The Craig Poisoning Mystery: A Chief Inspector Pointer Mystery

This review is for the paperback reprint of "The Craig Poisoning Mystery" (author A.E. Fielding) by "Resurrected Press". This is my tenth review of reprints by Resurrected Press of the A.E. Fielding books. The mystery is another good A. E. Fielding mystery, with Chief Inspector Pointer as an excellent character (he arrives early on the scene in this book), BUT the editing of this edition is certainly less than "good". Again, it appears that the original hardbound book was scanned, but the publisher's OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software is not of high quality AND there has been no assurance via editing to assure that the book is the same as the original work.Although not as poorly edited as many of the other A.E. Fielding books reprinted by this publisher, there are still significant errors, which include: a few hard returns mid-line with the remainder of the sentence indented on the following line; a few hyphenated words mid-sentence that should not be hyphenated (i.e., these words were probably hyphenated in the original text when the word went from one line to another; however, in the scanning of the text, the words remained hyphenated and due to different fonts and margins, the word(s) were mid-line); a few areas of spaces and hyphens adjacent; some extra semi-colons; a few mis-spelled words (e.g., griniy instead of grimy, J know instead of I know, etc.); a few sentences out of order (i.e., sentence is placed prior to the paragraph in which it should have been); missing words/phrases and extra words/phrases such that sentences are nonsensesentences run together and no breaks where new paragraphs should begin; and, too many arbitrary ". . . .".If you can get through the poorly edited text, the mystery is a good mystery, with some definite red-herrings, and with enough information where one (if very attentive) can (almost) solve the mystery. In addition, there is a very special line on page 241 which would be significant to everyone ("...what we find out for ourselves is really ours".).After reading one original hardbound mystery (old hardbound book) by A. E. Fielding, and finding the mystery to be an excellent mystery and excellently written, I bought 11 of these reprints from Amazon because I could not find the originals. This is the tenth of the 11 which I have read and I will continue to review the remaining reprints when I have finished reading them. It is truly a bad reflection on the publishing industry when a publisher does not care about correct scanning of the old classical books. I, personally, will never buy another book that has been published by this publisher (and there are many). It is difficult to believe that others actually read these reprints and provide good reviews without mentioning the multitude of errors.

I read a Kindle copy. I didn't buy the book pictured, although a "real" copy would certainly be worth having. This is a Golden Age detective novel with a classic challenge. A 4-star with no hesitation. (I save my 5-stars for super-books, like "Pride and Prejudice" or "The Last Chronicle of Barset" or mysteries as good as Strong Poison" and "The Franchise Affair.")

I only give this book three stars because it, as I admit does many another mystery story, repeats itself over and over. Then all of a sudden at the end, people have miraculous insights and memories that solve the mystery like magic. It has a butler, a gatekeeper, some aristocrats and Scotland Yard so it was not a complete waste.

This novel sees Inspector Pointer onceAgain looking at the toes of his shoes as he ponders new clues, Pointer orders those at Scotland Yard to perform leads while he trudges forward analyzing and delineating. Notice how he interacts with his colleagues always respectfully. His five star rating shines on! Rebecca's rating is five star.

You will enjoy the mysteries. I intend to read the whole series. Story lines will keep you guessing.

my kind of book

The twists at the end seemed much too contrived--not the best in this series.

I don't like that Inspector Pointer doesn't come into the story until halfway thru the book.