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oneblackrooster's review against another edition
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
summermc13's review
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
theoissocool's review against another edition
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.25
fictionfan's review against another edition
4.0
Up the Gunners!
Top football team Arsenal is playing a friendly against the Trojans – an amateur team who have been on an amazing winning streak and are thrilled to be taking on the professionals. The ground is jam-packed – seventy thousand spectators have crammed themselves onto the terraces, mostly Arsenal fans but plenty hoping the Trojans will play well and provide an exciting match. But shortly into the second half, the Trojans’ newest player, right-half John Doyce, collapses and has to be carried off the field. The game continues, with neither players nor crowd knowing that in the treatment room a desperate battle is being carried on to save Doyce’s life. By the time the final whistle is blown, the battle has been lost...
In a lot of ways, this is a standard murder mystery with a Scotland Yard Inspector as detective. But what makes it unique is that it’s set amid the real Arsenal team of its time of writing – 1939 – and the actual players and manager appear in the book. Gribble has also had access to behind the scenes at the stadium, and provides what feels like an authentic picture of what it would have been like playing or working for a top club back then, in the days when even professional sides still had players who had “real” jobs as well as their sporting careers.
I’m not a big football fan, but it’s impossible to be British and not have a reasonable knowledge of the game, and I enjoyed the look back at a time when boys wanted to play for their local teams for the glory of the game, rather than to become fabulously wealthy celebrities with their own clothing label and drug habit – back when sportspeople were actually sporting. It also brought back memories of how terrifying/exhilarating* it was to be packed like sardines in an overfull stadium, the vast majority of people standing on the terraces with only the posh folk sitting in the stands (yeah, strange terminology, I know), and the horror/excitement* of the massive surge forward when your team scored. Those days are gone – the major disasters of the seventies and eighties pushed stadiums to become all-seater, so younger fans won’t ever have had that experience – I don’t know whether that makes them lucky or unlucky, to be honest.
Fortunately, however, the book gets out of the football stadium before my reminiscences turned to boredom, and the plot revolves around the personal lives of the players rather than their sporting careers. Unsurprisingly, Gribble’s victim is one of the fictional Trojan players, and the real players and staff at Arsenal play only minor roles. I think it’s also safe to say that the real people can be discounted as suspects! Doyce was an unpleasant chap with a reputation as a womaniser and had given several of his team-mates and the staff of the Trojans cause to dislike him. He’d only joined the club a week earlier, but several of them had played together before in another team, and another of the Trojans was his business partner. So there’s a good pool of suspects and some intriguing motives for Inspector Slade and Sergeant Clinton to investigate.
Inspector Slade is professional in his approach, but is helped along by his almost superhuman ability to make wild guesses that turn out to be correct. A couple of these were pretty ridiculous, in truth, and I felt they let the plotting down badly – with a little more work Gribble could have made these leaps a result of investigation rather than miraculous-level intuition. Otherwise, the plotting is pretty good, especially in the motivation, and on the whole I liked the characterisation although for the most part it’s not very in-depth. I debated whether it’s “fair-play” - in the introduction, Martin Edwards describes it that way – but I’m not wholly convinced. The explanation when it comes could have applied to several of the suspects – the vital piece of information that identifies the murderer wasn’t available to the reader. There are also odd plot holes, like people being married without their friends and colleagues knowing and people being engaged but no-one knowing to whom. Necessary for the plot to work, but unlikely...
Overall then, I enjoyed this without being entirely convinced by the plotting. The evocative and well-written descriptions of attending a football match back in the days when it was a major weekly occasion in the lives of so much of working-class Britain – of doing the football “pools”, of trying to find out the results of rival matches once the game was over, of seventy thousand people all wending their way homewards very slowly on overcrowded buses and trains – entertained me far more than I anticipated, and I suspect would appeal even more to die-hard football fans (especially ones of a certain age). A walk down memory lane... and, as with so much vintage crime, fun as much for what it shows us about society as for the actual mystery element.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, British Library Crime Classics.
(*delete as appropriate)
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
Top football team Arsenal is playing a friendly against the Trojans – an amateur team who have been on an amazing winning streak and are thrilled to be taking on the professionals. The ground is jam-packed – seventy thousand spectators have crammed themselves onto the terraces, mostly Arsenal fans but plenty hoping the Trojans will play well and provide an exciting match. But shortly into the second half, the Trojans’ newest player, right-half John Doyce, collapses and has to be carried off the field. The game continues, with neither players nor crowd knowing that in the treatment room a desperate battle is being carried on to save Doyce’s life. By the time the final whistle is blown, the battle has been lost...
