Review of A Marriage Mystery Told from Three Points of View

28 Aug 2019 - Courtney Floyd

Published in The Athenaeum (16 Jan. 1897)

Mr. Fergus Hume has undoubtedly been endowed with a talent for stories of crime, and he shows wisdom in devoting himself to this class of fiction. It must be enough to say, without revealing the bold solution of it, that ‘A Marriage Mystery’ is ingeniously put together. The mystery is of course a murder. In the working out of the plot the author cleverly tries to make the reader fix the crime first upon one character and then upon another, but there is one detail which seems weak. Much depends on the exact time at which the murder was committed. This is supposed to be made certain by a doctor’s opinion. A doctor would hardly pretend to be certain from the appearance of a corpse that death took place at a moment which could be made precise within half and hour, and even if he were prepared to come to such a decision, a court of justice would certainly not accept his opinion as conclusive. A thoroughly good detective story should not leave ragged ends like this. There is, however, another point in which Mr. Hume is not quite successful. To make a satisfactory novel of this kind it is necessary to rouse strong interest in some direction. One wants the characters, or some of them, to be fascinating or at least strikingly lifelike, but Mr. Hume does not succeed in enlisting the reader’s sympathy for any character. He makes one say, ‘I certainly would like to know, but really I don’t care which of them did it.’

[review continues for Tracked by a Tattoo]