Still Life With Pistol

Sometimes you just want to try something new. For instance, you could try checking out a book by an author you haven't read before, or bringing your girlfriend to a secluded art retreat.

Sometimes doing something new gives you a fresh and unique experience, but other times, even if things start out well, at the end the book ends up being not that great, or someone ends up dead.

Still Life With Pistol stars Richard Patton, retired policeman who now serves as a private security consultant. Richard designed a security system for Bruno Fillingley, a master forger who uses his powers for good (he doesn't pass off his works as originals) hosts two-week art retreats in his house to host two-week art retreats. Bruno displays many forgeries in his house but has a few original works mixed in, and so needed a unique security system to not only prevent break-ins but also make sure nobody absconded with his valuable paintings. Bruno offers Richard an opportunity to partake in a retreat as thanks and, while Richard himself isn't interested, he goes with his wife (in every sense but legal) Amelia, who's an amateur painter.

Anyway, if the introduction didn't make it clear enough, someone gets murdered a few days in.

The book actually presents an interesting puzzle. The title of the book, Still Life With Pistol, comes from the painting the victim was creating, and the cover provides an accurate rendition of the painting. The gun featured in the painting is indeed the murder weapon, but that's what causes the issue, because the crime scene is found in the exact same state as depicted in the painting—including the petals on the gun. That means that either the culprit managed to fire the gun without disturbing the petals on it, or the crime occurred before the painting was finished and then the culprit completed the petals on their own.

The other cool thing is that the security system locking everyone in guarantees the murder was someone in the house. In a murder mystery you know the culprit will be one of the introduced characters and not just some random intruder, but it's fun when the characters need to explicitly acknowledge and grapple with the closed circle.

And that covers what I liked about the book.

Okay, that's not quite everything. I do like the solution in a certain sense, but I'm conflicted. The issue is that the culprit is the most boring candidate. The solution is pretty interesting, and there's a lot more depth and thought than one might expect from the culprit's identity. It's a cool journey to a boring conclusion, and the drabness of the conclusion completely dampens my emotional enthusiasm for the solution. So there are cool ideas, but I wish the resolution had been a bit spicier.

The explanation of the crime also feels like it's been reduced to as few points as necessary, with the finer points left completely unaddressed. In particular, there's one character who tries to do something that an ordinary person would not ever attempt to do without a very good reason... and that reason is left completely unaddressed. Which makes the book feel like a sterile puzzle rather than an actual story. And I like puzzle plots, but the book's emphasis on character dynamics combined with the perfunctory denouement suggests to me that Still Life With Pistol wanted to be more of a character piece... so which is it? Whether you look at the book as a character study all about why the dramatis personae do what they do or a puzzle plot focused on the mystery there are serious flaws, leading to my lukewarm feelings.

The other thing detracting from Still Life With Pistol as a character piece is that the characters are a bit... weird. There's a generally entertaining dynamic for what is mostly a group of random strangers, but sometimes it feels like a few lines of dialogue were skipped, and the book never goes back to fill in those blanks for us. I often get a similar feeling from Carr's dialogue. Also, things keep happening in the middle of the night... Doesn't anybody at the retreat ever sleep?!

Oh, and Still Life With Pistol breaks The Unbreakable Law of Detective Fiction, so that's something. I suppose that means I can't call it that anymore. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

So Still Life With Pistol is a very middling novel. It provided an interesting problem with the painting, gun, and petals, and the characters are decent enough, but the book was not entertaining enough to make the journey on its own worth it; everything depended on the solution. And the solution is... mixed. The full story behind the crime is interesting but the culprit is boring, and the latter element is what ultimately had a larger effect on my feelings. So check it out if you want a new, more recent Golden Age-style author because maybe Ormerod will be your cup of tea, but, while Still Life With Pistol is certainly not a bunch of meaningless scribbles, it's also quite far from being a masterpiece.