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Anthony Berkeley (1893–1971)

Teoksen Myrkytetyn suklaarasian arvoitus tekijä

38+ teosta 2,414 jäsentä 103 arvostelua 5 Favorited

Tietoja tekijästä

A journalist as well as a novelist, Anthony Berkeley was a founding member of the Detection Club and one of crime fiction's greatest innovators. He was one of the first to predict the development of the 'psychological' crime novel and he sometimes wrote under the pseudonym of Francis Iles. He wrote näytä lisää twenty-four novels, ten of which feature his amateur detective, Roger Sheringham näytä vähemmän

Sarjat

Tekijän teokset

Myrkytetyn suklaarasian arvoitus (1929) 558 kappaletta
Vakain tuumin ja harkiten (1931) 393 kappaletta
Rakkaani, paholainen (1931) 252 kappaletta
Minä olen syyllinen (1937) 180 kappaletta
Mrs Strattonin tapaus (1933) 144 kappaletta
Silkkisukkamurhat (1928) 104 kappaletta
The Piccadilly Murder (1929) 103 kappaletta
The Wintringham Mystery (1927) 102 kappaletta
The Layton Court Mystery (1925) 100 kappaletta
Murder in the Basement (1932) 100 kappaletta
The Wychford Poisoning Case (1926) 46 kappaletta
The Second Shot (1930) 45 kappaletta
Not To Be Taken (1937) 44 kappaletta

Associated Works

The Floating Admiral (1931) — Avustaja — 799 kappaletta
The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories (1990) — Avustaja — 399 kappaletta
Murha yksinoikeudella ; Ruumis varjostimen takana (1930) — Avustaja — 210 kappaletta
Ask a Policeman (1933) — Avustaja — 193 kappaletta
Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries (2016) — Avustaja — 165 kappaletta
Six Against the Yard (1936) — Avustaja — 158 kappaletta
Capital Crimes: London Mysteries (2015) — Avustaja — 155 kappaletta
Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2015) — Avustaja — 149 kappaletta
The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (2015) — Avustaja — 139 kappaletta
Bodies from the Library (2018) — Avustaja — 119 kappaletta
Serpents in Eden: Countryside Crimes (2016) — Avustaja — 104 kappaletta
Tales of Detection (1940) — Avustaja — 56 kappaletta
The Anatomy of Murder (1936) — Avustaja — 55 kappaletta
Three famous murder novels (1941) — Avustaja — 43 kappaletta
Bodies from the Library 3 (2020) — Avustaja — 42 kappaletta
65 Great Murder Mysteries (1983) — Avustaja; Avustaja — 41 kappaletta
Murder in Midwinter (2020) — Avustaja — 35 kappaletta
The Vintage Book of Classic Crime (1993) — Avustaja — 33 kappaletta
Murder Short & Sweet (2008) — Avustaja; Avustaja — 28 kappaletta
Murder Takes a Holiday (2020) — Avustaja — 28 kappaletta
The Great Book of Thrillers (1935) — Avustaja — 27 kappaletta
The Boys' Second Book of Great Detective Stories (1940) — Avustaja — 26 kappaletta
Detective Mysteries Short Stories (Gothic Fantasy) (2019) — Avustaja — 25 kappaletta
The Pocket Book of Great Detectives (1941) — Avustaja — 22 kappaletta
Murder by the Seaside (2022) — Avustaja — 22 kappaletta
Great Tales of Detection (1936) — Avustaja — 21 kappaletta
A Century of Detective Stories (1935) — Avustaja — 20 kappaletta
The World's Best One Hundred Detective Stories, Volume 2 (1929) — Avustaja — 17 kappaletta
Fifty Masterpieces of Mystery (1937) — Avustaja — 13 kappaletta
The Ash-Tree Press Annual Macabre 2004 - The Last 'Queer Stories from Truth' (2004) — Avustaja; Avustaja, eräät painokset8 kappaletta
13 Ways to Kill a Man (1966) — Avustaja — 7 kappaletta
The Black Cabinet (1989) — Avustaja — 7 kappaletta
Classic stories of crime and detection (1976) — Avustaja — 4 kappaletta
Best Detective Stories, Second Series — Avustaja — 4 kappaletta
Piirakkasota — Avustaja — 3 kappaletta
Best Stories of the Underworld (1942) — Avustaja — 3 kappaletta
Great Stories of Detection (1960) — Avustaja — 2 kappaletta
Antoloxia Do Relato Policial (aula Das Letras) (2013) — Tekijä, eräät painokset1 kappale
Missing From Their Homes — Avustaja — 1 kappale

