macmillan e 349 (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Hardcover. 8vo. Published by Macmillan Company, New York, 1933. 278 pgs. First Edition/First Printing. DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine and front board. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. In his Foreword, Eden Phillpotts states that "while chance opens this story on the lines of the detective fiction of commerce, I would ask the reader to believe that character, not crime, inspires it. Character is destiny, and upon this text the trilogy, of which this is the first volume, has been composed." In other words, Phillpotts has written what Julian Symons would call a crime novel: a book which, while it may contain some detection, concentrates chiefly on the effects of the murder on the central characters in this case the murderers of Lawrence Bryden: his younger brother Peter and his fiancée, Avis Ullathorne (later Peter's wife). Inspector Midwinter (who appears in other novels by Phillpotts) suspects the pair from very early on, and the reader is aware of their guilt from the first chapter, so the interest of the book lies not in how they murdered Lawrence with arsenic, but in their psychology (what in their characters drove them to murder, and what, if anything, will lead to their undoing? ) and in Midwinter's gathering of evidence. To achieve his effect, Phillpotts alternates between a conversation between Peter and Avis revealing a part of their plot and, in the next chapter, Midwinter discovering it, so that Midwinter seems to be closing in on the guilty pair. While he tries to see each step of the case from the perspective of his quarry, Midwinter is unaware that Avis is able to step into the inspector's mind, understand his every move and so call his bluff, which results in his certainty of their guilty and his powerlessness to do anything about it. EB; 8vo 8" - 9" tall.