Now here's a book that really fulfills the need of a reader who loves Golden Age-style puzzle plots - even though it was written in 1983, much later than the Golden Age, which is generally defined as the years between the two World Wars. It manages to combine:
- A real puzzle - in fact, one of those marvelous English cryptic crosswords - which hides a disturbing message;
- An English country-house setting, on the Isle of Wight;
- A group of characters -all mystery authors, in fact - who share a number of habits and secrets;
- And, to be sure, some secrets that - in at least one character's mind - are worth killing for.
The book is called A Six-Letter Word for Death, by Patricia Moyes, first published in 1983. It's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you may listen to a more complete version of this review by clicking here.
The book begins on a hot summer day, when someone anonymously sends a home-made cryptic crossword to Chief Superintendent Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard. If you're not familiar with the rather fiendish brain-teasers involved in such puzzles, let me explain: in an American puzzle, you generally get a short, one or two word clue to fill a given number of blank spaces in the crossword diagram. You get that in a British puzzle too – but you also get a different way to find the solution which involves both a definition of the answer and some kind of wordplay – puns, for example, or anagrams, or obscure quotes. I haven't done one for too many years, but they were (and, I believe, still are) wonderful exercise for tired minds.
At any rate, the puzzle (along with a few of the answers) received by Tibbett prove to be only the first clues to what appears to be a tantalizing mystery. He discovers that most of the answers resolve themselves into names – and a little research finds that most of the names belong to people who have been involved in cases where someone has died under what might be called suspicious circumstances. When Henry manages to trace the letter – and the puzzle which accompanies it – back to its source, he will find that it came to him from a group of very successful mystery writers who call themselves “the Guess Who Club.” All of them jealously guard the secret of their pen names and clearly value that secrecy. Henry is invited to a weekend with the club’s members and discovers there are a great many more secrets involved here than just the real names of the authors – including some deadly ones.
If you enjoy mysteries where the plot is full of twists and surprises and the character list full of interesting suspects, you really need to meet Superintendent Tibbett (and his wife, Emmy) and their creator, Patricia Moyes. A Six-Letter Word for Death is a very good way to meet them.
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