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A slightly subversive Golden Age murder mystery with elements of a comedy of manners that I would have found a lot more diverting if not for the fact that Anthony Berkeley clearly had Issues with Women. [It’s the kind of book where neither the male characters nor the narrative voice thinks domestic violence is anything other than a great way of keeping your wife in line. Ugh.
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
siriaeve | 9 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Mar 17, 2024 |
so well done - just as it's in danger of becoming tedious one realizes who did it - perfectly imagined
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
Overgaard | 28 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Mar 16, 2024 |
Anthony Berkeley originally published this as a serialised story titled Cicely Disappears in the Daily Mail, under his pseudonym, A Monmouth Platts. It remained out of print for years, until it was reissued in 2021 by the Collins Crime Club. A classic, country house mystery, that typifies the Golden Age of Crime Writing in English, it nonetheless raises some uncomfortable questions for the reader about class and wealth, antisemitism, and other forms of implicit prejudices.

In The Wintringham Mystery, we begin with our protagonist, Stephen Munro, who, having returned from military service, squanders his fortune and consequently finds himself impoverished. The opening scene consists of Munro relating to Bridger, his valet (and former orderly, in the military) that he has to let him go as he can no longer afford to pay his salary. Instead, Munro has - horror of horrors - found himself a job, as a footman, in the house of Lady Susan Carey, an elderly, wealthy woman with a country estate. In a deeply uncomfortable scene that was clearly written to be funny, Munro repeatedly mocks Bridger for failing to react with adequate shock and astonishment to this fall in his employer's status; today, we know that Bridger's lack of response may not only be due to the emotional deficits that Munro attributes to him, but also to the fact that he is currently employed by Munro, and bound by conventions of class that will become more apparent as we go on. If I'm to be uncharitable, I could also say that Bridger isn't particularly shocked by the concept of working for a living, more generally. In a touching display of devotion (or lack of self esteem), Bridger refuses to take Munro's recommendation letter and find himself another valet position, and instead accompanies him to Lady Susan's house, where he takes, I imagine, a substantial paycut, to work as under-gardener.

At Lady Susan's, Munro has difficulty adjusting to being a footman, after having been a gentleman of leisure. The hours are long; the butler, Mr. Martin, does not take a shine to him, and Lady Susan informs him that his name is now William ("We always call the footman 'William'). Lady Susan's upcoming weekend party entails a lot of work, and Munro is clearly unaccustomed to work. When the butler, Martin, lists out his duties, Munro marvels, "It seems to me that the footman's life is not an idle one." Oh, I wanted to smack him! His life is further complicated by the arrival of two people he knew from his former life: Freddie Venables, Lady Susan's nephew and Munro's former classmate from school, and Pauline Mainwaring, his former fiance. In response to Munro's fall from status, they respond differently. Freddie continues to awkwardly treat Munro as an old friend even as Munro serves him drinks, attempts to valet him and carries his luggage; Freddie keeps getting in his way, treating Munro like an old friend (who happens to be cleaning silverware, I don't know) and drawing Lady Susan's ire. Pauline Mainwaring cuts him dead. It turns out she is engaged again, this time to a wealthy financier, who is naturally, Sir Julius Hammerstein, and in accordance with Golden Age Mystery writers' tendencies towards anti-semitism, described unkindly and with reference to all the usual stereotypes. At the garden party are a cast of characters with all sorts of motives and intentions. It doesn't take long before Freddie Venables blurts out to the others that Munro is one of them, albeit in footman's livery, having fallen on hard times. The result is an awkward, un-party like situation: Pauline unbends and chats with him normally, the others refuse to be valeted by one of their own class, unpacking their own clothes, and Munro speaks with as he would normally, even though he's dressed in a footman's livery.

