there is always a list of something that is missing something that only the amateur notices. There is such a list here, too, in which (also in line with Golden Age mysteries) only a male (and amateur) detective would spot. There is always a surprising motive: here, World War Two is about to begin, although Mead doesn’t refer to this interesting fact until page 84. Sneaky bastard. And then of course there is the gathering together of all the [surviving] cast for the denouement, when Spector (the gifted amateur) reveals all.
Except there is another reveal later, in Flint’s office, involving a torturously involved explanation that changes a thought- to-be-suicide turned murder turned back into suicide but designed to look like murder…? No wonder Flint was confused. So was I.
I giggled a lot which might or might not have been Mead’s intention, but many readers will enjoy this trip back to the first half of the last century.
Interested? You can also watch Barbara Peters’ interview with Tom Mead.