Review: The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry

The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry by Mary Roberts Rinehart
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I noticed a later book in the series on Project Gutenberg, and since Gutenberg didn't have the first one, I got a copy from archive.org instead. Be warned: the archive.org version is the raw scan right out of a poor-quality OCR program, has not been edited even a little bit or even spellchecked for the most blindingly obvious scan errors, and as a result is not at all recommended and borderline unreadable - though in most (not quite all) cases I could guess what a word was supposed to be despite the many distortions.

That may well have lowered my rating from what it otherwise would have been; it's maybe a three-star book, to be absolutely fair. According to Wikipedia, this series is comedy (though the author is mainly known for her murder mysteries), and that's why I picked it up; but what it turned out to be was a murder mystery, and not a good one. It kept me reading because I wanted to know the explanation for the bizarre series of events, but in the end, the explanation was completely absurd. Maybe that's meant to be the comedy, but if so, it didn't work for me. (view spoiler)[A zookeeper, injured by being squeezed - not bitten - by a great ape, is put in the hospital and becomes "demented" because of his injuries. This leads him, for no believable reason, to commit ape-like acts, mostly violent ones, with ape-like agility, after he escapes, by a means that's never explained, from his restraints. Because the nurse who was supposed to be looking after the ward wasn't where she was meant to be when he escaped, and because she's already on thin ice to graduate from the training course for nurses and needs the money to support a sick sister, she covers up his disappearance and fakes a discharge for him, while he hides in the building and causes mayhem and, eventually, murder. The nurse and, presumably, her sick sister somehow disappear after the mystery is revealed. (hide spoiler)]

There's a trio of unmarried women, middle-aged or older, at the centre of the story. The title character and main investigator, known as Tish, is stubborn and domineering; her friend Aggie is silly and neurotic; their friend Lizzie, who narrates most of the story before the narration switches to Tish's doctor nephew for some reason I've already forgotten, is sensible and otherwise rather characterless. None of them have much more depth than the descriptions I've just given. Possibly their characters and their interactions are meant to be the comedy, but if so, it still didn't work for me.

There's a half-hearted gesture in the direction of a romance subplot, between the doctor nephew and a nurse, but it doesn't receive any development to speak of.

Overall, it strikes me as half-baked, if that, and I couldn't find the comedy.

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