| Title | : | The Man Who Didnt Fly |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0745186246 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780745186245 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 190 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1955 |
| Awards | : | Edgar Award Best Novel (1957) |
Who was the man who didn’t fly? What did he have to gain? And would he commit such an explosive murder to get it? First published in 1955, Bennett’s ingenious mystery remains an innovative and thoroughly entertaining inversion of the classic whodunit.
The Man Who Didnt Fly Reviews
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My goodness, this was tedious. Four days to read a book with fewer than 300 pages.
To be sure there's a good mystery in this story. A flight to Dublin is chartered to fly four men. It takes off and unfortunately goes down into the ocean in a ball of flames. It's then realized that only three men flew and the question becomes the identity of the man who didn't fly. It's complicated by not being sure which men were on the flight and that is the line of investigation that Inspector Lewis and Sargeant Young tackle by interviewing the Wade family.
Mr. Wade has two daughters, Hester a medical school student home between term and teenager Prudence. All four men had interactions with the family in the days leading up to the plane crash and recollections of that time are instrumental in the solution. And this is what the main of the story and where the central mystery is weighed down and practically crushed. It's circuitous in the details extracted and yes, it feels like Lewis is pulling teeth with the Wades. Often I wondered if they were really interested in finding out the truth which was a bit strange because Hester and Prudence had romantic interest in some of the men. It felt like a stalling tactic with all their soppy melodrama and was very irritating. Hester in particular came across as completely silly and I stopped believing her to be a medical student. Prudence was similarly plagued but being an overly romantic teenager, it tracked. Mr. Wade, I just felt bad for him as his business ambition far exceeded his abilities. Money practically fled from this man and I was glad he got a bit of a reprieve by the end of having a large portion of his remaining nest egg salvaged staving off penury.
I thought the characterization of the four men was uneven, with two portrayed more vividly and the remaining two sort of disappearing in distinction for their flatness. There's one other man who appears, Marryatt, who scowls, blusters and bullies about so much as the Inspector and Sargeant are wrapping things up that I was shocked in the conclusion when he's offered as a romantic win for Hester. Just no. There's a jewellery theft connected here as well and an opera. In the final analysis, the solution was done well enough but it was overall crushed by the weight of tiresome characters and their melodrama.
I will of course continue reading the British Library Classic Crime reissues. The forward by Martin Edwards was of course, wonderful and had me adding Margot Bennett's science fiction novels,
The Long Way Back and
The Furious Masters to my TBR.
And while this was just an okay read for me, I have to give Bennett her turn of phrase here. I have some favourite lines:
The amusing quotes:
"...He always seemed healthy and almost aggressively clean." She looked at the two detectives, who were brushed, scrubbed, shaved, creased, and shining, as if they had been preparing for inspection by Royalty."
"He looks like the kind of man who's been spoilt by his mother and kicked out by his father.
She was sixteen, not at all shy in her assumption that she had the solution to all human problem; and she added to this common adolescent feature a frightening competence.
He certainly deserved a good dinner, Hester thought, but it was a pity that good dinners involved cutting up so many things into such small pieces.
There's no satisfaction in throwing some fish into a frying pan. If a meal can't be a poem, it isn't worth cooking.
The "Eff that guy!" quotes:
"I remember having a financial crisis in Persia. I left it with forty-two thousand owing. I paid back every penny, except what I owed the Persians. Money! I never think of it."
"Do you know, I did rather like South Africa," Maurice said easily. "I haven't been there for years- I know they have their racial troubles, very regrettable. I couldn't approve less, but perhaps it was the tension that made it seem so exciting. It's like a game of chess, you know- White to play and mate in three moves- but Black has most of the pieces."
