From the Bookshelf of Reading the Detectives…

The Floating Admiral

The Detection Club (Editor),

G.K. Chesterton (Writer - Prologue)

Start date: December 1, 2022

Finish date: December 31, 2022

Discussion: Group reads

Why we're reading this: Winner of our December poll.
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Group reads

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What Members Thought

Sep 06, 2018 Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂ rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery-murder-crime-20th-century

3.5★

The Detection Club must have been the coolest club around.

A group of highly successful mystery writers getting together sharing their love of mysteries & detective fiction over regular dinners in London.

The idea of a group of the members each writing a chapter to a murder mystery was intriguing - & with writers as skilled as Agatha Christie & Dorothy L. Sayers involved - what could go wrong?

Unfortunately quite a bit.

After G.K. Chesterton's introduction (which I have already forgotten) V ...more

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Mar 25, 2017 John Frankham rated it really liked it

Shelves: crime-detective

An interesting whodunnit from 1932 with successive chapters written by members of the Detection Club - Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Croft, et al. After the end, a final chapter gives each author's intentions of who did it - many different intended perpetrators and methods!

It starts with a riverside fisherman stopping an unmanned boat as it drifts by - but it isn't empty. A murdered Admiral is laid out within, and it's the vicar's boat ...

A well-written book, with many character ...more

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Jul 16, 2020 Calum Fisher rated it it was ok · review of another edition

It's an intriguing idea - a round-robin novel, where members of the Detection Club each write a chapter, and then pass it on. The rules are they each have to deal with/take proper account of all the details provided by the previous writers, and each write with a solution in mind. It sounds great in theory.

But it really doesn't work - in this case at least. Clearly it's a challenge for the writers, especially those towards the end of the book, who have to make sense of everything that has gone b It's an intriguing idea - a round-robin novel, where members of the Detection Club each write a chapter, and then pass it on. The rules are they each have to deal with/take proper account of all the details provided by the previous writers, and each write with a solution in mind. It sounds great in theory.

But it really doesn't work - in this case at least. Clearly it's a challenge for the writers, especially those towards the end of the book, who have to make sense of everything that has gone before. This is probably an impossible task, and it shows, but the real problem is their good-faith efforts to try - which require the endless bending, twisting, and rereading of clues and, above all, the incessant showing of their working. After the opening chapters (which do set up an intriguing mystery) you can literally see the decline, as each new author becomes of necessity less and less concerned to move the story forward in any way, and instead has to try to make some sense of the increasing chaos and morass of clues that went before - Ronald Knox's arse-numbingly boring chapter actually just has the Inspector sitting in a pub mapping out for himself 39 (thirty-nine!) problems/questions about the case over 50+ pages. This may have served as a useful tidying-up exercise for the writers who followed, but it is unforgivably dull for the reader.

The story never really comes alive - the writers are clearly straining themselves to come up with technically-possible solutions and forget to do much else. Likewise the characters, including the Inspector himself, who are merely pieces on the chessboard to be moved around. Berkeley Cox provides an adequate solution, but it feels entirely arbitrary - which indeed it is, as the appendix with all the other possible solutions from each writer demonstrates. You picks one, you takes your choice. It probably doesn't help either that you have seriously patchy writing quality throughout - on the one hand masters like Christie, Sayers and Berkeley; on the other arch-humdrums such as John Rhode, the Coles, and Edgar Jepson. But the main problem seems to be baked into the exercise itself - given what they are required to do as writers, all are concerned to make the clues fit and the alibis add up, and increasingly so. This leads to a morass of stuff, much of it irrelevant, and above all to a highly artificial story, with everything and everyone reduced to chess-pieces to be arbitrarily moved around by whichever author comes next. It's dreary, and exactly the kind of thing that gives golden age detective fiction a bad name. This is usually unfair - but not here. ...more

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