Murder in Pastiche Or, Nine Detectives at Sea by Marion Mainwaring

*Used - good condition

Published by Collier Books 1961

Murder in Pastiche takes us aboard the RMS Florabunda on its voyage from Liverpool to New York in the 1950s. Incredibly, among the passengers are nine famous detectives. After an influential (and despised) American gossip columnist is found murdered, each takes a hand at solving the mystery. Everyone, passenger or crew, is a suspect -- and is thoroughly and amusingly eccentric.

Aboard the heaving, pitching Florabunda the story twists and turns as Marion Mainwaring deftly parodies Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot), Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason), Michael Innes (Sir John Appleby), Ngaio Marsh (Roderick Alleyn), Ellery Queen, Dorothy Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey), Mickey Spillane (Mike Hammer), Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe), and Patricia Wentworth (Miss Maude Silver). Their sleuths rush to solve the mystery before the murderer strikes again; or, worse, the ship arrives in America and they become "the laughingstock of two continents" unable to find whodunit despite their individual and collective brilliance.

At its debut in 1954, Murder in Pastiche was hailed by Anthony Boucher in the New York Times as a “wonderous book” which would be “a permanent addition--both as criticism and as entertainment--to the detective bookshelf.” It has been enjoyed by mystery fans around the world, including William Faulkner (as his niece Dean Faulkner Wells notes in her memoir "Every Day by the Sun"). Sally Rowena Munt in her feminist analysis of crime novels "Murder by the Book?" praises Mainwaring's satirical if affectionate critique of the genre's "generic machismo" and "historic phallocentricity."