The Last Houseparty

I can't say I liked this book. I am always drawn to Peter Dickinson's writing, even though it is often unsettling, and this is probably the most disturbing of his books that I've read. He wrote an impressive range of books for children and for adults: science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical fiction, suspense. This one might be considered mystery or suspense, I guess, or psychological fiction, and is definitely written for adults.

Most of the story takes place at Snailwood Castle in 1937 and 1980, bouncing back and forth in time, with isolated episodes occurring at various times and places in between. The main timelines are tied together by a spectacular tower clock with moving figures. The effects of events that happened at the show more house party in 1937 are still being felt in 1980. What happened at the house party? We don't find out until over two thirds of the way through the book. There is no traditional mystery structure. As often happens, Dickinson's conclusion leaves us with as many questions as it answers.

I found the book hard to get into at first, because political discussion was pretty central to the 1937 stream of the story. But I kept going because I wanted to find out what the crime was. By the time I got to the crime—and it was a nasty one—I was deeply invested in the characters and had to finish. Both the crime and the solution were disturbing, but I can't help admiring Dickinson's skill at creating the puzzle, building suspense, and messing with my expectations.

The cover illustration on my copy of The Last House-Party is excellent. It perfectly matches the descriptions of the castle clock. And the back cover shows a scene from the book with the clock tower in its courtyard. It's nice to see a cover that so accurately matches the story. show less

The story stayed with me and kept my interest even though it seems to spend a lot of time discussing seemingly irrelevant details, such as a long description of a game of croquet, and take forever to even tell us what crime was committed. There is a lot of bouncing back and forth in time. And there is a man who may or may not be someone who disappeared soon after something happened at the houseparty. I thought that the book would end with an acknowledgement that we may never definitively know what happened, but we do learn what got done and whodunit. It does end with uncertainly however: now that someone knows, what next?

A quote from a paragraph in which the author discusses describing / remembering / explaining an event to oneself or show more others:
There are monsters in our museums, skeletons pieced together and given plaster flesh and painted skin and then taken by visitors for accurate portrayals of the creatures that paddled in ancient swamps, until some maverick palaeontologist reinterprets the crushed and exiguous fossil-finds and one of the monsters discovers that it was never that shape at all. [p. 149] show less

one of my favorite British mystery authors

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