The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939)
Blurb:
My review:
Dull and commonplace suburban
setting with tennis court on which vicious Caligulan youth is
strangled, without any footprints left in the mud. Over-written and
under-plotted: thick neurotic atmosphere in which emotions are as much
strained to breaking point as the reader's patience; while lacking in
the crucial complexity of the author at his best, who admitted "that
book should have been a novelette" (Greene). Owing to singular paucity of
suspects, the reader should be able to guess the SPOILER: HIGHLIGHT TEXT TO READ (wheelchair-bound) villain
without difficulty, despite police suspicion of the thick-headed hero
and his lover, who speaks nauseatingly of the victim's "poor old
face." Solution is as impossible as the situation; not only
difficult to visualise, but Frankly preposterous: would anyone be so stupid?
Too many theatre people, who are as bad as anything in Clayton Rawson;
and very little Dr. Fell, who acts badly out of character, gloating at
the villain: 'I now propose ... to give myself the extreme pleasure of
telling you where you get off... The gallows. They are
going to hang you.' The last words suggest a plea on the author's
part: "He may, perhaps,be excused for not being up to his usual
form." He won't be.