Wicked Uncle: A Miss Silver Mystery [Paperback]

Patricia Wentworth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1993

When the menacing Gregory Porlock invites a group of unacquainted friends to his home, the house party takes on a sinister edge. The host himself is stabbed in the back, and it becomes clear to all that he was a blackmailer. But which of his unfortunate comrades would have thrust the fatal knife is up to Miss Silver to discover. Only she can see through the lies and motives, the clues and questions, to determine which guest made certain the party was over.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'You can't go wrong with Miss Maud Silver.' -- The Observer 'Miss Silver has her place in detective fiction as surely as Lord Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot' -- Manchester Evening News 'Miss Wentworth is a first-rate storyteller' -- Daily Telegraph 'Miss Wentworth's plot is ingenious, her characterization acute, her solution satisfying' -- Scotsman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 277 pages
• Publisher: HarperPerennial (April 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060923628
• ISBN-13: 978-0060923624
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,351,953 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars He Could Have Used a Copy of Blackmailing for Dummies, August 16, 2004

By 

Sires "I enjoy mysteries, historical and proc... (Chesapeake, OH, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wicked Uncle (Mass Market Paperback)

This book is really a 3 but I gave it a 4 because I had so much fun with it in a nonlinear way. A blackmailer (no surprise, revealed early on) has a houseparty and in the great British spirit of hospitality invites a houseful of people he is either currently blackmailing or plans to blackmail during the weekend.

Schedule:

8 am Breakfast kippers
9 am Blackmail
10 am walk in garden
11 am Blackmail
12 pm Tennis and blackmail
1 pm Lunch watercress sandwiches
2 pm spot of blackmail
3 pm blackmailing for extra credit
4 pm tea with crumpets and blackmail

Anyway, guess who gets stabbed during a rousing game of charades?

And guess who did it? The police can't. So they have to bring in Miss Silver who spouts Tennyson and knits an infant's vest out of fluffy pink yarn before solving the case.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Miss Silver, May 13, 2009

By 

Anna "'peace n joy'" (FL, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wicked Uncle: A Miss Silver Mystery (Paperback)

Great, as always, is Miss Silver by Patricia Wentworth. This one is the most 'romantic' of all her mysteries I have read so far, but about halfway through, the storyline feels more like a Miss Silver mystery again! Great read-hard to put these down.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars WICKED UNCLE - a.k.a. SPOTLIGHT, but not a bright spot in Miss Silver's career, September 17, 2006

By 

Michele L. Worley (Kingdom of the Mouse, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wicked Uncle (Mass Market Paperback)

"[Aunt Mary] had a complex about men...The Wicked Uncle really was an uncommonly bad lot. He used to go off and run riot, and then come back, take anything she'd got, and go off again."
"There's a Married Woman's Property Act. Why did she let him?"
"Well, she told me about that when she was quite ill. I think she was a bit wandery and didn't quite know what she was saying, but she meant it all right. She said, 'Don't ever get married, Dorinda. It's just giving a man the power to wring your heart.' And another time...she said in a dreadfully bitter voice, 'He had what they call charm. And he'd take anyone's last drop of blood and their last penny and laugh.'"
- Dorinda Brown to her cousin Justin Leigh, when asked whether her aunt ever told her how to handle proposals

WICKED UNCLE, while it turns upon the gentleman in question, has a somewhat misleading title - his niece Dorinda hasn't seen him since she was a little girl, and while he indirectly affected her a great deal through the aunt who brought her up, the uncle/niece relationship has little to do directly with her life - except that she knows him by sight and by his original name, which (in his current career as a blackmailer) strikes him as a minor inconvenience. Dorinda hasn't even suffered visible emotional damage; in fact, her most memorable characteristic is her unusually cheerful disposition and good temper.

After introducing us to Dorinda, who has just landed a job as a rich woman's "secretary" - really more a companion to Linnet Oakley, a fluttery type who's too "fragile" to do any work - and establishing that Dorinda and her sophisticated cousin Justin have the makings of a romance between them, the book moves on to introduce the Wicked Uncle himself: Gregory Porlock, formerly Glen Porteous, a society blackmailer busily arranging a country house party made up of a new crop of victims. Among them is Dorinda's new employer, and in a rather clumsy bit of plotting, Porlock first goes out of his way to arrange for Dorinda to be added to the house party, while amusing himself by arranging for her to be framed for shoplifting (thus ensuring that she won't actually be able to attend the gathering). Enter Miss Silver as deus ex machina, as she witnesses the botched frame-up and intervenes on Dorinda's behalf (and lays a little groundwork for Dorinda to think of calling her in later, when a murder investigation develops).

Apart from that incident, the first half of the book mainly consists of Porlock's arrangements for his guest list - a series of telephone conversations and occasional face-to-face meetings that introduce the suspects-to-be to the reader along with the material for blackmail. Each is an interesting little story in itself, from Moira Lane - a society beauty who likes living high without anything to live on, and a sometime flame of Justin's - to a professional entertainer guilty of treason during WWII, not long over at the beginning of the story.

Unsurprisingly, by the end of the first evening's party games, Porlock lies dead with a knife in his back - the luminous paint used during one of the games having marked him out nicely in the dark for the murderer (and supplying the book's alternate title, SPOTLIGHT).

While I enjoy the book for the sake of some of the individual characters' stories, I have to say that it strikes me as flawed. The long series of blackmail approaches at the beginning of the book eliminate most of the need for an inquiry for both readers and the investigators in the story, thanks to an eavesdropping member of Porlock's household. None of the romantic leads is ever considered as a suspect, even though at least one has a substantial motive that merited investigation. Taken together with the fact that the first victim (the Wicked Uncle himself, obviously) is completely unsympathetic, readers aren't especially desperate to see the killer brought to justice. Most but not all of the individual blackmail scandals are resolved, one way or another, but we aren't made to care enough about most of the victims to have a stake in seeing them all sorted out except for curiosity's sake.