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, My goodness, this was tedious, Four days to read a book with fewer thanpages,
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, sitelinkThe Long Way Back and sitelinkThe 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 fortytwo 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 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. 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, 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.
Very different. Enjoyed it. Curious mishmash: 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 mindnumbing kitchensink 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.
. . starring one very youthful William Shatner,
As a longtime 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 minidramas, aired in Julyandyearold Shatner played Harry, . . with an English accent. O. M. G. Here's the IMDb page, to save you searching, . . sitelink imdb. com/title/tt/ The "Top " 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 spaceship,
You couldn't make it up!! For my full review click on the link below:
sitelink wordpress If Lewis Carroll and O, Henry had collaborated on a mystery novel this might be it, It had onedimensional 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 postwar espionage with a great ending.
Those letters on the airplane wing are code for "don't even bother, " 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, 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 onedimensional, 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 twothirds 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 hitandmiss, with this one in particular a solid miss,.stars,on Goodreads on the account of finishing, .