Puzzle for Players

by Patrick Quentin

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0380480255
• ISBN13: 9780380480258
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: Avon Books
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant Theatrical Whodunit

In PUZZLE FOR PLAYERS suave debonair Peter Duluth is newly out of the nuthatch and is trying to jumpstart his theatrical producer career after a long hiatus spent trying to drown his sorrows at the tragic death of his wife, an enforced rest in a luxury nuthouse (with some murders thrown in, the case detailed in Quentin's previous novel A PUZZLE FOR FOOLS), and his meeting the woman who would become his second wife, the celebutante Iris Pattison. In the slush pile of scripts delivered "over the transom" Peter has found his ticket back to the bigtime, a domestic drama called TROUBLED WATERS, written in the vein of RAIN by a mild, meek young country fellow Henry Prince. Peter casts Iris in the play, in a supporting part, and for the two big parts he has landed Mirabelle Rue, a wild, flame-haired, vixenish leading lady, and Conrad Wessler, Germany's greatest actor and a recent refugee from Hitler's terror. Like Peter, each of these great stars is also making a comeback, trying to climb out of a personal hell of their own--Mirabelle fleeing a sadistic former husband, Conrad recovering from a plane crash that left his handsome face covered with plastic surgery and his younger brother in a madhouse. And someone backstage at the Dagonet Theater is determined to bring terror ringing through the aisles of Broadway. A cat prowls the dressing rooms with a ribbon round its neck with a message of bad luck. The ghost of a strangled woman, ghastly and gray, appears from within the star's dressing room mirror. Bodies start appearing during rehearsal and the police are closing in. Peter is trying to believe in his higher power but Mirabelle's omnipresent bottle of brandy is starting to look more and more attractive... The fun of the book is the theatrical milieu and the struggle of theater pros to overcome the roadblocks a mad killer is throwing their way. Wessler and Mirabelle are stereotypes in a way, larger than life divas, and the play they're trying to bring to life is standard melodrama, but Quentin makes this all perfectly intriguing and one hopes for a success for all concerned. Mirabelle must be modeled on Tallulah Bankhead, perhaps Gertrude Lawrence, while Wessler is sort of like Paul Muni and Walter Huston rolled into one. I haven't read them all, but this may well be the best "Golden Age" detective novel set in the theater. (Maybe The G-String Murders is almost as good.) It's miles better than those novels written by Dame New Zealand Theater Woman Ngaio Marsh. Say, I wonder why Agatha Christie, who had years of experience writing for the West End, never wrote a theater novel? If I remember right, one of the Miss Marple movies was set in a little rep company in the provinces, but by and large she seems to have decided to leave the theater out of her work. We can all remember the flamboyant actresses in her novels--LORD EDGWARE DIES and THE MIRROR CRACK'D, but it's almost as if she wanted to fictionalize the real life personae of, respec