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Patrick Quentin
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Puzzle for Players (The Peter Duluth Mysteries) Kindle Edition

by Patrick Quentin (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.3 out of 5 stars 10 ratings
From an Edgar Award–winning author, sleuth Peter Duluth must drop the curtain on a killer in this “medley of off-stage theatrics with a teaser of a solution” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
Patrick Quentin, best known for the Peter Duluth puzzle mysteries, also penned outstanding detective novels from the 1930s through the 1960s under other pseudonyms, including Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge. Anthony Boucher wrote: “Quentin is particularly noted for the enviable polish and grace which make him one of the leading American fabricants of the murderous comedy of manners; but this surface smoothness conceals intricate and meticulous plot construction as faultless as that of Agatha Christie.”
 
Theater producer Peter Duluth is fresh out the sanitarium where he got sober; found his new love, Iris; and also happened to help catch a murderer. Now he’s dead set on staging his big comeback with a new play featuring his lady as the star.
 
Unfortunately, they end up in a broken-down theater where the rats keep company with ghosts, and where there hasn’t been a hit in years. Combined with the usual egos, divas, and personal demons, it will be a miracle if Peter can get the play off the ground.
 
But his seemingly cursed production turns deadly when an actor literally dies onstage, with another murder soon to follow—this is not a dress rehearsal. Now it’s up to Peter to shine a spotlight on a killer.

 
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  1. Book 2 of 8
    The Peter Duluth Mysteries
  2. Print length
    334 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
  5. Publication date
    August 28, 2018
  6. File size
    6.6 MB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick, and Jonathan Stagge were pen names under which Hugh Callingham Wheeler (1912–1987), Richard Wilson Webb (1901–1966), Martha Mott Kelley (1906–2005), and Mary Louise White Aswell (1902–1984) wrote detective fiction. Most of the stories were written together by Webb and Wheeler, or by Wheeler alone. Their best-known creation is amateur sleuth Peter Duluth. In 1963, the story collection The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
 

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07DVZMZ4X
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ MysteriousPress.com/Open Road (August 28, 2018)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 28, 2018
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 6.6 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 334 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 10 ratings

About the authors

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  1. Patrick Quentin

    Patrick Quentin

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    I went to school for about 20 years; I enjoy writing a lot I suppose. When I was very young I attended American School of Paris where I achieved very high marks on the English placement exam. I finished at University of California, Davis in 2007 with degree in Political Science and Psychology.

    See more on the author's page
  2. Patrick Quentin

    Patrick Quentin

    Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    I went to school for about 20 years; I enjoy writing a lot I suppose. When I was very young I attended American School of Paris where I achieved very high marks on the English placement exam. I finished at University of California, Davis in 2007 with degree in Political Science and Psychology.

    See more on the author's page
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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
10 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Patto
    5.0 out of 5 stars Actors keep dropping dead — and it’s not in the script!
    Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2023
    Verified Purchase
    Peter Duluth, young Broadway producer/director, is back from undergoing a cure for his alcoholism. He’s got a play that will give him the comeback he craves. He’s in love with a beautiful woman, and Iris loves him back. His cast is pure star material. The only problem is the theater. It’s decrepit, infested with rats — and jinxed!

    Two actors die during rehearsals. The leading man and leading lady hate each other. The juvenile actor wants to tear up his contract. The mild-mannered author has turned difficult. There’s a diabolical blackmailer in the wing’s upsetting everyone. There may be a poisoner among them. And there’s a sinister Siamese cat wandering around the theater. Peter is in despair.

    The chief investor in the production is Dr. Lenz, Peter’s shrink. He’s a god-like figure who gives us hope that the play just might open despite everything. And in fact it’s the enigmatic shrink who solves the problems afflicting the Dagonet theater — and figures out the murderer.

    The first book in this series, Puzzle for Fools, is still my favorite. But I enjoyed Puzzle for Players. It appeared in 1938. I was lucky to find a used PocketBOOK edition.

    Patrick Quentin was the pen name of Hugh Wheeler collaborating with Richard Webb. Wheeler and Webb were British and wrote traditional British detective stories — until they moved to the United States. They then switched to American style speech and tonality to write the Peter Duluth series. Peter makes a very sympathetic amateur sleuth, although his shrink is better at deduction than he is.
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  • Khirul
    3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing
    Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2018
    Verified Purchase
    There's too much theater and too little mystery here. And too many crazy people being passed off as successful actors. The plot and denouement aren't credible.
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  • Kevin Killian
    5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Theatrical Whodunit
    Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2007
    In PUZZLE FOR PLAYERS suave debonair Peter Duluth is newly out of the nuthatch and is trying to jumpstart his theatrical producer career after a long hiatus spent trying to drown his sorrows at the tragic death of his wife, an enforced rest in a luxury nuthouse (with some murders thrown in, the case detailed in Quentin's previous novel A PUZZLE FOR FOOLS), and his meeting the woman who would become his second wife, the celebutante Iris Pattison.

    In the slush pile of scripts delivered "over the transom" Peter has found his ticket back to the bigtime, a domestic drama called TROUBLED WATERS, written in the vein of RAIN by a mild, meek young country fellow Henry Prince. Peter casts Iris in the play, in a supporting part, and for the two big parts he has landed Mirabelle Rue, a wild, flame-haired, vixenish leading lady, and Conrad Wessler, Germany's greatest actor and a recent refugee from Hitler's terror. Like Peter, each of these great stars is also making a comeback, trying to climb out of a personal hell of their own--Mirabelle fleeing a sadistic former husband, Conrad recovering from a plane crash that left his handsome face covered with plastic surgery and his younger brother in a madhouse.

    And someone backstage at the Dagonet Theater is determined to bring terror ringing through the aisles of Broadway. A cat prowls the dressing rooms with a ribbon round its neck with a message of bad luck. The ghost of a strangled woman, ghastly and gray, appears from within the star's dressing room mirror. Bodies start appearing during rehearsal and the police are closing in. Peter is trying to believe in his higher power but Mirabelle's omnipresent bottle of brandy is starting to look more and more attractive...

    The fun of the book is the theatrical milieu and the struggle of theater pros to overcome the roadblocks a mad killer is throwing their way. Wessler and Mirabelle are stereotypes in a way, larger than life divas, and the play they're trying to bring to life is standard melodrama, but Quentin makes this all perfectly intriguing and one hopes for a success for all concerned. Mirabelle must be modeled on Tallulah Bankhead, perhaps Gertrude Lawrence, while Wessler is sort of like Paul Muni and Walter Huston rolled into one. I haven't read them all, but this may well be the best "Golden Age" detective novel set in the theater. (Maybe The G-String Murders is almost as good.) It's miles better than those novels written by Dame New Zealand Theater Woman Ngaio Marsh. Say, I wonder why Agatha Christie, who had years of experience writing for the West End, never wrote a theater novel? If I remember right, one of the Miss Marple movies was set in a little rep company in the provinces, but by and large she seems to have decided to leave the theater out of her work. We can all remember the flamboyant actresses in her novels--LORD EDGWARE DIES and THE MIRROR CRACK'D, but it's almost as if she wanted to fictionalize the real life personae of, respectively, Ruth Draper and Gene Tierney, rather than use a theatrical milieu per se. Or Veronica Cray in THE HOLLOW--a dead ringer for Veronica Lake, but portrayed utterly outside of the Hollywood studio system. This is neither here nor there; I meant just to say, PUZZLE FOR PLAYERS is the real thing.
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