thousand pounds is being offered by The Daily Chronicle to the person who can solve the Ferris Wheel murder which has captivated London.
Young solicitor, Edmund Ibbs, is helping defend Carla Dean. She is facing trial, charged with murdering her husband, Dominic Dean, high above the ground in a Ferris wheel compartment.
No one else was in the compartment. The gun used was her husband’s revolver. Powder burns upon the husband demonstrate the revolver was fired at very close range. Her fingerprints alone are upon the revolver. There is no powder residue upon her hands. What explanation is possible beyond Dean shooting her husband? Ibbs is determined to find an alternative.
Two witnesses testify as to a mysterious limping man near the Ferris wheel at the time Dean is shot
Days later, Ibbs is at the Pomegranate Theatre watching the magic of Professor Paolini when a body, wearing armor, falls out of a crate instead of the expected Sir Lancelot. The body is Miklos Varga, the man who operated the Ferris wheel when Dean was shot. No one at the theatre saw Varga placed in the crate. The man moving the crate says only the man portraying Sir Lancelot was in the crate when he was wheeling it.
There is yet another murder in a locked room at the theatre. Ibbs, having been knocked out, finds himself in the room with a body in the corner and a revolver, recently fired, glued to his hand. The deceased is Paolini who was about to tell Ibbs everything about Dean.
Inspector Flint of Scotland Yard calls upon the old conjuror, Joseph Spector, to aid him as the good inspector is a solid man but these locked room crimes bedevil him. Spector is a master at dissecting illusion. With not one, not two but three impossible murders to be solved there is an abundance of illusion.
I came close on one but never figured out any of the murders.
Mead is a clever author. The story lagged a bit for me in the early going at the theatre but it steadily picked up momentum. I was grateful for the diagrams. It would have been too difficult to keep track of the settings and multiple characters with words alone. I look forward to reading the third in the series.
For the first book in the series I had Hercule Poirot provide his thoughts on the detective skills of Flint and Spector. In my next post Horace Rumpole of the Bailey considers illusion.
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I'm glad you enjoyed this one, Bill. I agree that Mead is a skilled writer. It's not easy to write about illusion in a credible way. I have to say, I very much enjoyed what Poirot had to say about Death and the Conjuror, and I'm looking forward to Horace Rumpole's remarks.
ReplyDeleteMargot: Thanks for the comment. I agree writing about illusion is challenging. Mead does it well.
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