The Case of the Missing Bronte [Mass Market Paperback]

Robert Barnard (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Dell (1986)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B002QLHL2Q
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Perry Trethowan is as interesting as the cases he cracks, June 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Case of the Missing Bronte (Crime, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

I met Robert Barnard in Yorkshire this summer in his role as the president of the Bronte Society. He told me of "The Case of the Missing Bronte" and described it as "an awful book," and said only the Brontesque lines with which he closes the work were really good. I picked it up and was surprised. While uneven in plot development, The Case of the Missing Bronte is rich in its characters -- only in the case of the Rev. Amos Macklehose does he lapse into caricature -- and Perry Trethowan's sometimes hilarious private observations -- "I ws even grumpier after we had stopped for twenty minutes for Jan to write postcards and Daniel to eat something fluorescent on a strick" -- keep the book moving. This is not Barnard's best book. It is also, its author's modesty notwithstanding, nothing approaching an "awful" book and no serious reader of Barnard would dare miss the book that reflects the origins of his interest in literature: the work of Emily Bronte.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Barnard Hits A Triple on This One, September 9, 2008

By 

John F. Rooney - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Case of the Missing Bronte (Crime, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

Brilliant, witty, verbal caricaturist Robert Barnard can't hit a homerun every time he comes up to bat. He's my favorite British mystery writer; I've read all forty of his gems, but this one does not rank among his best. Whenever certain crime novelists introduce thugs or gangsters into their books, the story becomes less interesting, less authentic because it's more fascinating to follow the felonies of supposedly law-abiding citizens. The criminal classes provide an easy way out because they murder for a living while the amateurs confound the police with their more devious motives and methods.

This book is less concerned with murder, and is more concerned with the violent beatings sustained by ordinary folk involved in the discovery of a previously unknown Brontė work. It starts in a pub when a little old lady approaches big and burly Scotland Yard Superintendent Perry Trethowan, Barnard's sometime series copper, and his wife Jan with a piece of old paper that has handwriting eerily resembling that of the Brontės. In the book the manuscript really gets around as we follow the misdeeds of greedy collector-villains and the hired goons.

Barnard is as funny as ever with his assembled cast of oddballs and his Yorkshire on wry cracks. He has a keen insight into what makes English society click, its quirky little cul de sacs of human behavior. Eccentrics are strewn all over his landscape. He sprinkles scorn on humbugs. A quote: "Politician's blather is to impress, suspects' blather is to gain time."

He has in this book, some satiric, nasty, devastating critiques of people and institutions, British education, and society in general.

Barnard can never really disappoint me. His stories are well-paced with his engaging characters and intriguing plots. You glide through his books awaiting his assorted nut cases and funny asides. Individual scenes such as the one in the tabernacle are superbly imagined.

4.0 out of 5 stars Funny, September 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Case of the Missing Bronte (Crime, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

Real funny, if your were to read any of his books the humour in them is bound to attract the reader's attention, the suspence is nothing to write home about and lacks the class and elan of Gardner.