The Grey Room [Paperback]

Eden Phillpotts (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2003

Subjects: Fiction Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: IndyPublish.com (June 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1404365613
• ISBN-13: 978-1404365612
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,620,892 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Grey Room, November 21, 2007

By 

D. Robertson (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Grey Room (Paperback)

Eden Phillpotts greatly influenced the writings of Agatha Christie, so if you like her work, you should find Phillpotts' work interesting. The Grey Room takes place at a manor house on Dartmoor. The beginning paragraphs paint the scene beautifully, but, like most British mysteries, the plot and character development are the be-all and end-all of this novel. Slower and dryer than Christie, but an intriguing story. This edition does not identify the fact that The Grey Room was a serial publication and dates to 1920. It was in The Popular Magazine originally.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Marginal Recommendation, August 7, 2005

By 

Ron "[e-mail]" (Whidbey Island, WA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Grey Room (Paperback)

The Plot: During a 1920's house party at the ancestral estate of Sir Walter Lennox, the sordid reputation of the unused Grey Room is a topic of discussion. An ancestor of Sir Walter's died in the room under mysterious circumstances -- although she was in her 80's so how mysterious is that? Years later a robust young woman meets a similar fate, being found in the morning looking peacefully from bed with dead eyes. To debunk the myth one of the house party connives to sleep in the room, and a repetition of the previous death occurs. Sir Walter's nephew talks him into hiring a detective to uncover the truth. But before the truth comes to light a number of other deaths occur.

A Review: I enjoy mysteries with a supernatural twist, so I did enjoy reading this obscure book. The ending was a bit of a let-down, but not unexpectedly. The writing style is pleasant, although there is way too much of dinner conversations that drone on for pages, mostly filled with speculations about the "here-after" and lots of religious clap-trap, since one of the characters is a parson. It's easy to skip over these parts and just read the meat of the story without missing anything.

A note: While I appreciate being able to find this book as reprinted by Kessinger Publishing (other editions I found online from antiquarian booksellers were way too expensive), I am disappointed in the bare-bones presentation. There is no modern introduction to the novel, and not even an original date of publication. In addition, the typesetting is pretty sloppy. There were numerous typos -- many of them where a small u was replaced with a small n, and vice-versa.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Silly but somewhat interesting, October 20, 2010

By 

sulymo "sulymo" (St Louis County MO) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Grey Room (Kindle Edition)

I got this free at the Amazon Kindle bookstore. It is definitely a period piece with a setting in an English country house. The cast of characters could have been assembled by Wodehouse, but they aren't funny and the book isn't remotely like any Blandings Castle book you may have read. This is an old fashioned mystery which I did keep reading because I wondered how the mystery would be solved. However I found some herky jerky scene shifts annoying. Occasionally the author engaged in lyrical descriptive passages, and it is a shame there isn't more of this fine writing in the book! There is a missing portions toward the end of the book. The characters are cardboard, there is an awfully lot of confidence in the police, and assumptions just stand there looking stupid. What I found most interesting were the conversations between characters, cardboardy as they were, which told of issues and revealed what people probably were thinking around 1920 in England, especially if they were upper class. I can't recommend this, but it is a harmless diversion and it is free.