In a lot of ways, this is a standard murder mystery with a Scotland Yard Inspector as detective. But what makes it unique is that it’s set amid the real Arsenal team of its time of writing – 1939 – and the actual players and manager appear in the book. Gribble has also had access to behind the scenes at the stadium, and provides what feels like an authentic picture of what it would have been like playing or working for a top club back then, in the days when even professional sides still had players who had “real” jobs as well as their sporting careers.
I’m not a big football fan, but it’s impossible to be British and not have a reasonable knowledge of the game, and I enjoyed the look back at a time when boys wanted to play for their local teams for the glory of the game, rather than to become fabulously wealthy celebrities with their own clothing label and drug habit – back when sportspeople were actually sporting. It also brought back memories of how terrifying/exhilarating* it was to be packed like sardines in an overfull stadium, the vast majority of people standing on the terraces with only the posh folk sitting in the stands (yeah, strange terminology, I know), and the horror/excitement* of the massive surge forward when your team scored. Those days are gone – the major disasters of the seventies and eighties pushed stadiums to become all-seater, so younger fans won’t ever have had that experience – I don’t know whether that makes them lucky or unlucky, to be honest.
Fortunately, however, the book gets out of the football stadium before my reminiscences turned to boredom, and the plot revolves around the personal lives of the players rather than their sporting careers. Unsurprisingly, Gribble’s victim is one of the fictional Trojan players, and the real players and staff at Arsenal play only minor roles. I think it’s also safe to say that the real people can be discounted as suspects! Doyce was an unpleasant chap with a reputation as a womaniser and had given several of his team-mates and the staff of the Trojans cause to dislike him. He’d only joined the club a week earlier, but several of them had played together before in another team, and another of the Trojans was his business partner. So there’s a good pool of suspects and some intriguing motives for Inspector Slade and Sergeant Clinton to investigate.
Inspector Slade is professional in his approach, but is helped along by his almost superhuman ability to make wild guesses that turn out to be correct. A couple of these were pretty ridiculous, in truth, and I felt they let the plotting down badly – with a little more work Gribble could have made these leaps a result of investigation rather than miraculous-level intuition. Otherwise, the plotting is pretty good, especially in the motivation, and on the whole I liked the characterisation although for the most part it’s not very in-depth. I debated whether it’s “fair-play” - in the introduction, Martin Edwards describes it that way – but I’m not wholly convinced. The explanation when it comes could have applied to several of the suspects – the vital piece of information that identifies the murderer wasn’t available to the reader. There are also odd plot holes, like people being married without their friends and colleagues knowing and people being engaged but no-one knowing to whom. Necessary for the plot to work, but unlikely...
Overall then, I enjoyed this without being entirely convinced by the plotting. The evocative and well-written descriptions of attending a football match back in the days when it was a major weekly occasion in the lives of so much of working-class Britain – of doing the football “pools”, of trying to find out the results of rival matches once the game was over, of seventy thousand people all wending their way homewards very slowly on overcrowded buses and trains – entertained me far more than I anticipated, and I suspect would appeal even more to die-hard football fans (especially ones of a certain age). A walk down memory lane... and, as with so much vintage crime, fun as much for what it shows us about society as for the actual mystery element.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, British Library Crime Classics.
(*delete as appropriate)
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
bookworm1909's review against another edition
1.0
Boring... SLOW mystery and too easy to figure out.
vsbedford's review against another edition
1.0
One of the the 3 or 4 titles in this series that was truly awful; not just "this isn't my style so I'm not enjoying it" but for reals bad. I basically sighed and gritted my teeth through the last half, mainly propelled by hatred and petty spite. Did this just punish myself? Yes.
I received an ecopy from the publishers and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I received an ecopy from the publishers and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
bev_reads_mysteries's review
4.0
Francis Kindilett has worked for several years to put together an amateur football (soccer) team that will be good enough to take on the best of the professional teams: the Arsenal Gunners. The day has finally come for the big match and he's sure his Trojans are up to the competition. The soccer stands are jam-packed and 70,000 fans are on hand to watch their favorites. The match is hard-fought in the first half with Arsenal gaining a one-nothing advantage and then John Doyce manages a beautiful penalty kick at the beginning of the second half to tie the score. Just as the momentum seems to shift to the amateurs, Doyce goes down on the field.