The plot get started with two key developments. The first, is that Cicely, Lady Susan's beloved niece, vanishes. At the start of the book she is evidently distraught and upset about something undisclosed. She initially skips the party to go sailing with friends, but then changes her mind and returns. During an attempted seance (rich people goofing around), the lights are turned off, and when they come back on, she's disappeared. Meanwhile, the butler, increasingly resentful at the way Munro is treated with casual friendliness by the guests, unlike all the other servants, complains to Lady Susan about him. So does Sir Julius Hammerstein, who doesn't like his fiance, Pauline and her ex-fiance, Munro resuming a friendship. Lady Susan decides to solve both problems with one stone: she fires Munro as a footman and rehires him as a detective. Munro moves out of servants quarters into a bedroom in the same house and proceeds to spend the rest of the book ineptly investigating Cicely's disappearance, and trying to decide how he can have his Pauline back, when he's unable to support her in the lifestyle within which she (and he) were raised.

The resolution of the mystery is sufficiently twisty: when first published, the Mail offered prizes for anyone who could solve it before the last chapter was out, and among the unsuccessful applicants was Agatha Christie. While entertaining enough, it is difficult for the modern reader to get around the deep-rooted classism, resting on an implicit, unstated assumption about the intellectual and moral superiority of the rich (in case you were wondering, yes [spoilers for the ending a servant committed the various crimes in the book ]. When Pauline tells Munro that she won't mind being a poor man's wife, and cooking and cleaning, he disputes it, telling her that her enthusiasm will eventually wear off, and she'll grow to resent him and the domestic labor. I'd imagine the very stoic Bridger might have had something to say about that, atleast internally, but instead, he is her "servant for life," because she once greeted him politely and shook his hand. To sum up, the mystery is a nice puzzle, the rest of the book is just out of sync with today's times.
… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
rv1988 | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Feb 16, 2024 |
may be best prep school book I've read
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
Overgaard | 4 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Feb 6, 2024 |

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Associated Authors

F. Tennyson Jesse Contributor
R. Austin Freeman Contributor
E.M. Delafield Contributor
A. J. Cronin Contributor
Helena Normanton Contributor
Percy Hoskins Contributor
G. B. Stern Contributor
Antony Marsden Contributor
John Prothero Contributor
Percy Savage Contributor
Sir Basil Thomson Contributor
Clennell Wilkinson Contributor
J. S. Fletcher Contributor
Russell Thorndike Contributor
Henry Wade Contributor
Gerald Bullett Contributor
J. D. Beresford Contributor
A. J. Alan Contributor
Edward Shanks Contributor
Martin Armstrong Contributor
Anthony Armstrong Contributor
Charles Cooper Contributor
Milward Kennedy Contributor
L. A. G. Strong Contributor
Harold Dearden Contributor
Leonard R. Gribble Contributor
William Gough Contributor
Val Gielgud Contributor
Martin Edwards Introduction
Christianna Brand Contributor
Barye Phillips Cover artist
Martti Montonen Translator
Colin Dexter Introduction
Eero Ahmavaara Translator
Juhani Jaskari Translator

Tilastot

Teokset
38
Also by
45
Jäseniä
2,414
Suosituimmuussija
#10,621
Arvio (tähdet)
½ 3.6
Kirja-arvosteluja
103
ISBN:t
188
Kielet
17
Kuinka monen suosikki
5

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