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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
He Fidgeted with a Piece of String....,
This review is from: The Old Man in the Corner: Twelve Mysteries (Paperback)
The late nineteenth and early twentienth century were a fecund period for classical mystery writers. Among the most popular was Baroness Emmuska Orczy.
Baroness Orczy, a Hungarian aristocrat, was best known for writing the Scarlet Pimpernel. In this collection we are introduced to a memorable character known as the Old Man. I must confess that some of the stories could be a tad too easy. This is not the fault of the author. Over the years a lot of copycats have imitated her plots, so reading them now, they may not seem as original or as challenging. Yet there is still much to appreciate in these short stories. The format is unique, with the cast at the beginning usually made up of the Old Man, the lady journalist, and the victims and perpetrators of the crime. No one has yet mentioned ordinary and mystery in the same sentence; and this one is no exception. We get the eccentric Old Man knotting his string, intimidating the lady with his analytical abilities, his dislike for the police and his empathy for the criminals. The baroness revels in disguises, eavesdropping, and mistaken witnesses---the stock-in-trade of a mystery writer. She establishes that simplicity and impossibility are synonymous, the apparent difference due to sagacity. The phrase 'The Old Man in the Corner' is a misnomer since the man takes the front seat at all trials, and does not hang in the corner except when explaining mysteries. The facts are not given to him by the journalist, though in deference to him, I admit he does no investigating of his own. Being in one place constrains the stories. They lack real drama, and are not as suspenseful as Christie or as elaborate as Doyle. However it takes nothing away from her pioneering effort in the mystery/detective field. If you have surfeited on Holmes and Poirot, you may try these twelve mysteries about the man spinning tales in the corner.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A DOZEN EXCELLENT FAIR-PLAY PUZZLE STORIES,
By
This review is from: The Old Man in the Corner: Twelve Mysteries (Paperback)
These twelve mysteries by Baroness Orczy are well written fair-play Puzzle stories which allow readers to test their wits against those of the strange old man who sits in the corner of a small restaurant, eating cheesecake, drinking milk, and compulsively tying and untying complex knots in a piece of string.
Readers need to be aware that this Dover book, edited by E. F. Bleiler, is NOT a reprint of the collection of Orczy's stories published with the same basic title in 1909. Instead, from a field of 38 stories featuring Orczy's amateur armchair detective, Bleiler selected six stories that had been included in her collection THE CASE OF MISS ELLIOTT (1905; twelve stories), five stories that had been included in her collection THE OLD MAN IN THE CORNER (1909; twelve stories), and one story ("The Glasgow Mystery") that was never included in any of her books, because it contained a major error pertaining to Scottish law. Bleiler considered the stories of her third old-man-in-the-corner collection, UNRAVELLED KNOTS (1925; thirteen stories), to be inferior, and he included none of those in his Dover edition. The mysteries in this book are titled "The Fenchurch Street Mystery," "The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway," "The Mysterious Death in Percy Street," "The Dublin Mystery," "The Glasgow Mystery," "The Liverpool Mystery," "The Case of Miss Elliott," "The Lisson Grove Mystery," "The Tragedy in Dartmoor Terrace," "The Tremarn Case," "The Murder of Miss Pebmarsh," and "The Affair at the Novelty Theatre." One of these cases concerns the theft of a large amount of cash, another concerns the theft of valuable pearls, and the remaining ten are murder cases. Be it known that the old man in the corner has no interest in helping to bring any criminals to justice; all of these stories could be called "crime without punishment" puzzles. As far as I can determine, the stories in this Dover book were reprinted from the texts found in THE ROYAL MAGAZINE, where they originally were published between 1901 and 1905. Furthermore, they seem to be arranged in the order of their magazine appearance, NOT in the order Orczy used in her own collections. All twelve of them are narrated by a young female journalist, who reports her conversations with the old man. Bleiler never mentions that Baroness Orczy, in her own collection titled THE OLD MAN IN THE CORNER (1909), revised the texts of the dozen stories she included--changing some of their titles, re-arranging the sequence, adding some new material, and converting the female journalist's first-person narration into third-person narration. For one thing, the sixth story to appear in a magazine--"The Mysterious Death in Percy Street"--was originally viewed by Orczy as her final mystery involving the female journalist and the old man in the corner. It ends in a way quite different from the first five stories: after the old man has provided his solution, the woman goes far beyond that and provides a shocking solution of her own--and without a word the old man leaves, and we are told that she "never set eyes on the man in the corner from that day to this." Orczy, when reprinting her stories in book form, placed this sixth story at the very end of her second collection, i.e., as the twenty-fourth story, to put a note of finality to the series, which she then thought she was done with.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A VERY EARLY ARMCHAIR DETECTIVE!,
By
This review is from: The Old Man in the Corner: Twelve Mysteries (Paperback)
THE STORIES ARE VERY GOOD. THE OLD MAN IN THE CORNER HEARS ABOUT THE DETAILS OF THE MYSTERY FROM A YOUR LADY REPORTER AND PROCEDES TO SOLVE IT. THE ONLY FAULT I FIND IN THIS BOOK IS THAT THERE AT LEAST ANOTHER 18 STORIES AND ARE NOT INPRINT.
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