The best detective writers of all time, including Agatha Christie & Dorothy Sayers, teamed up to write these stories- "The Scoop" and "Behind The Screen."
An unusual book!
The introduction is entertaining, but I do think if one cannot swear to have one's detectives well and truely detect maybe one is not quite what the Detection Club's founders had in mind for membership!
These are two stories written by the detective club. In the first case, I believe each chapter was written by a different member. In the second, the first half was written by one group, and the second half (w/o any guidance from the first) had to write the second to detangle everything.
I enjoyed The Scoop quite a bit. It was an interesting twisting bunch of characters and little things that turned out to be bigger things and a strong female character (even if she did have to be rescued) who ends up involved almost at random--and then figures out why the call went to her from the soon dead man, but barely. There were some transitions that were a bit jarring (and now we WILL have the cops involved--I'm guessing one of the author has a cop as a sleuth) but everyone played fairly nicely with everyone else's characters and there weren't too many extra twists tossed in just because everyone needs a twist. I enjoyed it.
Behind the Screen. It was good, but I had a few more problems with it. In many ways it was much smoother (which makes sense, given how it was written), but I have a bit of a problem with the end solution--namely the plausible, probably has to be true to have a legit solution, but no previous hint solution to the timing issue of what a visitor saw. It just seemed...tacked on. I just felt as a reader there should have been some clue other than "well, it had to be that way". I don't think the authors played fair on that one little point.
Otherwise, it was a fascinating tangle. I just wish I knew if the second half came up with the solution the authors of the first half had had in mind. I was also amused by the solutions sent in (as this was apparently done as a radio program)--people who think the murderer would get away with it must read different mysteries than me!
Interesting experiments in writing, and the authors are good enough to pull them off.
The introduction is entertaining, but I do think if one cannot swear to have one's detectives well and truely detect maybe one is not quite what the Detection Club's founders had in mind for membership!
These are two stories written by the detective club. In the first case, I believe each chapter was written by a different member. In the second, the first half was written by one group, and the second half (w/o any guidance from the first) had to write the second to detangle everything.
I enjoyed The Scoop quite a bit. It was an interesting twisting bunch of characters and little things that turned out to be bigger things and a strong female character (even if she did have to be rescued) who ends up involved almost at random--and then figures out why the call went to her from the soon dead man, but barely. There were some transitions that were a bit jarring (and now we WILL have the cops involved--I'm guessing one of the author has a cop as a sleuth) but everyone played fairly nicely with everyone else's characters and there weren't too many extra twists tossed in just because everyone needs a twist. I enjoyed it.
Behind the Screen. It was good, but I had a few more problems with it. In many ways it was much smoother (which makes sense, given how it was written), but I have a bit of a problem with the end solution--namely the plausible, probably has to be true to have a legit solution, but no previous hint solution to the timing issue of what a visitor saw. It just seemed...tacked on. I just felt as a reader there should have been some clue other than "well, it had to be that way". I don't think the authors played fair on that one little point.
Otherwise, it was a fascinating tangle. I just wish I knew if the second half came up with the solution the authors of the first half had had in mind. I was also amused by the solutions sent in (as this was apparently done as a radio program)--people who think the murderer would get away with it must read different mysteries than me!
Interesting experiments in writing, and the authors are good enough to pull them off.
From the back cover: It was another foggy night in London when the members of the world-renowned Detection Club gathered to repeat the sucess of their jointly authored book, The Floating Admiral. Each writer worked on the mysteries without knowing the solutions the others had planned. When the creators of Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey and other sleuths get together, you can be sure the mysteries will be monumental, the detection delightful, and the results exciting.
