A word of social advice, gained through reading Golden Age accounts of glamorous (if deadly) weekend house parties at country estates: if your host, who is recognized as an expert in precious jewels, invites you for a weekend party, and just happens to ask you to be sure to bring along your most valuable stones for him to examine, you might want to think twice about accepting the invitation. That's one of the lessons readers could draw from Alan Melville's 1934 thriller, Weekend at Thrackley. That is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you are welcome to listen to the complete review by clicking here.
The British Library has been reprinting several books by Alan Melville, who is remembered in his native U.K. primarily as a presenter on television. He also wrote several crime novels, the first of which was Weekend at Thrackley, which is primarily a thriller in the style of, say, Edgar Wallace. It is being reissued in August as one of the British Library Crime Classics series, which is published in the United States by Poisoned Pen Press, which made a copy of the book available to me for this review.
Weekend at Thrackley begins when a young man named Jim Henderson receives a surprising invitation from jewel expert Edwin Carson, who claims to have been a good friend of Jim's late father and would like to meet Jim. Jim knows nothing about Carson, and he certainly has no jewels, but he decides to accept the invitation anyway. Jim, after all, came out of the first world war with no marketable skills worth mentioning, and, at the time of Carson's invitation, hadn't worked in three years. He liked the idea of a party, with plenty of food, for a long weekend.
The party takes place at Thrackley, an incredibly gloomy old house where the rather sinister Mr. Carson lives. There are some servants, particularly the ill-favored and ill-tempered butler, Jacobson, and there are five guests besides Jim who arrive bearing a great deal of fabulously expensive jewelry. Readers are unlikely to be surprised when it becomes evident - especially to Jim - that someone has sinister designs on all that jewelry. There will, most certainly, be murder done.
Melville keeps the action moving, and there are all sorts of interesting plot twists – secret rooms, murderous devices, gunplay, chases, disappearances and kidnappings – all the things you might expect to find in a good thriller from the period. As with most thrillers, the reader’s enjoyment comes from being surprised by the unexpected twists and turns, so you'll find plenty of them. As usual in this series of reprints, mystery historian Martin Edwards provides us with an introduction to Weekend at Thrackley that gives us more information about Alan Melville’s very interesting career. If you enjoy early thrillers of the kind that Edgar Wallace used to write, you’ll very likely enjoy Weekend at Thrackley.
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