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Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story (British Library Crime Classics)

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Of course it has a snow bound train, an abandoned house and a random bunch of strangers stranded together , intrigued? The story is a bit mystery, a bit thriller, a bit gothic, with locked rooms, disappearing clues, and deep snow banks.

It was fun to settle down with this atmospheric 1937 mystery and a cup of tea during a snowfall in New England yesterday. Farjeon is now best known as the author of Number Seventeen, a play that was adapted for the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock. More Deadly Than the Male: Martha Wicks, née Shaw, turns out to be considerably more ruthless than either her brother or husband. Several passengers take shelter in a deserted country house, where the fire has been lit and the table laid for tea—but no one is at home. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item.

Strange and his daughter reveal that the actual mystery is something completely unexpected and nothing really to do with all that came before. We're a very small team operating in an environment that is quite tough on independent publishers, so we're extremely proud of our sales figures: up 400 per cent in November on the previous year.

After this delightfully intriguing start, things get more and more puzzling for the trapped visitors. Imagine my delight when I received two British Classic Christmas Crime Mysteries from across the seas from a Tracey in the UK. It feels like an opportunity missed, as the main characters become reduced to the passive spectators they were first defined to be, accidental visitors who stumbled upon criminal doings that only involve them through propinquity. Will all the stranded passenger survive the experience and what about the owner of the house whose food and beds they are making free with? Trapped in the house is a neat group of characters: Jenny Noyes, a platinum blonde chorus girl; aristocratic (and argumentative) siblings David and Lydia Carrington; aspirational but fever-ravaged clerk Robert Thomson; elderly bore Mr.

One critic for the Saturday Review of Literature reviewed one of his later books writing that it was "amusing, satirical, and [a] frequently hair-raising yarn of an author who got dangerously mixed up with his imaginary characters. Hopelessly lost, they’re reunited when they all take refuge in Valley House, a dwelling where the kettle is boiling and the table hospitably set for tea even though the place is deserted. When deciding which two books to re-read this month, in keeping with my own personal challenge to re-read various vintage novels, this one seemed like a very appropriate candidate for December. It's not really a typical Golden Age Mystery in that you can't follow all the clues through to a solution but I think you just have to go with the flow and see where it takes you.

The highly successful reissue of this book in 2014 by the British Library initiated not just a series of classic-era crime reissues by the BL but a revival of interest in classic crime novels in general. This author was apparently a very successful member of that group, but I had never heard of nor read him before.

The character holding the mystery element of the story together relied a bit too much on info dumping in chunks and no puzzle fan will be impressed with the statement: ‘I am groping my way through sensations as well as known or deduced facts,’ nor ‘When you find the atmosphere facts resolve themselves inside it.

I loved this book, maybe it's just the right time of the year to read a snowbound mystery at Christmas but it was great! If the narrator had stuck to one voice it would have worked better for me but her male voices were very annoying.The psychic, Edward Maltby, decides to leave the train and attempt to find another station and he is soon followed by others from his train carriage. Her producer, her lover, the playwright for her next hit and her agent are all here, soon to become so many suspects when Tait is found murdered on a cold December morning in the lakeside pavilion. Attempts are made at trying to find a path out of the snowbound haven but these fail but on one of the excursions a lady and her father are discovered, having crashed their car into a ditch. As the conditions outside are worsening, to leave seems out of the question, so the party decides to make use of the food and shelter and offer to pay the mysterious owner whenever he or she turns up.

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