Message From Sirius

by Cecil Jenkins

Inspector Marc Island has his hands full as he investigates the murder of England's top rock singer. Offbeat and interesting. - The Mystery Lover's Companion, Art Bourgeau

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

I was educated at Trinity College Dublin, plus postgraduate work at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris. I have taught at university level in Paris, then at Exeter and Sussex, with year as visiting prof at UBC Vancouver.
My literary interests are in French and German as well as in English, but I am also interested in philosophy, history and politics.
A former soccer player, I enjoy various sports as well the theatre and the cinema.
I am married with a daughter and twin sons, and I now live - rather to my surprise - in the bourgeois arty pseudo-village of Hampstead in London, UK.

Reviews

[Ralph · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somewhere in this book you can find an interesting mystery, some well-drawn characters and a competent police procedural involving Scotland Yard. To find all that, however, you have to make your way through narration as dense as Brer Rabbit’s bramble patch, characterization slathered on thick as mud, and dialogue delivered with the panache of a traffic report. Add to those drawbacks an extremely dated political background pulled from the cold-war headlines of 1961 and you have a novel extremely difficult for the modern reader, even for one well versed in the political and social history of the time. And, yet, it was lauded, then, by the likes of Agatha Christie, Julian Symons and C.D. Lewis.

The reader’s problems with this book begins with the title, “Message from Sirius,” surely more suited for a science fiction novel than a mystery, but halfway through the book we discover there is a reason for the title. Then there is the narrative voice used to guide the reader from the first page forward. For me, it was like being told a story by an old man prone to muttering to himself; he always knew what he was talking about because he had been there, but since I hadn't his mumbled references were often vague and confusing, and when groups of people were talking, it seemed more like a screenplay with stage directions than an actual conversation in a novel.

The mystery with which the book begins (after a very bizarre nuclear-themed rock opera skit by the victim) is a variant upon the locked room theme, the difference being that instead of being in an enclosed space with no possible killer, the murder takes place in full view of hundreds with no possible killer…in any case, it’s an impossible murder. In a book by Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr, the impossible murder and its solution would take center stage, but, here, it’s quickly shunted off to the sidelines, only to be brought up later whenever one of the high-profile suspects (political, media, nobility or entertainment world) comes under suspicion. Eventually, even the mystery itself is overshadowed by world government conferences and nuclear showdowns. When Superintendent Ireland eventually solves the mystery (I give nothing away, for you know he must) it feels like something of an anticlimax, and the unmasking of the killer is done without witnesses, with no ramifications being revealed in the novel, other than Ireland’s own personal reactions.

Despite the faults I've laid out this is not a bad book, and the determined reader can plow through the dense narrative and oddly formatted dialogue and still enjoy the mystery. Not only determined but able to understand arcane political references, and able to believe there was once upon a time a world in which politicians held conferences upon which the fate of the world really did hinge…in short, a world totally unlike our own.

[Love of Hopeless Causes · Rating 1 out of 5]

Compelling cover and sleeve propoganda. I didn't know there was such a thing as, "too British," until I attempted this.