The Guilty Abroad

Rating:
Summary: The Guilty Abroad
Review: A decent, serviceable mystery, using Samuel Clemens as its detective--competing, actually, with Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard to solve the puzzle of a shooting at a seance.

The book spins its wheels in the first hundred pages or so, which is disappointing. Clemens and his employee/servant, the narrator, look like they are accomplishing something after the lights come on at a "sitting" (apparently the official name for a seance), and a well-known doctor is discovered with a bullet in his head, but really, but it's fair to say that the early sections just keep rehashing and reiterating the few scanty things already known. Characters, all of them, just keep pointing out the same details over and over again...which leads to another criticism: boy oh boy, is this book all talk! This novel is mainly dialogue, chat chat chat--take out what's in quotation marks and you would have a very thin book.

Characters yapping endlessly back and forth is a plague on the book throughout, but the second half is livelier and more expansive than what had preceded it. Clemens (he's Mark Twain too; you know that, right?--it's just that he's mostly refered to as Mr. Clemens in this book) does manage to get himself and his trusty servant, Wentworth, into some jeopardy in the later stages--both in a seedy bar where Nosey Parkers are apt to get stomped on, and at a shooting range where Clemens wants to see an airgun tested--it may be something like the strange flashless, noiseless weapon that might've used at the seance--only to have someone just off the perimeter of the range start shooting back!

I have to admit that I was interested in the book enough, as it warmed up, to start trying to come up with my own theory as to HOW the quasi locked-room murder was done, so that's a good sign. I was somewhat off the truth, naturally. And even though I do feel this book contains too much dialogue, and an opening that gets stuck in a rut for a while after the killing, I got happier as things went along, and characters stopped mulling over what we already knew, thank you. Characterization--mainly established through chatter, of course--is nicely handled; we have shady Ed McPhee, smarmy Cedric Villiers, our noble narrator (who proves to be quite loyal to Twain, when it comes to stepping into the path of danger and risking his own hide to protect "Mark Twain!), and the innocence of Twain's plucky young daughters, who insist on trying to help with the mystery.

Rating:
Summary: A lovely little book
Review: This latest in the "Mark Twain Mysteries" series may well be the best. Like the others, the mystery itself is secondary to the charm of the characters and the travelogue, but those are positive things and a recommendation.

This book is a must-read for fans of the real Mark Twain and for historical-mystery fans. Heck has done his homework.