Emerald of Catherine the Great by Hilaire BellocMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
In the popular style of early-20th-century British humour, this book generates comedy largely by making its characters ridiculous, unpleasant, stupid, and venial, with the omniscient narrator pointing at them and encouraging the audience to laugh. That's not my favourite approach to comedy by a long way, hence the three-star rating.
It's a kind of parody of detective fiction, in which the reader (almost) always knows exactly what's happened, and the characters never put the full story together. It involves an heirloom jewel that is lost (not stolen at all) during a country house party; everyone who finds it, for their own reasons, pushes it off on someone else and then throws suspicion on that person, who then passes it on to the next person before they can be caught with it. This makes it also a kind of farce, I suppose.
It has the unusual distinction of having been illustrated by G.K. Chesterton, who has captured the different characters in caricature style.
I found it mildly amusing; other readers may like it a lot more than I did.
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