Dark of the Moon

Rating:
Summary: A contrived mystery
Review: A lesser Carr from his late period. Fans may still like this mansion mystery, as it has the typical Carr ingredients - humour, romance and impossible murder - but in much more contrived form than usual. And I can't help the feeling that there's something very fishy in the murder solution, which in Carr's case, doesn't answer "who did it" but "how it was done".

Rating:
Summary: terribly tedious
Review: This book was copyrighted in 1967, Carr's later years, when, I believe, he was really at his wit's end because of his peculiar fondness of "impossibility". In this 251 pages' book, not until 1/3 of its length has the murder occured. Even after that, it's as tedious as the previous chapters. One finds that Dr. Fell's supposedly witty remarks in fact carry nothing relevant, and that the farce of a ghost writer is only to stretch this empty story to a novel's length. The legends of the victim's ancestors bear every hallmark of Baskervilles, but they fail to produce the same atomosphere in this novel, and are hardly relevant to the crime. The murder mechanism is not unlike Thor Bridge of Sherlock Holmes, yet there is none whatsoever investigation or discovery in this novel. Only to the very end, bingo, the idea is drawn from thin air. Sometime I really believe if Carr waste less time on stressing the "impossibility" of the crimes, they in fact don't seem so impossible at all. To make the worse worst, like a typical sensational writer, Carr spared no pain to invent a sickening affair, which one even doesn't expect to see in the gossip column often.

Rating:
Summary: terribly tedious
Review: This book was copyrighted in 1967, Carr's later years, when, I believe, he was really at his wit's end because of his peculiar fondness of "impossibility". In this 251 pages' book, not until 1/3 of its length has the murder occured. Even after that, it's as tedious as the previous chapters. One finds that Dr. Fell's supposedly witty remarks in fact carry nothing relevant, and that the farce of a ghost writer is only to stretch this empty story to a novel's length. The legends of the victim's ancestors bear every hallmark of Baskervilles, but they fail to produce the same atomosphere in this novel, and are hardly relevant to the crime. The murder mechanism is not unlike Thor Bridge of Sherlock Holmes, yet there is none whatsoever investigation or discovery in this novel. Only to the very end, bingo, the idea is drawn from thin air. Sometime I really believe if Carr waste less time on stressing the "impossibility" of the crimes, they in fact don't seem so impossible at all. To make the worse worst, like a typical sensational writer, Carr spared no pain to invent a sickening affair, which one even doesn't expect to see in the gossip column often.