With this installment, we have another Jean Webster story downloaded from Gutenberg. This time around it's a mystery.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Four-Pools Mystery by Jean Webster C+
This is a murder mystery, though it had me wondering for a while, since we didn't get to the murder until something like 40% into the story. An attorney, our narrator, needing rest after an exhausting case - this seems to be a popular device to get people off of work and into the story - goes down south to visit his uncle on an old plantation in Virginia. The uncle has two sons, the elder of which he disinherited, the young is still around, but often at odds with his father, plus a daughter who ran off with a fellow her father disliked. He disinherited her too, but she died. You know, an old southern aristocrat.
Once our narrator arrives, a series of unexplained events like the supper's chicken being stolen out of the oven, plus all sort of food and other stuff go missing. The black servants consider this the work of the ghost of a slave beaten to death, i.e. a haunting. Or as it is written in the book, "Ha'nt" Our murder then follows, and eventually an newspaper reporter who is known for solving mysteries for his paper is eventually brought in to solve the crime.
The story is well written, fairly entertaining, with a great deal of time spent in the lead up to the central mystery, examining the characters, local, and customs of the South, within 40 years of the end of slavery. The black characters all talk in that stereotypical dialect, all are superstitious, and all are portrayed as loyal to the stern Grandfather, even though he beats them on occasion. The northern narrator finds this surprising, and in the end, Webster has the newspaper man say that the person murdered actually committed suicide by the way he treated the blacks; the blacks needed to be respected and treated as people. Still, in 2025 I don't think this story would be considered acceptable on account of its stereotypical portrayal of the uneducated southern black, however sympathetic it might be.
So to sum it up, nothing special, dated, and not a story that I think you have to go out and read.
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