The Merry Hippo (1963)
Blurb:
My review:
A
genuinely
amusing work, written with much humour and skill reminiscent of Waugh’s
Black Mischief. A
delightfully ill-assorted group, both
European and African, constituting the Royal Commission on
Constitutional
Changes in the Protectorate of Hapana, is sent to a post-imperial
Africa rife
with revolutionary movements and espionage, which may, via Soviet pigs,
have
something to do with the poisoning of a harmless and amusing old
buffer, unless
he was, as seems most likely, poisoned by mistake.
Some detection by the local Superintendent
(like Stapleton, an amateur lepidopterist), but it is the cynical
academic, a
friend of Jacey’s, who solves a particularly mystifying and engrossing
problem,
and discovers a murderer who is both well-hidden and an anti-climax. The clue of the medical instrument, though, is
a triumph of misdirection.
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