Peter Straub

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The Return of the Blue Rose

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SOURCE: "The Return of the Blue Rose," in The New York Times, June 27, 1993, p. 24.

[In the following favorable review, Wilson provides a plot summary of The Throat.]

With The Throat, Peter Straub concludes a trilogy that began with the novel Koko and continued with Mystery. He deftly recapitulates the themes of the first two, then modulates them into that of this very impressive finale.

The police department of Millhaven, Ill., had closed the book on the Blue Rose murder case back in 1950 when a homicide detective named William Damrosch was found dead in his home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, having left a note with the words "Blue Rose" on the desk in front of him. Tim Underhill wrote a novel, "The Divided Man," about the case.

After that, Underhill now tells us, "I thought I was done with Damrosch, with Millhaven and with the Blue Rose murders. Then I got a call from John Ransom, another old Millhaven acquaintance…. John Ransom still lived in Millhaven. His wife had been attacked and beaten into a coma, and her attacker had scrawled the words BLUE ROSE on the wall above her body."

So he flies to Millhaven and links up with Tom Pasmore, the son of Lamont von Heilitz, the town's legendary sleuth, who may have been a victim of the Blue Rose killer himself, though his death occurred long after the case was closed. To solve the mystery of the attack on April Ransom and the murders that have subsequently been committed, Underhill is forced to explore regions of his psyche and his past that are, to say the least, disturbing. His sister, also named April, had been murdered just before the original series of Blue Rose killings began. Her death had never been connected with the others, even by him, but now he's not so sure. There is also a Vietnam connection Underhill and Ransom had some dealings there, though Underhill was in the Army and Ransom served with a Special Forces unit.

The Throat can fairly be described as a classic mystery novel. The emphasis here is on character and ratiocination. Tom Pasmore, for instance, is a worthy descendant of the line of dandified gumshoes that began with Poe's Dupin. Given its size and scope, however, Mr. Straub's novel has more in common with those of Wilkie Collins than with Poe's more modest tales.

Mr. Straub dutifully puts style at the service of plot, so one tends not to notice the clarity and smoothness of his prose. But every now and then a passage leaps out, such as the description of an attack of pain Underhill has: "a combination of burn and puncture … the legacy of the metal fragments embedded in my back … moving around, crawling toward the surface like Lazarus, where first a sharp edge, then a blunt curl, would emerge."

What gives The Throat its particular resonance is that its underlying theme seems to have less to do with sublunary crime and criminals than with the more transcendent mystery of moral contagion, the permanent scars it can inflict and the curious bonds it causes to be formed.

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From Fiend to Friend, The Daemonic Feminine in Modern Gothic