Death in Captivity
Death in Captivity is a mystery novel by the British crime writer Michael Gilbert, first published in the United Kingdom in 1952 by Hodder and Stoughton and in the United States by Harper & Brothers. It was Gilbert's sixth novel and, unlike his previous ones, does not feature Chief Inspector Hazlerigg in any way. Nor is it set in Gilbert's usual locales of London, the English countryside, or France. Instead, while it has many of the elements of the classic detective story, it is also a gripping novel of mounting suspense that takes place in a 1943 prisoner of war camp for British officers in northern Italy—it was the first of Gilbert's numerous later works that would feature suspense and danger as much or more as elements of detection.
Plot
A murder has been committed, but not in the typical enormous country house in the English countryside of the Golden Age of Detection. Instead, a Greek prisoner of war interned in a camp for British officers is found dead in an underground tunnel that a number of the officers have been tirelessly working on in secret in the hope of fleeing the camp.
Reception and Appraisals
Anthony Boucher of the New York Times said that "the first 1952 book to reach this reviewer's desk is one which wouldn't disgrace any Best-of-the-Year list" and went on to say that it concerned:
...an important murder trial, with real understanding of courtroom psychology and technique. But the camera eye of the author constantly flashes from this... to the efforts of two likable and believable amateurs detectives who are striving to assemble last-minute evidence for the defense; and their adventures, involving maquisards and collaborators from the past, and gold-smugglers and secret agents of the present, make a thriller as wildly exciting as the courtroom scenes are suavely persuasive. It's hard to recall any technical tour de force of fusion quite so admirably integrated as this. Mr. Gilbert is one of the most accomplished leaders of the new British school of murder writing.[1]
An appraisal some years after its publication comes from Barzun and Taylor's encyclopedic Catalogue of Crime:
A superb, though harrowing, story of murder in a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Italy towards the end of the last world war. The skill with which suspense is kept up during a series of trivial incidents related to oppression and plans of escape is equaled only by the management of a large number of characters, Italian and English.[2]
Notes
- ↑ Criminals at Large, "The New York Times", 6 January 1952 at [1]
- ↑ Jacques Barzun & Wendell Hertig Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime,Harper & Row, New York, "Second Impression Corrected", 1973, page 208