A review by sharkybookshelf
The Floating Admiral by The Detection Club

4.0

In a sleepy seaside estuary town, a retired sailor lands a rowing boat containing a dead body, but Inspector Rudge suspects that there’s more to it than initially meets the eye…

I read this on a whim as a bonus entry in my #SharkyReadsChristie project - it’s a collaborative murder mystery where various members of The Detection Club (including Agatha Christie, which is how I came across it) each contribute a chapter, a “relay murder mystery” if you will. Was it an amazing murder mystery? Not particularly. Was it a fun concept and an enjoyable read? Absolutely - each author has to incorporate loose ends from previous chapters and cannot introduce randomly confusing clues (all clues must be justifiable). The result is, of course, a mish-mash of styles and pacing, but I thoroughly enjoyed playing along and thinking how the clues that get thrown in might get interpreted later on, seeing the directions in which the different writers took the story, what they each chose to focus on. Each author also wrote a brief summary of how they expected the solution to unfold, and these were all included in the notes at the end, which was actually my favourite part of the book - it was fascinating to see where they drew similar conclusions and where they really didn’t, and how the same clues were sometimes interpreted so differently. It very much drives home the intellectual puzzle style of so many “Golden Age” murder mysteries (which, incidentally, is what I love so much about Christie). A relatively middling murder mystery, but a fun read nevertheless by dint of how it was put together - best approached as a game while considering where you would go with each clue that pops up.