The Mysteries of Reverend Dean [Paperback]

The octogenarian Dean is a marvelous, fully dimensioned creation, and the stories...the stories!...wonderful impossible crime tales! Don't miss "Murder at an Island Mansion," "Murder from the Fourth Floor," "Murder on a Caribbean Cruise," "Murder at the Lord's Table," "Murder in a Sealed Loft," and "Murder at the Fall Festival." And the Christian theological content, though very sound, is not intrusive. Long may this remarkable sleuth flourish.

There aren't very many of today's mystery authors willing to tackle the locked room/impossible crime genre. Hal White deserves a lot of credit for creating the Reverend Thaddeus Dean and giving him a half-dozen fairly presented and clued locked room crimes to unravel. Fans of John Dickson Carr will agree that the puzzles are fairly constructed and clearly presented to the reader - and White employs some masterful misdirection to send us off after red herrings while Reverend Dean works his way to the correct solution. These are excellent puzzle mysteries, very much in the classic tradition, and thoroughly enjoyable. I recommend it highly.

Hal White's book is exciting indeed! He has publically announced his intention of reviving an eclipsed genre, the impossible crime associated with John Dickson Carr and G K Chesterton among others. The Chesterton parallel is even stronger in that White has invented a series detective who, like Chesterton's Father Brown, is also a cleric. In fact the book is published by a Christian publishing house, though the Reverend Dean is retired and anyhow strangely unaffiliated; his theology is murky, but one hardly ever feels it intrusive. Dean solves cases in his little town in the Pacific Northwest, Dark Pine, two hours outside of Seattle, a setting that affords some nice lonesome chills.

Right now Thaddeus Dean is primarily a collection of quirks that don't really amount to an actual character. Said quirks include ownership of a monstrous St Bernard, "Puppadawg," missing his late wife Emma, gone now these three years, addiction to strong coffee, reading paperbacks in a special steam shower cabinet which swells up the books three times their size, parking at WalMart as far from the entrance as possible. He also explodes when obliged to get up earlier than 10:00 a.m. In short, he's cranky and humorless, and in future books might reap the benefit of fewer eccentricities, just like Ariadne Oliver's Sven Hjerson and his vegetarianism. Childless himself, Dean feels a paternal warmth towards a police detective, Mark Small; while a favorite niece, Susan, makes an early, puzzling appearance in the Dean saga. (Puzzling because she's set up to play a part in the stories that follow, yet she disappears and Dean never mentions her nor thinks of her again.) MURDER AT AN ISLAND MANSION shows Hal White's strengths and weaknesses in equal measure. Vicki Calais contacts Reverend Dean to express her horror that, one by one, everyone in her family is being slaughtered by impossible means--each one different. The set-ups are rich in atmosphere, the crimes themselves baffling, and Dean's deductions amazing yet fairly clued. And yet White has set himself up by limiting his suspects to only a handful (actually two) that we know who the killer is right away, particularly when the suspect is known to have mastered a particular field of activity back in high school. Giveaway! Dickson Carr was always doing that in his novels, where among a thousand other details one particular detail might go unnoticed (that is, if Tim was known to throw his voice at high school parties, you know Tim's the one responsible for the current murder and that somehow ventriloquism links into it) but in a short story, the jig's up as soon as the high school propensity is mentioned.

In MURDER ON THE FOURTH FLOOR, a demented wife takes a potshot at her husband from a fourth floor window--or did she? When the building is searched, she is nowhere to be found. Again the murderer has got to be exactly you would think, while White stumbles trying to reproduce the speech patterns of a young urban black witness--it's a painful page or two, but no real harm done. MURDER ON A CARIBBEAN CRUISE is like White's version of Agatha Christie's A CARIBBEAN MYSTERY, in which Miss Marple was sent as a charity gesture by her family to enjoy the hot sands and steel drums of a distant island. It's such a different atmosphere for Reverend Dean, far away from the preferred Northwest climate, and the crime he investigates seems particularly gruesome, with a touch of "Cabin B-14" to it as well. MURDER AT THE LORD'S TABLE may strike some as tasteless, particularly from a Christian publisher, for after you read the murder method you realize that for Hal White literally nothing IS sacred, but it's a good story nevertheless. (This is the one where the proofreading comically falls apart when Reverend Dean suffers "duel blows," instead of what I assume were supposed to be "dual blows.") In MURDER IN A SEALED LOFT, Mark Small once again calls upon the aged Reverend for assistance, in a case where a painter is found stabbed in her studio completely locked in from the inside! There are some great deductions in here involving frozen red blood cells and even I, far from a biologist, could understand and even anticipate, thanks to White's careful and fair presentation of the evidence. In MURDER AT THE FALL FESTIVAL, Reverend Dean confronts a bizarre murder apparently committed while a band of his helpers are preparing the annual Halloween party he founded way back when. George Weston is found inside a garage with only two entrances or exits--a walkway and the sort of door you always see in garages, big and massive and moving up and down. In this case Dean has to prove himself to Mark's boss, Detective Tom Michaels, one of the few men in Dark Pine who don't believe Dean walks on water (sic). Needless to say, Dean passes with flying colors, and then solves the case in an astounding series of deductions that will have you looking at your cigar case and pondering just how long and cylindrical and heat-bearing it is. This one has a solution that will make strong men literally blanch. THE MYSTERIES OF REVEREND DEAN is a marvelous debut, and I only hope that White considers putting Reverend Dean at the center of the action in a mystery novel next.

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