Thursday, May 19, 2016

Mixing mystery in real life with the magic of reel life

A dog has been howling for the past thirty six hours near my gated community. The sound comes from behind the high walls at  the left corner. I first thought it was a dog from one of the  houses in that corner, and wondered why it was howling so much.
May be they had left it inside the open, gated garage and gone out.
But no, the howling went on and on, and I realized it was coming from the mangroves behind.
Apart from wondering what was happening with that stray caught in the heavy spurts of rains here, I was also reading a suspense story by......wait for it..........G.K.Chesterton.
It's a story called the blue cross, but it's not about dogs or cats or camels.
It's about a silver cross with blue sapphires in it.

The suspense, the build up and the denouement are well done, but having known the author as an essayist in my school text book, I noticed how cleverly the essayist in him had sneaked in to chat with the reader all through a fast moving mystery. He had included many blogger like random observations all through the story. Also, in the style of early twentieth century, the nouns are ambushed by adjectives.
It was a good read. Never knew the author had written a series of detective stories in which the main character is a priest named Father Brown.

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