Traditional Mysteries blog reviews The Magic Bullet

Larry Millett's locked-room mystery novel THE MAGIC BULLET is reviewed by the blog Traditional Mysteries.

Millett_Magic coverI've decided to add more locked room mysteries to my reading list in upcoming months. To kick things off I thought I'd start with one that's just been published and then move on to some of the classic works. I'm not sure how many writers are working in this particular sub-genre these days but Millett has come up with one that I'd rank right up there in terms of overall story. As for the locked room aspect, I'm not real well versed in that area, but I'd venture to say that this was a decent one.

Millett has written a number of books thus far in which Minneapolis saloonkeeper Shadwell Rafferty and Sherlock Holmes team up to solve crimes. I haven't read any of the others and it sounds like a weirdo premise, but in this particular case Holmes plays a relatively small role and he is offstage the entire time, communicating with Rafferty by mail.

The story takes place in 1917, in Minneapolis, at a time when the city is being disrupted by various anti-war and labor agitators. Against this backdrop we are presented with the locked room murder of one Artemus Dodge, a paranoid tycoon who has barricaded himself inside a penthouse suite consisting of office and apartment, a setup which would give most bank vaults a run for their money.

I'm normally a bit reluctant to take on any mystery that runs longer than 300 pages (or even 200, for that matter). As I've noted before, brevity is an excellent quality for most works in the genre, but Millett manages to confound my theory with a work that totals 347 pages and doesn't waste any of them. Yes, the solution to the crime is a bit convoluted and requires many pages to explain, but isn't that pretty much the point of these exercises?

Published in: Traditional Mysteries
By: William I. Lengeman III


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