Minutes from a discussion of Patrick Quentin's A Puzzle for Fools

[Charles]

On Monday, August 5th, the American Mystery Classics Book Club, whose membership continues to grow, now counting five passionate readers among its ranks, met on the leather-backed furniture of New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop to discuss Patrick Quentin’s first Peter Duluth mystery, A Puzzle for Fools. Read on to see some of what we discussed, and please chime in with your own thoughts and questions if you’re participating in this book group from afar. (Possible spoilers follow)

- We began with a general conversation about Patrick Quentin, discussing the strangeness of a pseudonym that contains multiple authors beneath it, and briefly considered the ways in the presence of those two writers (Hugh Callingham Wheeler and Richard Wilson Webb) may have affected the text.

- While all agreed that the prose was strikingly modern, or, at least, not as old fashioned as some might have expected, a few members found the action itself and some of the logic of the plot to be confusing. There was a bit of debate as to how deliberate that obfuscation might have been, since the use of the sanitarium setting and its inmates was obviously intended to unsettle to narrative and call its clues into question.

- One reader noted a loose thread in the book’s solution, and none present could explain it away: how did the murderer know that Iris Pattison would have a credible motive for killing Laribee?

- We discussed the presence of the Great Depression in the book, and talked a bit about how mysteries from different eras often reflect the times in which they were written. In A Puzzle for Fools, this social history was emphasized by the fact that the sanitarium contained characters from various social classes, providing a variety of attitudes towards the stock market crash and the bankers who caused it.

- There was a brief conversation about the murderer’s use of vaudevillian traditions to obscure his identity, a skill set that seems remarkably common in literature from the era (or at least common enough to have also appeared in the last book this book club read, Clayton Rawson’s Death from a Top Hat).

- Finally, one reader called attention to the fact that Peter Duluth actually fails to solve the crime! This seems to distinguish the novel from most other Golden Age mysteries, where the detective is the all-knowing presence watching everyone else fumble over the evidence. Since none present had read other titles in the series, we were curious how often such failures ended the character’s investigations.