Lead Review (Death and the Conjuror)
- Book: Death and the Conjuror
- Location: London
- Author: Tom Mead
Such a lovely design for the hardback version of this novel, very colourful and bound to catch the eye of many readers.
This is a theatrical mêlée of killings and clues, led by Inspector Flint of Scotland Yard, ably supported by retired stage magician (and part-time sleuth) Joseph Spector.
Dr Rees is a psychiatrist from Vienna who has made his home in Dollis Hill. He is found murdered, slashed about the throat. Yet, curiously he is in a locked room that cannot be accessed from the outside. What a conundrum. His death is compounded by the theft of a rather good painting elsewhere in London, again, quite how it could have been removed from the house is a great point of debate and deep mystery.
The sleuthing gentlemen pore over Dr Rees’ client notes. They have to decipher who clients A, B and C might be, and despite the doctor’s coy confidentiality, they have soon determined the identities of the people he was treating. Might the clues lie there, or even further back in his history, to someone he was seeing in a professional capacity back in Vienna, called the snake man? Further characters are brought into the possible frame of perpetrators, to wit Dr Rees’ daughter Lidia, her boyfriend Marcus, and darling of the drama world, Della Cookson (a kleptomaniac, who also happens to be Patient B), musician Floyd Stenhouse (Patient A) and Claude Weaver, who is patient C. A rich variety of characters, with quite a few secrets between them.
The novel is creatively laid out but the characters pass through the story without any real sense of who they are, they don’t feel anchored into the narrative. There is a Dramatis Personae list as the book opens, to which the reader can refer (although I find this kind of list off-putting, as it often indicates a lot of potentially unknowable characters coming up).
In the story much time is spent in rhetorical reflection, sorting through the clues, hypothesising and pondering, posing questions and essentially treading well worn ground that can feel quite repetitive. The story circled a good deal and somehow needed teasing into a vigorous linear trajectory. There is considerable dialogue throughout, broken up with some humorous interludes and a few red herrings dropped along the way. The writing is good and the idea behind the story is certainly inventive and engrossing.
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