"Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments"

You have to pity the police who were called upon to solve this particular murder at the New York Museum of Natural History. The victim had been murdered with a good old fashioned "blunt instrument" - in a building with ten thousand potential blunt instruments hanging on the walls or otherwise on display. And that's just one of six fascinating stories on display in "Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments and Other Tales of Mystery," by Philip Wylie, a truly fine collection. It's the subject of today's review on our podcast, and you can listen to the full review here.

I remember reading Philip Wylie when I was growing up. He wrote in all different genres - fiction and non-fiction, screenplays, even some poetry. And he also wrote some first-rate mysteries - a fact which, I admit, I didn't know until Crippen & Landru published this terrific collection. Edited by Bill Pronzini, it contains six stories - no series characters here, just some incredibly well-written, suspenseful classic mysteries.

In addition to the title story, "Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments," the others cover a wide range of crimes and settings. For example, in one, "Murder at Galleon Key," a young man finds himself being framed for a murder - and must track down the truth in the midst of a violent hurricane in the Florida Keys. Another, "Death Whispers," is about a newspaper writer, temporarily blind after surgery, who overhears what he thinks is a murder in the next apartment - and finds himself grappling with a murderer he cannot see. "It Couldn't Be Murder" has an ingenious "impossible crime" plot. What all the stories have in common is memorable characters, finely detailed settings, and plenty of clues artfully given to the reader. Bill Pronzini's introduction provides useful and interesting background on a writer who isn't all that well remembered today - and deserves better.

As these stories were written and first published between 1931 and 1944, they qualify as part of the Vintage Mysteries Reading Challenge at the My Reader's Block blog. I hope you've been looking there to see what others are reading - there are some great (and, yes, unfamiliar) choices being made!

Comments

[Bev@ My Reader]

Oh, Les, you're dangling another hard-to-resist one in front of me. The title story sounds particularly interesting. It's been quite a while since I read anything by Wylie and then it was his When Worlds Collide science fiction stories. Until John at Pretty Sinister Books posted about one of the novels, I didn't even know that Wylie had written mysteries.