Review: The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye

The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye by Brian Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This author appears to have loaded a shotgun with punctuation and discharged it at close range into his manuscript. He should have included fewer dashes, fewer hyphens, fewer exclamation marks and a lot more commas (some of them in places that he uses dashes, some in places where he puts no punctuation at all). Proof, if it were needed, that some publishers a century ago sometimes put out badly edited work, just like many publishers today.

Neither the amateur detective nor the police inspector has a lot of personality, and I kept confusing them, because they both have names starting with B.

A bookie is introduced at one point as a minor character. Before we even meet him, the author alludes to his maid's appearance as indicating that she's Jewish. Then he similarly indicates that the bookie himself is Jewish. After that, he points out his Jewishness, and then after stereotyping him two or three times, concludes by making the point (in case you had missed it) that he's Jewish. If this isn't quite antisemitism, it's a close cousin to it, especially since his ethnic origin has nothing to do with anything.

The plot doesn't make a ton of sense. It's sometimes unclear which parts were coincidence and which parts were planning, especially since (view spoiler)[the murderer steals a suitcase from a luggage trolley at a hotel, possibly at random, so that the victim won't be identified immediately to give him time to do something I've forgotten, and registers the victim at a different hotel under the name of the suitcase's owner, who, as it happens, is acquainted with the victim, even though neither of them are anywhere near their hometown. The victim then apparently signs in under that name, which can't be accounted for by anything other than some prearrangement with her that the resolution of the plot never mentions and that isn't especially plausible (hide spoiler)]. The twist is unusual, but I don't think the author played very fair with the reader in leading up to it. And one of the two motives for the crime is muddied by a backstory that comes almost straight out of one of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

For me, it was a bit of a miss, and I won't be reading more from this author.

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