Customer Reviews

The Death of an Ardent Bibliophile: A Peter McGarr Mystery

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I read this book of Bartholomew Gill's without making reference to the reviews on this page. I am glad I did. Unlike the one review to be found here, I found this book to be great fun. What I find to be the strongest feature of Gill's writing is the way he presents his regular cast of characters. I really care about all of them a great deal. So while the mystery is fun, what really matters is to watch these characters in their interplay with each other and with the possible killers. The deceased deserved his untimely death and it does not really matter so much how he died. I was glad to see him gone. But the solving of the mystery and how that solution impacts of Peter McGarr and his co-workers is great fun. I have come late to the works of Bartholomew Gill and am going through them one at a time. "Death of a Joyce Scholar" is the one that I recommend to people the most so far, but "Ardent Bibiophile" will now be on this list. If you like Gill, this one will definitely not disappoint.

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