
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Classic Edgar Wallace: an intriguing title, a clever villain with (for the time) state-of-the-art technology, a calmly determined police detective who ends up in deadly danger, an appealing couple who have Troubles, a secondary villain who is up to no good but charming (in a foreign way; foreigners are, of course, automatically suspect and a bit strange), blackmail, murder, faked suicide, financial skullduggery, the mysterious house of the title with its secret panels and tunnels and lifts, the search for a missing heir under an unusual will, it's all here.
The ending is a bit abrupt and doesn't fully resolve everything, but I don't think it absolutely needs to. It's a strong point at which to end.
Wallace wasn't always that strong on continuity in his more quickly-written books, and the opening chapter of this one seems to be contradicted in minor ways in subsequent chapters, but if you don't think about it too hard and just imagine the well-described characters and their conflicts, it's fine.
Wallace's solidly written pulp novels consistently hit the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list. They don't have the depth of reflection or emotion to take them up to Gold, but they seldom have serious enough faults to drop them into Bronze. They're reliably good for the genre, and if you're in the mood for a pulp adventure, not written to a formula or leaning too hard into the silly tropes, but definitely right in the middle of what a pulp adventure is, picking up a Wallace is a sound move.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment