The Poison Oracle

First line: "With as much passion as his tepid nature was ever likely to generate, Wesley Morris stared at Dinah through the observation window."

Well, in 1974 this might have been an amusing little mystery novel, but today it just reads as atrociously racist.
Too bad, because I love the idea of a psycholinguist as hero!

What an easy premise: a murder is committed and only an animal witnessed the crime. The reader knows from the beginning, well in advance there will be murders. At least two of them. There are frequent reminders to these crimes throughout the book if only to keep the upcoming events in place and anticipated. The story centers around Dr. Wesley Naboth Morris. He is a zoo keeper who speaks Japanese; tutors his Oxford classmate's son, an Arab prince in English and is, by trade, a psycholinguist. His side project is working with Dinah, a chimapanzee, to determine if primates can learn coherent sentences using plastic symbols. It is Dinah who witnesses the promised murders. The story begins with an interesting twist when a Japanese airliner show more is hijacked and makes an emergency landing at the Sultan's palace. To further complicate The Poison Oracle the Sultan's palace is surrounded by the Swampmen. Living in the swamps these tribes are outsiders to the palace. They are different from the community of Arabs that border their swamp - divided by skin color, culture, and most obvious of course, language. Some end up as servants in the palace but most are misunderstood and feared to be evil. The Poison Oracle is a story about language but it is also a story about oil. The Arabs believe there is oil in the marshland. A war with the marshmen would drive their tribes out. Dr. Morris has the thankless task of trying to solve the mystery of the murders, but also acting communicator with the marshmen. show less

This man makes me proud to be classified as a mystery writer.