No one had tackled Doyce. He had been alone when he fell. He had simply folded up like a jack-knife and slipped to the ground.
The ailing player is carried off the field, but nothing the trainer does can rouse Doyce. He's unresponsive and sweating uncontrollably and just after the match has ended so has Doyce's life. Scotland Yard is called in and it's determined that Doyce was murdered with an alkaloid poison. Inspector Slade is the Yard's man and is soon on the hunt for the sender of a mysterious package which arrived for Doyce just in time for half-time; a pretty young blonde woman who asked for Doyce and ran off when told he was dead; and the meaning behind a clipping that accompanied the package which referred to a drowned girl.
Doyce was new to the Trojan squad and didn't have many friends, though there others on the team who had known him from earlier soccer teams. There was a certain coolness between Doyce and his partner in an insurance company, Phil Morring (who also plays for the Trojans), and several of the players though Doyce rather too full of himself, but is there really a motive in all that? Inspector Slade and Sergeant Clinton will have to find out. There's also a wife that no one knew Doyce had--a wife with a devoted admirer.
I have to say...I've never read a soccer match mystery. Gribble gives just enough of the football action to set the stage and provide the setting for the murder without letting the sport overshadow the mystery. It was quite unique to have the members of the actual Arsenal team of 1939 involved in the mystery (though, of course, we all know that none of them will wind up being the murderer). It's very entertaining and nicely plotted. And he did a fine job making me focus on a particular item and derailing my attempt to spot the killer before Slade. I was a teensy bit disappointed that the particular item didn't wind up figuring in the solution at all...but overall I enjoyed this quite a lot.
First posted on my blog My Reader's Block.
No one had tackled Doyce. He had been alone when he fell. He had simply folded up like a jack-knife and slipped to the ground.
The ailing player is carried off the field, but nothing the trainer does can rouse Doyce. He's unresponsive and sweating uncontrollably and just after the match has ended so has Doyce's life. Scotland Yard is called in and it's determined that Doyce was murdered with an alkaloid poison. Inspector Slade is the Yard's man and is soon on the hunt for the sender of a mysterious package which arrived for Doyce just in time for half-time; a pretty young blonde woman who asked for Doyce and ran off when told he was dead; and the meaning behind a clipping that accompanied the package which referred to a drowned girl.
Doyce was new to the Trojan squad and didn't have many friends, though there others on the team who had known him from earlier soccer teams. There was a certain coolness between Doyce and his partner in an insurance company, Phil Morring (who also plays for the Trojans), and several of the players though Doyce rather too full of himself, but is there really a motive in all that? Inspector Slade and Sergeant Clinton will have to find out. There's also a wife that no one knew Doyce had--a wife with a devoted admirer.
I have to say...I've never read a soccer match mystery. Gribble gives just enough of the football action to set the stage and provide the setting for the murder without letting the sport overshadow the mystery. It was quite unique to have the members of the actual Arsenal team of 1939 involved in the mystery (though, of course, we all know that none of them will wind up being the murderer). It's very entertaining and nicely plotted. And he did a fine job making me focus on a particular item and derailing my attempt to spot the killer before Slade. I was a teensy bit disappointed that the particular item didn't wind up figuring in the solution at all...but overall I enjoyed this quite a lot.
First posted on my blog My Reader's Block.
robinwalter's review against another edition
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.75
As a longtime Gooner I had to read this. It was difficult to get into but picked up toward the end. I suspect the movie will actually be more enjoyable
annarella's review against another edition
5.0
I love British Library Crime Classics and this was no exception.
I was curious about a book set in the soccer world and it was interesting to have a look at that world.
The mystery was a classic whodunit, engaging and entertaining.
I loved the plot, solid and without no plot hole, the cast of characters and the setting.
There was a bonus added because I discovered the movie and had pleasure in seeing it.
A very good mystery, highly recommended!
Many thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and Edelweiss for this ARC
I was curious about a book set in the soccer world and it was interesting to have a look at that world.
The mystery was a classic whodunit, engaging and entertaining.
I loved the plot, solid and without no plot hole, the cast of characters and the setting.
There was a bonus added because I discovered the movie and had pleasure in seeing it.
A very good mystery, highly recommended!
Many thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and Edelweiss for this ARC
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