UBC #9: A Room to Die In
May. 1st, 2006 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyUBC #9
Queen, Ellery. [Jack Vance]. A Room to Die In. 1965. Signet Double Mysteries: The Copper Frame and A Room to Die In. New York: Signet-New American Library, 1981.
This is, in fact, a pretty spiffy locked-room mystery. The romantic sub-plot is tedious, cliched, and eminently predictable (although bonus points for the female lead being the protagonist/detective, SOLVING the mystery, and never having to be rescued from anything), but that's par for the course. Lee and Dannay tend toward the cookie-cutter romantic subplots of the sort that inspires Harriet's telegram to her agent in Have His Carcase, and the desultory nature of this romance may in fact be Vance taking the mickey. You could make a case.
Of course, the murderer's only apparent motive was that he had this really cool idea about how to commit a locked-room murder and wanted to try it out, but then that's very often the case with locked-room mysteries.
Queen, Ellery. [Jack Vance]. A Room to Die In. 1965. Signet Double Mysteries: The Copper Frame and A Room to Die In. New York: Signet-New American Library, 1981.
This is, in fact, a pretty spiffy locked-room mystery. The romantic sub-plot is tedious, cliched, and eminently predictable (although bonus points for the female lead being the protagonist/detective, SOLVING the mystery, and never having to be rescued from anything), but that's par for the course. Lee and Dannay tend toward the cookie-cutter romantic subplots of the sort that inspires Harriet's telegram to her agent in Have His Carcase, and the desultory nature of this romance may in fact be Vance taking the mickey. You could make a case.
Of course, the murderer's only apparent motive was that he had this really cool idea about how to commit a locked-room murder and wanted to try it out, but then that's very often the case with locked-room mysteries.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 08:58 pm (UTC)