Fetch The Floating Admiral Depicted By The Detection Club Publication

novel tends to prove that having a lot of famous authors doesn't necessarily make for a better novel,

As the novel develops, each author adds various plot elements such as "discoveries", new characters, and red herrings, so that by the last chapter the stage is very cluttered indeed.
It was Anthony Berkeley's job to pull it all together at the end and to "make sense of the mess", The reader isn't really given a lot of help in deciding which things to eliminate from consideration and by the end we have two bodies, and a police Inspector who appears to be totally confused.
The result is that the final chapter is more like a novella, very long, and final plot is very complicated,

It does help that the narrator, David Timson, is so good and provides a sense of continuity with his voice, as well as distinguishing cleverly between characters.
I'd like to be able to say that I recognised the various styles of the authors, but I'm not sure that I did, You are told at the beginning of each chapter who has been responsible for this chapter,

I have talked to fellow readers about this concept, particularly in relation to teams of writers responsible for novels, Just recently we came across an Australian novel written byauthors, and two writers in a team like Nicci French, Michael Stanley, and Charles Todd are quite common, I thought sitelinkThe Detection Club was the best thing ever when I first heard of ita club of Golden Age mystery authors that included Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers with GK Chesterton himself as the president but I had never heard of The Floating Admiral, which was a simply terrific idea: a detective novel written roundrobin style by the entire Club, each member in turn being required to provide the next chapter of the story along with a sealed solution explaining the solution to the whole mystery.
As an entertainment for the Club itself, it must have been pretty terrific, As a curiosity of detective fiction for the GoldenAge detective fan, it's also a great read,

The plot is pretty similar to every other detective story, with the exception that the last chapter goes on and on and on as the last poor author attempts to tie up all the loose ends.
The subtle shifts in tone, characterisation, and so on, are all fun to watch as each new author steps in to continue the story, GK Chesterton himself contributed a Prologue to introduce the whole story, which is as brilliant and dreamlike as everything GKC wrote, Of the major contributors, Dorothy Sayers stood out as the best author, Ronald Knox, writer of the famousCommandments of Detective Fiction, is an author I wasn't familiar with, whose chapter also seemed one of the better contributions, This book has whetted my interest, and I think I'll be looking up some more of his work in the future,

The solution of the mystery provided in the final chapter was pretty ingenious, though extremely complicated as necessary considering the crazy clues, It was followed by the solutions which the authors were each required to provide, and I'm sorry now that I didn't read each author's solution immediately after his or her respective chapter, since they might have been more meaningful that way.


All in all, this was a fun read which introduced me to some new authors and stands for the future as a delightful record of one of the great literary clubs of the twentieth century.
The Floating Admiral is a detective novel written inby everybody, OK, not everybody, but at lot of people, fourteen of them, They were all members of the Detection Club, before I write about the book, of course I have to write about the club, I have been looking for this book a long time because it sounded so interesting, the idea anyway, On to the club.

The Detection Club was formed inby a group of British mystery writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L, Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Arthur Morrison, Hugh Walpole, John Rhode, Jessie Rickard, Baroness Emma Orczy, R, Austin Freeman, G. D. H. Cole, Margaret Cole, E. C. Bentley, Henry Wade, and H, C. Bailey. Anthony Berkeley was instrumental in setting up the club, and the first president was G, K. Chesterton. There was a fanciful initiation ritual with an oath probably written by either Chesterton or Sayers, and the club held regular dinner meetings in London, If you don't know who all those people are that's fine, neither do I, People like, Ronald Knox, Arthur Morrison, John Rhode, G, D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole among others, I've never heard of before, but apparently they were good enough mystery writers to make it into the club, Ok, more about the club,

In addition to meeting for dinners and helping each other with technical aspects in their individual writings, the members of the club agreed to adhere to Knox's Commandments in their writing to give the reader a fair chance at guessing the guilty party.
These fairplay "rules" were summarized by one of the members, Ronald Knox, in an introduction to an anthology of detective stories, They were never intended as more than guidelines, and not all the members took them seriously, The first American member though then living in the UK was John Dickson Carr, elected in, And here's the oath:

Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, JiggeryPokery, Coincidence, or Act of God I wonder if the author who had the person killed by a circus bear could have made it into the club, is that an Act of God I still consider that the dumbest ending of any book I've ever read.
This club is still around, the current president is Martin Edwards, I don't know who that is, though, Sorry Mr. Edwards if you're out there, Don't worry, I'm getting to the book, A number of works were published under the club's sponsorship most of these were written by more than one member of the club, lots more usually, each contributing one or more chapters in turn.
In the case of The Floating Admiral, each author also provided a sealed "solution" to the mystery as he or she had written it, including the previous chapters.
This was done to prevent a writer from adding impossible complications with no reasonable solution in mind, The various partial solutions were published as part of the final book, I don't know if any of the other books did that, it took me years to come across this book so I doubt I'll ever see another one,

The twelve chapters of the story were each written by a different author, in the following order: Canon Victor Whitechurch never heard of him, G, D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole same here, Henry Wade,

Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Dorothy L, Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley, G. K. Chesterton contributed a Prologue, which was written after the novel had been, I just realized there are more people I don't know than I do,

The book begins with an introduction by Dorothy Sayers in which she says:

"When members of the official police force are invited to express an opinion about the great detectives of fiction, they usually say with a kindly smile: 'Well, of course, it's not the same for them as it is for us.
The author knows beforehand who did the job, and the great detective has only to pick up the clues that are laid down for him, It's wonderful,' they indulgently add, 'the clever ideas these authors hit upon, but we don't think they would work very well in real life, '

There is probably much truth in these observations, and they are, in any case, difficult to confute, If Mr. John Rhode, for example, could be induced to commit a real murder by one of the ingeniously simple methods he so easily invents in fiction, and if Mr, Freeman Wills Crofts, say, would undertake to pursue him, Bradshaw in hand, from Stranraer to Saint JuanlesPins, then, indeed, we might put the matter to the test, But writers of detective fiction are, as a rule, not bloodthirsty people, They avoid physical violence, for two reasons: first, because their murderous feelings are so efficiently blownoff in print as to have little energy left for boiling up in action, and secondly, because they are so accustomed to the idea that murders are made to be detected that they feel a wholesome reluctance to put their criminal theories into practice.
While, as for doing real detecting, the fact is that few of them have the time for it, being engaged in earning their bread and butter like reasonable citizens, unblessed with the ample leisure of a Wimsey or a Father Brown.
"

And so their came the Detection Club, and The Floating Admiral, which Dorothy Sayers says is their detection game on paper, The two rules for the game were that each writer must construct his or her installment with a definite solution in view that is, he must not introduce new complications merely "to make it more difficult.
" He must be ready, if called upon, to explain his own clues coherently and plausibly, each writer must also provide their own proposed solution of the mystery, Secondly, each writer had to deal faithfully with all difficulties left for his consideration by the previous writer, He or she could not just dismiss them as an accident or give an answer that is inconsistent with the story, She goes on to say that they were both surprised to find what the other authors came up with, She says that while she was plunged into bewilderment over what she received by Mr, Milward Kennedy, she was baffled at what Father Ronald Knox came up with when she gave the manuscript to him, seeing him come up with something totally different than she was thinking of.
And finally it gets passed down and finished by Anthony Berkeley in a chapter he titled, "Clearing Up The Mess, "

As for the plot, it was interesting, It was interesting to see how the plot changed from chapter to chapter as we changed author to author, and you could tell how it changed, One writer would have me going down one path, then we begin the next chapter and it was like going down a totally different road, And as for what was going on, well on a drifted boat, the body of Admiral Penistone is found, which makes the title totally make sense, Last night, he had dinner with his niece in the house of the vicar, they came in their boat, and they leave in their boat, However, the boat on which the admiral is found is not his boat, it is owned by the vicar, Just in case you're wondering, almost everyone in the book has a boat, The admiral was stabbed by a knife or a dagger, but there is no blood on the floor leading our detective who is also our main character, him and the admiral, believing the dead guy wasn't killed in a boat at all.
Furthermore, the mooring line has been cut twice, They made a big deal out of that, they were much more impressed about that than I was, And then there was the newspaper, we can't forget the newspaper, at least half the writers couldn't forget it, the other half weren't all that interested in it, There is a flower in the boat too, that doesn't come into it until later though, but keep it in mind, three or four of the writers had to do something with it.
Things changed as the book went on, there was Elma Holland, in the first chapter she is described as a young woman, about thirty or a few years above that age, but she isn't beautiful, in fact as Inspector Rudge tells us, she is just plain ugly.
But then, she becomes beautiful when she "fixes" herself up, a few chapters later one of our characters is madly in love with her and she is beautiful by then.
And that's how things change, After a while there is a missing brother, a missing wife, a secret love affair, a person set up for a crime he didn't commit, the real criminal, or criminals.
That's what makes it interesting, the way each author changes the story, it's also what makes it annoying and hard to enjoy because it's impossible to figure out the crime yourself since the crime and all around it changes every chapter.
I'm glad I read it, but I won't read it again, On to the next book, Happy reading. Written piecemeal by several members of the Detection club each contributing a single chapter and having different solutions in mind, this book sounds like a good idea, and was likely much more fun to write than it is to read.
The vast difference in style, vision, and ability between different contributors makes for clunky disoriented reading, And while the writer who tackled the concluding chapter did manage to deliver a satisfying solution to the tangled mystery and many of the chapters were exciting and well delivered the few that were painfully laborious to get through make the story on the whole something you read to familiarize yourself with the more casual writing of authors you already love than to enjoy an enthralling mystery.
One author literally spent his entirepage chapter forcing the investigative character to ask himself incredibly obvious and stupid questions about the case and render also to himself unnecessarily lengthy and unsubstantiated answers.
It's parts like this which makes what I imagine must have been an engaging project among friends with a similar interest a bit rough for casual readers, .