Are you all sitting comfortably? Have you got your copies of Freud? Strap yourselves in for a journey through the darker niches of the human mind. Helen Eustis's famous book takes the psychological detective story to its logical conclusion. An Irish poet is murdered while teaching at a girls' college in the US. Suspects are kept to a minimum, the police are out of sight and clues are non-existent. The role of detectives is taken by a young reporter from a local paper, and the college girl he recruits and later woos in one of the most unsentimental romances in fiction. But their achievements are minimal, and it is the school's psychiatrist, Dr Forstmann, who eventually discovers the truth.
Eustis puts her cards on the table. All the supects are neurotic in some way or other, and the appropriate Freudian explanation is given, usually in textbook terms. It says a great deal for the author's skill that she can turn such an unpromising approach into an intriguing and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny story. There is little deduction here, but keen readers will grasp the hints and identify the murderer by the halfway point. For me the humour seemed to drop off a little after this, but the writing is so good and the characters so convincing that I was more than happy to read on.
Sad that Eustis didn't put her obvious talents to work in a more rational paradigm, but the critics are justified in calling this a classic of its kind. How many psychiatrist-detectives owe their original inspiration to Dr Forstmann? Highly recommended, and an Edgar winner.
The title, by the way? From a poem by Auden:
Let us honour if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.
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