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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
WHO KILLED FRANCES RAYE?, November 26, 2000
Dr George Matthews, a psychiatrist, encounters a patient who claims he is paid by a leprechaun to wear a flower in his hair. Another, he claims, pays him to whistle at Carnegie Hall during performances. A third pays him to give quarters away. Jacob Blunt wants Dr Matthews to confirm that he's mad. Dr Matthews is curious, so he accompanies his patient to a rendezvous with one of the leprechauns. His name is Eustace and he isn't at all pleased to see the doctor. So begins the Deadly Percheron. After that it gets strange. First published in 1946 this unique murder mystery transcends the boundaries of the genre. It's noir, it's nightmarish, it's compulsive. John Franklin Bardin drags the reader into a world where the nature of identity is constantly questioned. Is our hero who he says he is? Can he be trusted? Is he, in fact, sane? Reality, as seen through his eyes, is a shifting kaleidoscope of memories. As the murders mount up the fragments of his shattered psyche are slotted together. Slowly reality stabilises. At the end of the novel, but only then, it all makes sense. Who killed Frances Raye? Well, now, let's start at the beginning..."Jacob Blunt was my last patient. He came into my office wearing a scarlet hibiscus in his curly blond hair. He sat down in the easy chair across from my desk, and said, "Doctor, I think I'm losing my mind.""
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
WHO KILLED FRANCES RAYE?, November 26, 2000
Dr George Matthews, a psychiatrist, encounters a patient who claims he is paid by a leprechaun to wear a flower in his hair. Another, he claims, pays him to whistle at Carnegie Hall during performances. A third pays him to give quarters away. Jacob Blunt wants Dr Matthews to confirm that he's mad. Dr Matthews is curious, so he accompanies his patient to a rendezvous with one of the leprechauns. His name is Eustace and he isn't at all pleased to see the doctor. So begins the Deadly Percheron. After that it gets strange. First published in 1946 this unique murder mystery transcends the boundaries of the genre. It's noir, it's nightmarish, it's compulsive. John Franklin Bardin drags the reader into a world where the nature of identity is constantly questioned. Is our hero who he says he is? Can he be trusted? Is he, in fact, sane? Reality, as seen through his eyes, is a shifting kaleidoscope of memories. As the murders mount up the fragments of his shattered psyche are slotted together. Slowly reality stabilises. At the end of the novel, but only then, it all makes sense. Who killed Frances Raye? Well, now, let's start at the beginning..."Jacob Blunt was my last patient. He came into my office wearing a scarlet hibiscus in his curly blond hair. He sat down in the easy chair across from my desk, and said, "Doctor, I think I'm losing my mind.""
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A horse of a different color, July 23, 2009
This review is from: The Deadly Percheron (Paperback)
John Franklin Bardin's 1946 novel shares most of its affinities with the genre of the noir novel (as perfected by writers like Cornel Woolrich or Dorothy B. Hughes), but it's something else besides... it starts out as a kind of humorous fantasy novel, much like something out of Thorne Smith, with a patient telling his psychiatrist three leprechauns pay him every day to complete different silly tasks such as wearing flowers in his hair. Then there's a murder, and then by the fourth chap[ter the novel starts all over again with the same narrator... who is being told he has a different name than he thought previously.
It would be wrong to give more away, but the whole work is certainly one of a kind, and partakes of many different genres and experiments greatly with the idea of an unreliable narrator (indeed, the great theme of the book is how much you can trust someone else's testimony). Its intriguing play with identity seems to anticipate later (and unfortunately better) books such as Patricia Highsmith's THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, and it certainly is a page turner. But it's ultimately not a very good book. There are too many murders, too many revelations that everything you'd been reading was not what you had thought it was; and the central intrigue that ties the whole plot together (and is of course only revealed at the end) is too outlandish. You can see why Millipede Press included it in its superb and beautifully bound re-issues of horror novels, but as fine as its aspirations are, it never really takes off to the level of a Highsmith or a Woolrich at their best.
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