The Roman Hat Mystery Lib/E

The Roman Hat Mystery was moderately entertaining as an early golden age mystery but it dragged on too long for the material and lacked nuance with the plot, characters, and themes.

Being a fair play mystery it gave me the chance to solve the mystery alongside the detectives, perhaps a little too literally, which I did and I was right, but it wasn't as satisfying as I had hoped. After finding out the solution, I realized it wasn't as fair play as I had wanted and yet it wasn't as challenging as I had wanted either. We didn't know the motive for the murder or anything about the murderer until the end and it was disappointing with modern eyes and not explored at all.

The entire book is firmly set in its time period and everything relies on knowing the decade—particularly to understand how men dressed to go to the theatre, which is integral to the plot. I felt there was a bit of missed opportunity (Chekhov would be disappointed) in that at a play called “Gunplay” where lots of gunfire happens onstage a man is poisoned in the audience. Why poisoned instead of shot?

Anyway it was a lot of little annoyances that didn't add up, plus messy plotting and characterizing, that put this at three stars for me.