"None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me."- Rorschach (Alan Moore's Watchmen, 1986-87)
I've seen tons
of praise
being heaped on Eric Keith's Nine Man's Murder (2011), which is
considered to be a modern, puzzle-oriented homage to Agatha
Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) with more than one
seemingly impossible situation confronting the reader. So what's not to like, I
thought, right? Well...
Nine Man's Murder begins well enough, for this type of mystery novel, as nine former
students of Damien Anderson's detective academy receive typewritten invitations
for a reunion at Moon's End – and isolated vacation home on a snowy mountaintop
in Northern California.
There are a string of past incidents
described in the opening chapters and they provide a repository of motives,
which come into effect when they discover the body of Damien Anderson in an
upstairs closet. A knife-handle protrudes from his abdomen.
They further discover an obliterated
bridge. A cut phone-line and a dead internet connection, which condemns them to
spend a couple of days on the isolated mountaintop in the company of an
ambitious killer – eager to rack up a respectable body count.
So far, so good, but the book doesn't
break any new ground for this particular type of detective story. Granted, it's
hard to do, but not impossible, because there are examples (e.g. Herbert
Brean's The
Clock Strikes Thirteen, 1954). Unfortunately, Nine Man's Murder
settles on stock-in-trade depiction of the so-called "isolation-mysteries," but
that not even my main objection to the book. Because that would've been
forgivable.
The personalities of the characters
resembles that of a group of Easter Island statues, because they're barely
indistinguishable from one another and completely unmoved by what's been
happening around them – which robbed the story of the mountain tension
associated with these isolation-mysteries. A rising sense of terror and growing
suspicion are the main ingredients for this type of story. Even if there's a
puzzle at the heart of the story. Am I actually defending
character-development?
Anyhow, my interest was briefly revived
when a series of seemingly inexplicable murders began to occur, which include a
shooting in an upstairs room when everyone else could be accounted for. Someone
else is strangled to death inside a locked bedroom. A potential suspect is
imprisoned in the library and the key is sealed away in a separate room, but
the murderer was still able to get to the wrongly accused man.
I was hoping these locked rooms would be
the books saving grace, but I couldn't have been farther from the truth. The
explanation for the locked rooms harkened back to one of the oldest tricks in
the book and it wasn't even done very well, which annoyed me even further and
it was the point that I really began to hate the book – luckily, I had already
arrived in the final pages of the book.
I really should end this review here, but
I want to share an alternative explanation for the impossible murders to finish
this review on a semi-positive note. There's also a reputation to maintain as
the blogosphere's resident locked room enthusiast. So here we go.
Well, what if the doors at Moon's End had
solid, wood-carved symbols embedded in them, such as a sun on the library door
and stars on the bedroom doors, which appeared tightly sunken into the middle
of the door, but could be taken out with a (special) nail, pen or stylus.
The murderer than could take aim through
the newly opened hole in the door and shoot at his victims, which would provide
the story with both a red herring and clue. There would be the acrid smell of
gun smoke inside the locked room, suggesting the murderer was inside, but one
of the trained detectives would notice the shots were very loud – perhaps too
loud if they came from behind closed doors inside a locked room. It would also
give the murderer more room and time to move around with less chance of being
discovered.
Anyhow, I probably have something a lot better for my next review.