The "Just because it's cynical doesn't make it untrue" quote:
"People fall in love and they die, and no amount of poetic advice has ever helped them to do either of those things more successfully. They are interested in love for a few years, and later they are afraid of death. But they are always interested in money. Everyone, everywhere is interested in money all the time. There's never been an age when people agreed so heartily to be interested all at once in the same thing." -
A puzzling mystery…
A plane crashes en route to Dublin. Four men were supposed to have been going on the trip, but only three boarded the plane. There were no survivors and no bodies have been found. The first problem is that no one knows which of the four men is the one who is, presumably, still alive. The second problem is that he hasn’t turned up, explaining why he missed the flight. Inspector Lewis and his assistant, Sergeant Young, have to backtrack through the last day or two to see if they can identify the man who didn’t fly, and find out why he has disappeared…
This is a very odd crime novel. I assumed the crime would be that the plane had been deliberately destroyed, meaning that the pilot and passengers had been murdered. But this idea never seems to feature much. Maybe back in the 1950s, planes were always falling out of the sky en route to Dublin so it didn’t seem so suspicious? Instead, Lewis and Young seem to be merely trying to identify the dead and the living, for the sake of the inquests. And yet I couldn’t quite swallow the idea that two relatively high-level officers would be assigned to such a task. Fortunately, however, it soon transpires that all four of the men had secrets, so the lack of an obvious crime soon fades into the background as the investigation begins to centre on what they’d all been up to in the days before the flight.
Some of the early part follows the usual detective story format of Lewis questioning locals, but soon he hones in on the Wade family, who seem to have had connections with all four of the men. From then on it’s told partly through members of the family giving their recollections, mixed with a straight third-person narrative of what they’re telling. Again odd, but it does work eventually, after a rather slow and confusing start. Mostly we see the action from the perspective of Hester, the older of Mr Wade’s two daughters. She’s a sensible young woman, who is worried that her father seems bent on speculating with his small remaining fortune on the advice of one of the plane’s passengers. Another is the Wade’s lodger, a strange, nervous man who seems almost paranoid at times. A third man is a neighbour and long-time friend of the family. And the fourth is Harry, a ne’er-do-well with poetical aspirations, with whom young Hester is beginning to fancy herself in love. So the family is as keen to know who has survived as the police are, and readily co-operate in telling all they know of the days leading up to the crash.
The basis for the plot is all a bit silly really, and not terribly credible. But the actual plotting of the mystery element is excellent – it’s a real puzzle, based on clues and logic and elimination. The reader has as much chance as the police to work out the identities of the men on the basis of the clues given. Needless to say, I didn’t, although some parts of the story were easier to guess at than others. The characterisation is a bit contrived to serve the plot, and I must admit it took me ages before I could tell most of the missing men apart without checking back each time to remind myself which was which. Harry the poet and the Wade family members are much better drawn, especially Hester, who provides a rare character to care about amidst the many unlikeable and unscrupulous people in the cast.
Overall, I have rather mixed feelings about it. I enjoyed the second half much more than the first, and suspect it would greatly appeal to people who enjoy the challenge of a clue-based logic puzzle. It’s not quite as successful in terms of character and motive, but these aspects are still strong enough to give an enjoyable background for the puzzle elements. One for the mind rather than the emotions, I think.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, the British Library.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com -
I honestly have not the slightest clue what I have just read, and that's not for lack of trying. I know that sometimes books written this long ago require more concentration on my part to follow the plot, because the language usage is not quite what I'm used to, and given the accolades on the back of the copy I have, I really wanted to at least understand what was going on.
It's a very different type of story - finding out which man didn't fly being central to the story - and okay, it initially looked like something fairly promising as even the introduction was not what I had expected from the title. I thought "the man who didn't fly" referred to someone who, as a matter of principle, didn't fly, rather than a man who simply was not on board this particular flight (I received this book as a gift, and had not read the blurb before). That was a good start, throwing the unexpected my way almost immediately.
Once the premise was established, I was initially of the impression that . Much of the book is instead devoted to the officers going around speaking to people, most prominently the Wade family (who seem to have something to do with each of the men who could be the one that didn't fly). The conversation rewinds to the two days before the flight and takes the reader through what the men did during those two days, revealing - surprise surprise! - that each of the men had secrets of their own. "Conversation" is also a rather generous term to use to describe what went on, as everyone seemed incredibly chatty for a book character, and there was a lot of what felt like monologuing as what one character said (in response to another) didn't always relate to the point of the original speaker. It didn't help in the slightest that all the characters felt incredibly one-dimensional, and I reached a point where I struggled to distinguish who was who.
