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Sep. 23rd, 2017 01:54 amFrom "Quain":
I regret that I lent a certain lady - irrecoverably - the first thing he wrote. This I have said was a detective novel called The God of the Labyrinth; I can add that it was published towards the end of November, 1933. By early December, the pleasing but laboured convolutions of Ellery Queen's Siamese Twin Mystery had London and New York engrossed; I would suggest that the failure of our friend's novel should be blamed on this disastrous coincidence. Also - and I want to be absolutely honest - on the book's flawed construction and on a number of stiff, pretentious passages that describe the sea. Seven years on, I find it impossible to recollect the details of the plot. Here, then, is its outline, now impoverished (or purified) by my dim memory. There is a puzzling murder in the opening pages, plodding conversation in the middle, and a solution at the end. Once the mystery is solved, we come upon a long paragraph of retrospection containing this sentence: 'Everyone thought that the meeting between the two chess players had been accidental.' The words lead us to believe that the solution is wrong. The anxious reader, going back over the relevant chapters, discovers a different solution, the true one.
Quainisms? God's-handkerchiefs? Painted breadcrumbs? Chess meetings? Giddings? Dead Pauls?
I regret that I lent a certain lady - irrecoverably - the first thing he wrote. This I have said was a detective novel called The God of the Labyrinth; I can add that it was published towards the end of November, 1933. By early December, the pleasing but laboured convolutions of Ellery Queen's Siamese Twin Mystery had London and New York engrossed; I would suggest that the failure of our friend's novel should be blamed on this disastrous coincidence. Also - and I want to be absolutely honest - on the book's flawed construction and on a number of stiff, pretentious passages that describe the sea. Seven years on, I find it impossible to recollect the details of the plot. Here, then, is its outline, now impoverished (or purified) by my dim memory. There is a puzzling murder in the opening pages, plodding conversation in the middle, and a solution at the end. Once the mystery is solved, we come upon a long paragraph of retrospection containing this sentence: 'Everyone thought that the meeting between the two chess players had been accidental.' The words lead us to believe that the solution is wrong. The anxious reader, going back over the relevant chapters, discovers a different solution, the true one.
Quainisms? God's-handkerchiefs? Painted breadcrumbs? Chess meetings? Giddings? Dead Pauls?
