Okay.as a huge fan of Houdini, I was a little disappointed in the characterization in this book. My equally beloved harpo came through unscathed . Plot was ok, would have expected more wit from a book featuring Benchley & Parker ( )

Dorothy Parker and crew are back! This time they get mixed up in the nutty world of art as a friend of their kills himself jumping of the Brooklyn Bridge, only to see his so/so art jump up in price! Their quest to find out what happened to him takes them to the den of Mickey Finn and Harry Houdini performances at the Hippodrome. A fun adventure with Parker and Benchely coming to the rescue yet again! ( )

The Algonquin Round Table was a literary salon that met in the Algonquin Hotel in New York in the 1920s, bringing together some of the great writers in that time and place, more specifically, Dorothy Parker and Peter Benchley, but also including Harold Ross, Robert Sherwood and Alexander Woollcott. The conceit here is that Parker and Benchley become amateur detectives in the Thin Man tradition solving crimes of an artistic bent. These writers were wits of the highest order and the author tries to inject some of that bon mots humour into the novel, with some, but not complete, success.

Murphy describes the 1920s New York world well and squeezes in several references to historical people, places and events. What is missing here, I think, is the acid burn of the original writers. They were funny with their puns and speedy retorts, but the real laughs came with an edge of maliciousness and Murphy does not deliver on that.

The plot is fairly standard with a nice twist half way through, but peters out after that as too much of the book is concerned with tying up loose ends and the sub-plots do not compensate for that. ( )

This second volume in the series was OK, a very light read. Naming a main character in a mystery Ernie McGuffin made one part of it very easy to guess. At least the mystery took another turn after that, though not an unexpected one, that was harder to solve. ( )

This is the second book in the punny and funny An Algonquin Round Table Mystery series. Many of the characters and the Algonquin room are real, but the story itself is fiction. Not a page goes by that there isn't a pun or the reader won't chuckle.

Dorothy Parker has the dubious honor of being selected by Ernie MacGuffin, an artist of covers for pulp magazines, to what turns out to be his suicide note. Parker and and Benchley, shortly before midnight, are leaving their favorite speakeasy when Parker remembers the note. She reads the note, only to find out that Ernie is going to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge at midnight. They make a dash for the bridge, but arrive there to find Ernie's shoes and a painting of the bridge. But a body is never found.

Trying to find out more about the life of Ernie to write a story, Dorothy comes a former stripper who claims to have had contact with Ernie from the other side. The Great Houdini is in town and he is talked into attending a seance with Dorothy. Of course they find that Ernie is not really dead, but only working a scam to make his paintings valuable. In the meantime, it is also learned that Ernie's widow is seeing someone from her hometown. Then Ernie's body is found, but he has been murdered.

So, Dorothy and Benchley need to learn whether it was the wife, the shady lawyer who was running his own scam with Ernie's paintings after the apparent suicide,or possibly the new boyfriend.

A thoroughly enjoyable story with very interesting characters.

Looking forward to the next punny one. ( )