robinwalter 's review for:

The Case of the Platinum Blonde: A Ludovic Travers Mystery by Christopher Bush

4.0

mysterious relaxing medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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 This was the seventeenth Travers mystery I've read and in some ways the most interesting. Both the as always excellent introduction from Curtis Evans and the intriguing opening chapter talk about Travers' crisis of conscience. Travers as narrator extends that in the form of a challenge to readers - will those who read "his" story suffer the same crisis of conscience, and would they make the same decision he does, or not? As openings go, it got me completely hooked. 

 

This fascinating approach was not without its downside however. The story was not remotely Fair Play. Despite a quite lengthy and explicit Chekhov's rifle paragraph in which Travers tells the reader that absolutely everything in the story they're about to read is there is a critical element and there is no padding, he also explicitly says that he withholds information - from the reader as he does from the police. 

 

Because I seldom read mysteries with the intent of trying to figure out whodunit, the mystery that intrigued me in this story was the nature of that crisis of conscience and the related questions of how Travers resolved it and whether I would suffer any pangs of conscience myself. This meant that I read the story quite quickly because I was in a hurry to get to the dénouement. 

 

In the end, that climactic reveal was a bit of a damp squib. There was little evidence that Travers' conscience was really that troubled at all by the decision that he made, and because he had withheld from the reader key pieces of information relating to identities and motives, it felt like the reader wasn't given much  opportunity to suffer the moral dilemma promised at the start. Poirot’s Curtain it was not 

 

This is the second Travers story that I've read in which he is operating more or less solo as a PI, and both he and his authors seem to have settled into it more comfortably. I like the inventive and teasing introduction, even if the reveal wasn't all that, and Travers does come across less pompous and priggish than and some earlier stories. An enjoyable addition to the series for me, I look forward to seeing how his independent career develops in later stories.