By the time we got to the day before the flight (maybe two-thirds way through), this was starting to read more and more like a "what happened in this peaceful little village" type of general fiction book rather than a crime/mystery. I think the example quote on Goodreads is fairly representative of the book as a whole: Super long, goes around and around in circles to the extent that it wasn't clear any more what was important and what was not. I read till the end just to see how it would end, as it was a relatively short book, and wasn't really surprised myself when I ended it with a shrug and an "oh, okay".
I appreciate the efforts of the British Library to put together this collection of stories, and have discovered many delights that I otherwise would probably not have picked up. But they do tend to be quite hit-and-miss, with this one in particular a solid miss. 1.5 stars, 2 on Goodreads on the account of finishing. -
Scottish author Margot Bennett was born in 1912 and worked first first as a copywriter in the UK and Australia and then as a nurse during the Spanish Civil War before turning to writing. Her output in crime fiction was relatively small, yet successful: The Man Who Didn't Fly was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger and was runner-up to Charlotte Armstrong's A Dram of Poison for Best Novel at the Edgars in 1956, and she won the Gold Dagger two years later in 1958 with Someone from the Past. She was also chosen to contribute a short story to the second CWA anthology, Choice Of Weapons, edited by Michael Gilbert.
But thereafter, a bit of mystery regarding Bennett herself began. She essentially stopped writing crime fiction, something discussed by Martin Edwards both on his blog and in the foreword he wrote for the Black Dagger Crime Series edition of The Man Who Didn't Fly. Bennett only wrote for television for awhile—including the early 60s UK adaptation of the Maigret novels by Simenon—with the exception of two non-mystery books (one of which had the intriguing title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Atomic Radiation), before abandoning writing altogether in 1966. She died in 1980 at the age of 68.
In The Man Who Didn't Fly, four men are scheduled to take an ill-fated chartered flight to Dublin that crashes into the Irish Channel. Although the bodies can't be recovered, it becomes evident that only three men were on board the plane, yet all four are reported as missing. Inspector Lewis and Sergeant Young have their work count out for them trying to coax clues out of unreliable witnesses including the Wade family, Charles and his daughters Hester and Prudence.
The lives of the Wades intersected with all four of the missing men: Harry Walters, a desperate poet, who was in love with Hester Wade; Joseph Ferguson, a businessman who wife was more interested in Harry; Morgan Price, a nervous guest of the Wades; and Maurice Reid, something of a family friend. Slowly but surely, Lewis and Young piece together the details of the days leading up to the flight, finally uncovering the name of the missing man. But that just sets up a new problem: what happened to him and why?
Bennett's artful plotting was enough to capture the attention of the producers of NBC's Kraft Television Theater who created an episode in 1958 based on The Man Who Didn't Fly starring then 27-year-old William Shatner, Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith of Lost in Space) and Walter Brooke (guest star in just about all TV series in the 60s, 70s, and 80s). The book was also chosen by Julian Symons as part of his 1958 "100 Best Crime Stories" for the London Sunday Times. -
While reading this novel, I really tried to remember the time frame of when it was written and set. At the beginning I thought oh, what fun...but then it meandered with accounts and conversations that were so boring. The characters were very one dimensional and the females, I can't believe I'm saying this, seemed hysterical. I had to check again that a female wrote this book. I never really understood this description...but maybe it only seemed this way because of the endless dialogue and the characters not written to much depth.
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One of the craziest books I've ever read. I hated every page of it. I can't imagine how it ever got past a publisher.
