Customer Reviews

The Problem of the Wire Cage

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939)" is the opposite of a locked-room mystery. In this book, a man is strangled to death on a sand tennis court. Only one set of footprints leads across the court--and they belong to the corpse.

Okay, whodunit? As usual in a 'Golden Age' mystery, there are lots of suspects and motives. The corpse was a particularly venomous sort of ladies man who never did an honest day's work. Everyone disliked him except for his adopted father, and that included his two discarded mistresses, his fiancée and the guy who keeps proposing marriage to her, and an acrobat.

Some of my favorite theories as presented by the various characters involved ice skates, sneaking up behind the victim by walking on one's hands, and making one's way to the middle of the court by creeping across the wire netting.

Then a second victim is murdered (taking out my favorite suspect), and Carr's gigantic Dr. Gideon Fell must clear up all of the false theories and discover the real murderer.

Carr plays fair with his readers. All of the clues needed to solve this mystery are presented, including (in my Bantam edition, at least) a diagram of the tennis court. The author demolishes the false theories with ponderous ease, including a hilarious passage where two well-meaning clue-hunters wreck several tennis courts by trying to prove that the murderer could have crept along the overhead netting. The solution involves a fairly complex set-up, but revolves around the particular relationship that the victim had with his murderer, so I don't think Carr was blind-siding his readers.

Although this author was an American most of his mysteries (including this one) are set in England. If you're a fan of the technical, or "Impossible! No one could have committed this murder!" mystery, "The Problem of the Wire Cage" should hold your interest through that proverbial rainy afternoon.

"The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939)" is the opposite of a locked-room mystery. In this book, a man is strangled to death on a sand tennis court. Only one set of footprints leads across the court--and they belong to the corpse.

Okay, whodunit? As usual in a 'Golden Age' mystery, there are lots of suspects and motives. The corpse was a particularly venomous sort of ladies man who never did an honest day's work. Everyone disliked him except for his adopted father, and that included his two discarded mistresses, his fiancée and the guy who keeps proposing marriage to her, and an acrobat.

Some of my favorite theories as presented by the various characters involved ice skates, sneaking up behind the victim by walking on one's hands, and making one's way to the middle of the court by creeping across the wire netting.

Then a second victim is murdered (taking out my favorite suspect), and Carr's gigantic Dr. Gideon Fell must clear up all of the false theories and discover the real murderer.

Carr plays fair with his readers. All of the clues needed to solve this mystery are presented, including (in my Bantam edition, at least) a diagram of the tennis court. The author demolishes the false theories with ponderous ease, including a hilarious passage where two well-meaning clue-hunters wreck several tennis courts by trying to prove that the murderer could have crept along the overhead netting. The solution involves a fairly complex set-up, but revolves around the particular relationship that the victim had with his murderer, so I don't think Carr was blind-siding his readers.

Although this author was an American most of his mysteries (including this one) are set in England. If you're a fan of the technical, or "Impossible! No one could have committed this murder!" mystery, "The Problem of the Wire Cage" should hold your interest through that proverbial rainy afternoon.