Death By Sheer Torture

British mystery writer Robert Barnard in his forty novels has at various times toyed with the idea of a series detective. Often Barnard is better in his standalone mysteries without one. Writers tend to become bored with their own creations. In several of his mysteries he used Detective Inspector Perry Trethowan, a six-foot-five weight lifter who weighs seventeen stone (238 pounds). Trethowan also appears in "Death and the Princess," "The Case of the Missing Brontë," "The Cherry Blossom Corpse," and "Bodies." In "Death by Sheer Torture" Perry has to investigate the death of his estranged father who has been murdered while wearing spangled tights using his own sado-masochistic, self flagellation contraption, a strappado machine. His father's private vice becomes too public for Perry's comfort zone. Perry is reluctant to go back to the family's mansion for the investigation because it is inhabited by his family of oddball eccentric loony tunes relatives, a family of "nincompoopery." Barnard likes dealing with disreputable and distasteful types: they're more fun to read about. Although it is quite funny and well-plotted, this is not top drawer Barnard. The solution makes more sense than some of his other ones, but the book seems repetitive and lacking in that extra Barnard magic. The way the plot unfolds and the discovery of a missing letter are handled very well. Weird characters are one of his strong suits, and they are certainly present here. The manic kids, the Squealies, in the book are fun to read about. His comic, ironic, satirical flair is in evidence, but the book struts instead of soars. It's told in the first person and perhaps we get a little too much of Perry.

The mystery begins with the strappado death of CID Detective Inspector Peregrine "Perry" Trethowan's estranged father Leo at the Trethowan ancestral home, Harpenden House. Perry is asked by the Assistant Commissioner to participate in the investigation. This is an assignment Perry would have preferred to avoid. It is professionally embarrassing, as his 70 year old father was found dead wearing spangled tights, and although Perry left Harpenden House years ago, one or perhaps more of his highly eccentric relatives, still living there, is likely to be the murderer(s). This somewhat bizarre story is populated by odd characters and biting commentary about Perry's relatives and upper class attitudes and practices. This is a well told tale that held my interest throughout, although it took a while to get comfortable with Barnard's idiosyncratic writing style, which occasionally, for me, intruded on the storytelling. Barnard writes with an acerbic, tongue-in-the-cheek comedic style, using a unique choice of words and sentence structure. Two first chapter quotes: "...like all right thinking people I read my paper backwards ...", and "Certainly he would not have committed suicide: he never was one to do anybody a favor", demonstrate the story's humorous tones. His uncommon choices of words and sentence structure seem more redolent of a foreign writer with an exceptional command of English, than an English-born and Oxford-educated author. Some illustrative examples are: "I began expatiating aggrievedly on a theme...", "Aunt Sybillia went into acidulated retirement...", If your looking for an unusual reading experience and are comfortable with occasionally pregnant sentences, unique over-the-top characters, a humorous but disparaging viewpoint, and a more entertaining than mysterious story you may find this a surprisingly entertaining novel.

For everybody with an "interesting" family, this book offers a delightful mystery set against memorable characters. Perry Trethowan is an "everyman" sensible cop coerced into revisiting a past that he had good reason to flee; in order to solve a murder that will embarass him for the rest of his life.Numerous red herrings ensure that you will not solve the case by chapter three, always worth three stars. The other two stars are for the charaters.

Perry is a London police detective who has, to his immenserelief, been disowned by his upper-class family. The Trethowans mightbest be described as cut-rate Sitwells or Mitfords: a poet, a painter (long deceased, and the only one with any real talent), a composer, a set-designer, and a Nazi sympathizer -- plus their various offspring, all living in a monstrosity of a country house. When Perry's father (the composer) is found dead on a torture device of his own design, our detective's immediate reaction is: "That is just how one of my family would die, and just how one of my family would murder... I'll be the laughing-stock of the CID for the rest of my life." However, the Scotland Yard brass decide that only a Trethowan can comprehend the mind of another Trethowan -- and so, despite his pleas, Perry is sent back to the bosom of his family to find the killer among them. Although there is very little violence or sex in this book, it's still not your typical warm fuzzy aristo-Anglophile romp either.