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Dame Agatha Christie and Her Peers
An intro by Martin Edwards tells us this novel (1955) was nominated for a Gold Dagger Award AND across the pond an Edgar Award, then went unpublished for decades. Imagine, also in 1955, Highsmith's sensational "Talented Mr. Ripley" went relatively unnoticed*. AND, Christie's "Hickory Dickory Death" (yes, 1955) was nominated for nothing but has never been out of print!**
Cast - 2 stars: Dry except for young thief Jackie, but he's only around for a few pages.
Atmosphere - 1 star: Dry. Surprisingly so.
Plot - 3: Four men charter a plane which crashes. One man doesn't board. Interesting!
Investigation - 1 star: 200+ pages of...chatting about poems and cooking and crushes...
Resolution - 1 star: ....but what about Jackie and....oh never mind.
Summary - 1.6 stars: This is a logic problem (Harry was not in Africa, Morgan smoked, Maurice likes whiskey) you might find in a puzzle magazine but stretched out into a novel. Solid idea poorly executed.
*Wow, how times change!
**A LOT! -
A very British mystery, concerning which out of four men did not make it on to a plane which crashed, leaving three passengers dead. Meandering, well written and a believable conclusion. I enjoyed this.
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If Lewis Carroll and O. Henry had collaborated on a mystery novel this might be it. It had one-dimensional characters, silly dialogue and two of the dumbest females anyone ever came up with. (Hester is on vacation from medical school and I wouldn't let her tie my shoes she was so ditzy.) The mystery doesn't start to gel until the very end and by that point I just didn't care about any of it. The cover, which was sadly the best part of the book, along with my misreading of the blurb, led me to believe it was post-war espionage with a great ending. Those letters on the airplane wing are code for "don't even bother."
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Quixotic imaginative thriller. Well written and original. Good read and hats off to those who brought this 1955 whodunnit out of retirement...came close to winning the inaugural Gold Dagger award. Martin Edwards comments wryly this is the second time he has written an introduction for a reprint of the book...may there be a third and a fourth as it is worthy of it. As he remarks it is a shame Margot Bennett's output was limited as she found screenwriting more lucrative for she had a sublime talent.
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For my full review click on the link below:
https://crossexaminingcrime.wordpress... -
Closer to 2.5. I wanted to like it more, and I'm glad I was not the only one confused by the plotting and the misleading premise.
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I just could not get into this one. The story premise sounded good, but the writing was quite boring and the dialog and interactions between the characters was often annoying. Much of the time, it seemed like characters popped up that we were supposed to know with little introduction. Maybe I was so bored that I missed specifics, but I couldn't bear to read anymore and just skimmed the solution at the end.
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3.5 stars. While I enjoyed the writing quite a bit, there's a lot of talking. The mystery itself is kind of unusual and if you are looking for a thriller, or even some action, look somewhere else. But it was engaging as an audiobook, and I might try another from Bennett someday.
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Was leuk boekie maar zat niet veel sfeer in het verhaal voor de rest wel spannend.
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I think I was anticipating a weightier matter to be the driving factor at the core of this mystery, there wasn’t one; and, the reveal was pretty disappointing.
The narrator helped hold my interest and I thought he did a good job with the Aussie bloke. -
Very amusing.
A weird mixture of Virginia Woolf and Stella Gibbons in style. After a while I found this book quite pleasing,like vague memories of books I read in holiday houses on rainy days, when young. -
Very different. Enjoyed it.
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Weird. Very weird.
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Curious mish-mash: lame romance overwhelms an intriguing mystery framing device.
I finished it, but it felt like a bit of a penance. Bennett's "humorous" approach to character relies on letting them talk, talk, talk, rabbiting on endlessly in a way that is, I guess, supposed to be "cute," but is actually just wearying.
I stuck with it, because I was curious about how the endless chatter about Hester and Harry, and Moira and Harry, and the extremely annoying teenager Prudence, and Mr Wade's poor business sense and dubious investments in Australian oil would contribute in any way to the solution of the mystery of who was and wasn't on the doomed flight to Dublin and SPOILER ALERT Clever, but hardly compensation for the pages of mind-numbing kitchen-sink drama we've had to endure to get there ...
There is ONE saving grace and, perhaps, I must confess, it's what kept me reading.
