Have you ever heard this term… “Locked–room mystery” ?… A well-known term for mystery lovers. It is also called an ‘impossible crime scene’ as if some supernatural entity came out of nowhere, murdered someone, and then disappeared, inside a room, which was locked from inside and remained locked!
This book is one example of such a story, indeed one of the earliest, it claims. Look at the few lines about the author on his page,
Wallace was such a prolific writer that one of his publishers claimed that a quarter of all books in England were written by him. Wallace wrote screen plays, poetry, historical non-fiction, 18 stage plays, 957 short stories, and over 170 novels, 12 in 1929 alone.
I was thinking to read some English mystery, and some short book from Agatha I was almost ready to go for, but the above-mentioned introduction of this author tilted me in his favor, more than 170 novels in all, my goodness! Are thrillers and mystery the only genre, in which you can become such prolific? I also came to know that many writers of his time criticized Wallace and George Orwell was one of them. But he must have been a populist writer, I am pretty sure.
As I had not read anything from the author and after reading a few pages of the book that I had downloaded years ago on my device, I decided to go for it. And I must say I was not disappointed. He created layers of suspense from the beginning, a murder occurred in the beginning and for hundred-odd pages, I kept thinking that it was rather a simple case, then the real murder of the rich and most villainous character of the story occurred inside a locked room and the rest of the story pursues around this second murder. The characters are interesting and dialogues are also very handy.
The writing is very simple yet binding and for a mystery plot, there is no hindrance in understanding the connections and hidden clues, but I could not guess till the end. The book kept me engaged all the time. T.X. is the name of the detective behind the mystery. The way the secret was revealed at last did little dishonor to the effort of this audacious detective T.X, though by introducing one line that ‘T. X. knew it’ author maintained his dignity in the last pages.
The thing that I disliked about the plot is that the author created so many suspicious incidents throughout the book, which steered the needle from one direction to another. And at the end when the mystery was revealed some of those scenes looked frivolous to me yet they were very cleverly crafted in the middle of the plot. One more revelation at the end, after disclosing the murderer, did not seem natural and seemed foisted on the reader just to make a happy ending.
Yet my first time experience with Edgar Wallace was certainly not bad. I don’t know if I will get time to revisit the author sometime but I will keep my eye on his King Kong!
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