Swan Song - SPOILER Thread - (Gervase Fen #4) (Sept/Oct 22)

[Susan]

Welcome to our Sep/Oct 22 buddy read of Swa[bookcover:Swan Songn Song|35454016] the fourth Gervase Fen mystery aka Dead and Dumb and first published in 1947.

When an opera company gathers in Oxford for the first post-war production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger its happiness is soon soured by the discovery that the unpleasant Edwin Shorthouse will be singing a leading role. Nearly everyone involved has reason to loathe Shorthouse but who amongst them has the fiendish ingenuity to kill him in his own locked dressing room?

In the course of this entertaining adventure, eccentric Oxford don and amateur sleuth Gervase Fen has to unravel two murders, cope with the unpredictability of the artistic temperament, and attempt to encourage the course of true love.

Have just realised that, sadly, the whole Gervase Fen series are not easily available on kindle, so anyone following this series might need to think ahead as we read on. The next two are on kindle, just something to be aware of.

Please feel free to post spoilers in this thread.

[Judy]

The ending of this is very clever - one of those outrageous twists that we usually associate with Christie!

I didn't find it terribly believable, especially the idea that the man becoming so ill doesn't bother to seek any medical attention because he is too busy, and doesn't notice that the cream is making his skin problems worse - but I didn't really mind that it wasn't realistic.

I also agree with Emma's comment in the other thread that I struggled to visualise the ending - in particular, I got a bit lost with all the business about the trapdoor and the noose.

[Susan]

So often in GA mysteries the endings are so bizarre that you just have to accept them, don't you? It's as though authors were trying to find the least likely means of killing someone!

[Judy]

Susan wrote: "So often in GA mysteries the endings are so bizarre that you just have to accept them, don't you? It's as though authors were trying to find the least likely means of killing someone!"

Yes, definitely! I suppose, aside from the entertainment value, they didn't want to come up with methods that people would copy in real life - and not much danger of that with methods like the trapdoor one here, where it's hard to understand it, let alone copy it!

[Pamela]

I really liked this one, I found the humour much lighter and more natural as it came out of the characters rather than the frenetic chases we’ve seen in earlier books. Charles Shorthouse was a gem!

I also found the final solution rather bizarre, the only bit I grasped (I think) is that the drugged Shorthouse was pulled up with feet to the ceiling, but I couldn’t quite picture it (probably just as well!) I did twig that the vanishing cream was a clue as it got so much time in the discussions, but didn’t quite realise why.

Glad I read this, as I’d been a bit underwhelmed with the Fen books, but this was great fun.

[Frances]

This one was fun, with the opera staging in the background, the quirky cast of characters and a completely impossible murder with a solution that seemed incredibly far-fetched but clever. I quite enjoyed it and look forward to the next one!