Sun 2 Aug 2020
A Locked Room Mystery Review: NICHOLAS WILDE – Death Knell.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
NICHOLAS WILDE – Death Knell. Henry Holt & Co., hardcover, 1991. Published previously in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1990.
The two protagonists in this fairly good locked room mystery are a pair of 14-year-old boys, good friends who, in spite of some very spooky conditions, decide to solve a murder of an old man in a securely sealed church crypt on a cold snowy night in rural England. Could it have been suicide? The only keys to the murder scene are lying next to the body, and the only door is blocked by a massively huge stone that has been moved from its place in the center of the crypt.
As the author of this tale, Nicholas Wilde depends greatly on atmosphere: there is an old legend that the old abandoned church is haunted, its bell rings at various times with no one around, and most of the in-person investigation has to be done in the dark and/or bad weather. It helps that the two investigators are young boys: they have to talk to each other constantly to keep their courage up, adding to the sense of dread they have to overcome.
The solution to the mystery is extremely cleverly done, and as usual, it takes several pages for the boys to explain how they figured it out. If I were the editor, though, I’d have asked the author for clearer explanations of what was going on during several crucial passages. It is not at all clear at times as to what is happening. I think Wilde was trying to finesse his way through those spots, and relying far too much on the boys’ somewhat panicky point of view of the events as they happened.
The problem here with that approach is that he really didn’t have to. The plot is solid enough that he didn’t have to be so mysterious. Wilde could have been as clear as day in describing the scenes in question, and the story would have been just as mystifying. Maybe even more so.
August 2nd, 2020 at 3:43 pm
Other online reviews:
http://moonlight-detective.blogspot.com/2020/03/death-knell-1990-by-nicholas-wilde.html
https://theinvisibleevent.com/2020/04/14/death-knell-by-nicholas-wilde/
August 2nd, 2020 at 10:14 pm
Was this one a juvenile? For some reason writers and editors of juveniles used to feel much less compunction about dotting i’s and crossing t’s when writing for a primarily younger audience?
August 2nd, 2020 at 10:22 pm
You’re quite right in asking. It was indeed published for the Young Adult market, and as of right now it’s not listed in Hubin. Not yet, anyway. Even though the detectives are kids, they’re smart kids, and the tone is adult enough that it really doesn’t matter how it was marketed. I’m going to suggest it to him that it ought to be in there.
And as for your other observation, it’s not a matter of not dotting i’s and crossing t’s, exactly. The plot is airtight. What I disliked, intensely, is having to go back over certain scenes several times to decide what it was that just happened. Wilde had a real big league winner here, and he muffed it.