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Lady Killer
Earl Borstleman, Professor of Mathematics at State University, was a medium sort of man--medium height and weight, medium-colored hair, medium-sized features.
Altogether quiet, conservative and mild, his sole (and wholly innocent) idiosyncrasy was a gentle craving for neatness and order.
Hardly the sort of man whom you would expect to murder his faithful loving wife.
But, quite suddenly on the morning of fortieth birthday, Earl Borstleman decided to do just that.
Altogether quiet, conservative and mild, his sole (and wholly innocent) idiosyncrasy was a gentle craving for neatness and order.
Hardly the sort of man whom you would expect to murder his faithful loving wife.
But, quite suddenly on the morning of fortieth birthday, Earl Borstleman decided to do just that.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1957
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 3, 2018
I loved this. The story of a maths professor who wants to kill his wife and tries to apply logic to not get caught
March 21, 2015
For my full review, please visit Casual Debris.
The 22 November 1957 edition of The Spectator blurbs that Lady Killer is a "readable" crime novel featuring "yet another mild-mannered man" in a work that adds "little to what Mr. Iles did, once and for all, in Malice Aforethought." I'm not familiar with Francis Iles's novel, though it appears to hold up well, while William Hardy's Lady Killer seems to have been immortalized in lukewarm a Spectator review blurb. In fact, I had to manually add the novel to Goodreads where it did not yet exist, though a small number of little-read Hardy works do (intermingling, incidentally, with other books written by other William Hardies).
In Lady Killer, mild-mannered Earl Borstleman decides, on his fortieth birthday to kill his wife. As a mathematician he feels he can, via the supreme logic afforded by his intellect, produce a perfect crime. With some pondering, both patient and impatient, he settles on a plan to confuse the crime amid others, to essentially kill five unrelated women in his college town, and insert wife into victim slot number three. Conveniently, a bright student, a recent returnee from the Korean War, would fit in nicely to take the fall for the crimes, and Prof. Borstleman could live happily in his little OCD world.
The flaws in the novel are numerous, yet as the reviewer of The Spectator pointed out over half a century ago, it is readable. Quick, somewhat enjoyable, somewhat interesting. Utterly flawed.
The 22 November 1957 edition of The Spectator blurbs that Lady Killer is a "readable" crime novel featuring "yet another mild-mannered man" in a work that adds "little to what Mr. Iles did, once and for all, in Malice Aforethought." I'm not familiar with Francis Iles's novel, though it appears to hold up well, while William Hardy's Lady Killer seems to have been immortalized in lukewarm a Spectator review blurb. In fact, I had to manually add the novel to Goodreads where it did not yet exist, though a small number of little-read Hardy works do (intermingling, incidentally, with other books written by other William Hardies).
In Lady Killer, mild-mannered Earl Borstleman decides, on his fortieth birthday to kill his wife. As a mathematician he feels he can, via the supreme logic afforded by his intellect, produce a perfect crime. With some pondering, both patient and impatient, he settles on a plan to confuse the crime amid others, to essentially kill five unrelated women in his college town, and insert wife into victim slot number three. Conveniently, a bright student, a recent returnee from the Korean War, would fit in nicely to take the fall for the crimes, and Prof. Borstleman could live happily in his little OCD world.
The flaws in the novel are numerous, yet as the reviewer of The Spectator pointed out over half a century ago, it is readable. Quick, somewhat enjoyable, somewhat interesting. Utterly flawed.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews