A Puzzle for Fools: A Peter Duluth Mystery

This is the one where Peter Duluth first meets Iris Pattison, and they're both in the mental hospital. Who knew that these two "fools" would wind up as the hero and heroine of one of America's best loved detective series? Well, in this episode they're still a little crazy, though it's plain from the beginning that Peter at any rate is well on his way to mental health. He had seen his first wife go up in flames literally in front of his eyes, with no way he could save her, so after the funeral he took to the bottle and became a dipsomaniac. Clearly, for the pseudonymous authors who used the name "Patrick Quentin," William Seabrook's "nonfiction novel" ASYLUM was a leading source--it's even name checked in the opening pages of FOOLS. Some readers like Peter and Harriet in the Dorothy Sayers books, but for me, I prefer my Peter with Iris. The earliest Duluth books were all called Puzzle for this, Puzzle for that, and they used as the second term sort of a medieval noun as if from the days of Beowulf--thus "fools" in the Shakesperean sense of "madmen," then "players" where a modern equivalent would be "actors," and so on: "Puzzle for Wantons" anyone? I like this effect of a slightly removed and ironic dialectic in which two time frames are measured against each other, the push and pull of opposing historical forces. However after a certain point in time the authors must have felt some diminishing returns coming on, so they got rid of the "Puzzle for" device and just started calling the books regular names like BLACK WIDOW, etc., which must have alienated the faithful. Imagine if Sue Graftoc suddenly stopped the "T is for Teabag" routine and just called the next Kinsey book "Nightmare for Kinsey"! As usual, Iris is the most beautiful and alluring girl in the world, but there's always an attractive man for Peter to bond with, usually in their underwear or less. Quentin never lets one down in the beefcake department, and here is the magnificent Cary-Elwes-in-PRINCESS-BRIDE British stud Martin Geddes, a narcoleptic, how handy for when you want to run your hands up and down his magnificent body just to see what happens. Dr. Lenz the kindly psychiatrist and head of the clinic, obviously modelled on the grest Freud himself, is godlike and charismatic as always, though with perhaps fewer quirks than he would develop in PUZZLE FOR PLAYERS. All in all, a brilliant conflation of traditional detective story clueing and grand guignol.

If I get a bad grade on my O. chem. midterm I'm blaming this book. It was given to me to read while I was in the middle of studying and it caused some sizable breaks in my attempts to learn what a carboxylic acid is. Needless to say, I found it pretty engrossing, or at least more than my textbook. A Puzzle for Fools is essentially a country house murder, with the twist being that it's set in a mental hospital. It has the set group of people who could be suspects, the limited setting and the basic interactions, the doctors take the role of the hosts, the staff of the servants etc., that are typical to that classic genre of mysteries, but the setting itself give a flair of the unusual. The story is narrated by Peter Duluth, a recovering alcoholic who is among the more sane of the inmates of the asylum. By virtue of his sanity, and the fact that he discovers the bodies, Duluth is taken into the confidence of the authorities and tries to solve the mystery on his own. The murderer starts with a campaign of frightening various inmates and using their neuroses to his advantage. He (and I should mention that I'm using the indefinite pronoun here) then moves on to a particularly gruesome and brutal murder. To criticize, I would say that the murderer is a bit to miraculous, has too many skills that just happen to be perfect for the job at hand. It's not entirely believable and tends to the melodramatic. The other problem is that it got very confusing at the end, when I was certain that it had been stated that one person was the murderer, but then the very characters that made the statement seemed to ignore and forget it, leaving a welter of confusion that was never cleared up.