Customer Reviews

The Death of an Ardent Bibliophile

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Strikingly different in tone from all the other Peter McGarr mysteries, this novel may have been a Gill experiment in the blackest of black humor. It's a curiosity in the McGarr series, a wicked piece of work with some truly disgusting scenes, perhaps an attempt to mock the pseudo-realism of other mysteries and/or film, or, more likely, an attempt to imitate the dark satire of Jonathan Swift, whose work is featured throughout this novel about the murder of a man who regarded himself as the Dean's reincarnation.

In the opening scene McGarr arrives at the estate of B.H.P. Herrick, the keeper of Marsh's Library of antique manuscripts in Dublin, finding find him nude and six days dead. With a sort of ghoulish glee, Gill describes the macabre scene in minute detail, omitting none of the putrescent details. Herrick was in the midst of a Frollick, "inspired by Swift," a lurid carnal escapade in which Herrick quoted lines from Swift and which he videotaped, unwittingly recording his own agonizing death from poison.

I concede that the book is clever, in that it incorporates some serious literary criticism about Swift's work, some of it obscure, in addition to discussions of Gulliver, the Brobdingnagians, the Yahoos, and the Houyhnhnms, and it does illustrate how the main character surrounded himself with the modern incarnations of these Swiftian creatures. However, Gill's additional remarks about "excremental verse" and the Freudians, along with additional scenes of degradation, keep this grim and grisly little novel firmly mired in depths most readers do not expect of this series and will not want to explore. 1 star for subject matter, 2 stars for cleverness. Mary Whipple

The book opens with the detective, McGarr, being let into the murder house. A woman talks him through the house, chatting constantly without any interrogation. Arriving at the corpse, they stand about talking for another 10 pages about the dead man and her theory that he was stealing priceless books from the library where he worked. Although the author tells us the corpse is swollen and putrifying, our characters must have nerves and noses of steel. Later on, McGarr and his crew watch blue videos starring the late corpse. The chatty lady watches with them. (Is this typical of how Irish police operate? Hey - let's watch dirty movies with a witness!) This brings us up to about page 80. No other non-police character has appeared. Hmmm - wonder whodunnit? Well, if the novel doesn't succeed as a mystery or a police procedural, maybe it's full of Irish character and atmosphere. Oops - the author forgot to include them too! Most of the characters speak the way Americans expect the Irish to speak - they really aren't allowed to be human, just pleasant caricatures. The whole novel seems a lazy effort.