In the introduction, Series Editor Martin Edwards reveals that The Man Who Didn't Fly was adapted as a TV drama in 1958 ... starring one very youthful William Shatner.
As a long-time fan of Star Trek, I had to find out more, and yes, it is so. It was adapted for the Kraft Television Theater series of mini-dramas, aired in July 1958 and 27-year-old Shatner played Harry ... with an English accent. O.M.G. Here's the IMDb page, to save you searching ...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0622573/... (The "Top Review" posted is right on the money for the book, as well as the dramatization, I think ...)
This bit of information adds extra delight to one line from the book, describing Harry:
... his face was round and his mouth and chin soft. She liked a man to have a hard, lean, Hollywood look. Harry was nearly handsome, but he didn't look like a man who would be put in charge of a space-ship.
You couldn't make it up!! -
This was definitely a different kind of mystery story. And not in a bad way.
At first, some of the characters in this book made me uncomfortable. They were grifters, con men and just plain unidentifiable. But why should that matter? I don't need to see a resume to like someone.
I just felt like yelling at Hester Get out! I was feeling deeply apprehensive for her. And that is not something I get out of most mysteries. Especially not golden age mysteries.
But once the pieces slot together, this is an amazing logical puzzle. It is definitely not the whodunnit style of case. All they are trying to do is to figure out who actually went down in the plane. So the questions have a lot of that 'if a train is traveling x speed on track one' flavor to them. But you only need to keep going to find out it makes perfect sense!
And in reality, I would have liked to have had a lot more of some of these characters - especially Harry. In fact, this could have been called 'The Thing About Harry... " and I wouldn't have minded a bit. But yeah, the actual title makes sense too.
Harry is a poet. And he comes up with some of the best lines in the whole thing. Like this:
"Then don't let's talk," Harry said in a strained voice. "It will get us nowhere. Nothing will. We're on a ball, being bowled through emptiness to eternal silence. We're only pieces of animated dust. Why should we try to hurl our squeaking voices through the universe?"
He scares people, but he wakes them up too. It's disturbing at first, because he's not following the script. But it is hypnotizing to watch.
Most of the book takes place before the plane takes off, when the family who knew some of the passengers is telling the police about the three days prior to the flight. You don't know until the end who was on that plane. And it is spellbinding finding out. It all fits together so neatly. -
A charter flight goes down in the Irish Sea. The flight was booked for four passengers, but only three took off. The missing passenger doesn't come forward. What happened to the man who didn't fly?
An oddly structured book, this: police quickly home in on a family — Mr Wade and his two daughters — who knew all four passengers, and who reluctantly tell the story of the last few days before the fatal flight. Also interviewed are the wife of one of the passengers and a mysterious Australian who has been lurking in the village. The book then turns into a logic puzzle, as the police and witnesses reassemble all the evidence to work out who was on the plane.
A weirdly talky book, mostly dialogue, mostly people talking at, rather than to, each other; it reminded me of reading a play. Not remotely believable, with an unnecessary, improbable and cursory romance tacked on in the last chapter, but interesting enough structurally to hold the attention.
(The book also contains a short story by Bennett, "No Bath for the Browns", about a family that moves into a terrible new house.) -
I actually enjoyed "The Man Who Didn't Fly."
It is an unusual vintage mystery novel. Majority of the content focuses the two days prior to the plane crash. The actual investigation or the revealing of the case (about the man who didn't fly) is short. In a way, there isn't much for readers to do about solving the crime, so readers beware. The writing isn't dated like many other novels written around the same time, but the plotting is strange. To simply put, "The Man Who Didn't Fly" is better be read as a plain story with drama. The mystery part is just an added-on. Solving and understanding the puzzles require some logical thinking at the end. This book showcases how versatile the mystery genre could be. "The Man Who Didn't Fly" is the kind of book either readers hate it or love it. To me, it is definitely one of the most interesting and unexpected reads from the British Library Crime Classics series.
Including a short story, "No Bath for the Browns," at the end of the book. A delightful short story.
