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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
EAN: 9780821717028
ISBN: 0821717022
Label: Zebra
Manufacturer: Zebra
Number Of Items: 1
Publication Date: 1986-05-01
Publisher: Zebra
Studio: Zebra

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Beautifully Written British Tennis Set Mystery!
Review: Carr is among the very top "Whodunnit" Authors of them all, and is always in top form. Here we have a classic love triangle, suspects arguing about how they'd like to "murder" someone after a rainy tennis match, and Carr's unmatched methods to do the dirty deed. Not to mention one of the more bizarre detectives , Dr Gideon Fell, social snobbery at its worst, a yahoo Texan at a circus full of acrobats. The killer is fairly easy to identify, and there's the usual red herrings thrown in, and the solution may be a bit unrealistic, but I've read many at least as zany! You just can't miss with the great John Dickson Carr!

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Problematic
Review: Dull and commonplace suburban setting with tennis court on which vicious Caligulan youth strangled, without any footprints left in the mud. Owing to singular paucity of suspects, reader should be able to spot villain without much difficulty, despite police suspicion of thick-headed hero and lover, who speaks nauseatingly of the victim's "poor old face." Solution is as impossible as the situation: not only difficult to visualise, but Frankly preposterous: would anyone be so stupid? Over-written and under-plotted: thick neurotic atmosphere in which emotions are as much strained to breaking point as the reader's patience; while lacking in the crucial complexity of the author at his best, who admitted "that book should have been a novelette." Too many theatre people, as bad as anything in Clayton Rawson, not enough of whom get murdered; and very little Dr. Fell, who acts badly out of character, gloating at the villain: "I now propose...to give myself the extreme pleasure of telling you where you get off... The gallows. They are going to hang you." The last words suggest a plea on the author's part: "He may, perhaps, be excused for not being up to his usual form." We won't.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Problematic
Review: Dull and commonplace suburban setting with tennis court on which vicious Caligulan youth strangled, without any footprints left in the mud. Owing to singular paucity of suspects, reader should be able to spot villain without much difficulty, despite police suspicion of thick-headed hero and lover, who speaks nauseatingly of the victim's "poor old face." Solution is as impossible as the situation: not only difficult to visualise, but Frankly preposterous: would anyone be so stupid? Over-written and under-plotted: thick neurotic atmosphere in which emotions are as much strained to breaking point as the reader's patience; while lacking in the crucial complexity of the author at his best, who admitted "that book should have been a novelette." Too many theatre people, as bad as anything in Clayton Rawson, not enough of whom get murdered; and very little Dr. Fell, who acts badly out of character, gloating at the villain: "I now propose...to give myself the extreme pleasure of telling you where you get off... The gallows. They are going to hang you." The last words suggest a plea on the author's part: "He may, perhaps, be excused for not being up to his usual form." We won't.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Problematic
Review: Dull and commonplace suburban setting with tennis court on which vicious Caligulan youth strangled, without any footprints left in the mud. Owing to singular paucity of suspects, reader should be able to spot villain without much difficulty, despite police suspicion of thick-headed hero and lover, who speaks nauseatingly of the victim's "poor old face." Solution is as impossible as the situation: not only difficult to visualise, but Frankly preposterous: would anyone be so stupid? Over-written and under-plotted: thick neurotic atmosphere in which emotions are as much strained to breaking point as the reader's patience; while lacking in the crucial complexity of the author at his best, who admitted "that book should have been a novelette." Too many theatre people, as bad as anything in Clayton Rawson, not enough of whom get murdered; and very little Dr. Fell, who acts badly out of character, gloating at the villain: "I now propose...to give myself the extreme pleasure of telling you where you get off... The gallows. They are going to hang you." The last words suggest a plea on the author's part: "He may, perhaps, be excused for not being up to his usual form." We won't.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Another impossible murder
Review: "The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939)" is the opposite of a locked-room mystery. In this book, a man is strangled to death on a sand tennis court. Only one set of footprints leads across the court--and they belong to the corpse.

Okay, whodunit? As usual in a 'Golden Age' mystery, there are lots of suspects and motives. The corpse was a particularly venomous sort of ladies man who never did an honest day's work. Everyone disliked him except for his adopted father, and that included his two discarded mistresses, his fiancée and the guy who keeps proposing marriage to her, and an acrobat.

Some of my favorite theories as presented by the various characters involved ice skates, sneaking up behind the victim by walking on one's hands, and making one's way to the middle of the court by creeping across the wire netting.

Then a second victim is murdered (taking out my favorite suspect), and Carr's gigantic Dr. Gideon Fell must clear up all of the false theories and discover the real murderer.

Carr plays fair with his readers. All of the clues needed to solve this mystery are presented, including (in my Bantam edition, at least) a diagram of the tennis court. The author demolishes the false theories with ponderous ease, including a hilarious passage where two well-meaning clue-hunters wreck several tennis courts by trying to prove that the murderer could have crept along the overhead netting. The solution involves a fairly complex set-up, but revolves around the particular relationship that the victim had with his murderer, so I don't think Carr was blind-siding his readers.

Although this author was an American most of his mysteries (including this one) are set in England. If you're a fan of the technical, or "Impossible! No one could have committed this murder!" mystery, "The Problem of the Wire Cage" should hold your interest through that proverbial rainy afternoon.

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