01/2018

Not not a thriller, mystery, psychological crime story. I thought this was good. One thing that struck me, this is a rare story where a man is the helpless victim, and he needs a female hero to save him. Also it seems a play. It all takes place in two rooms. From 1965.17 s Sportyrod509 30

A locked “turret” room murder mystery. A member of the wealthy Whitman family is attacked in their home, but survives. Harold, an ex-inlaw, appears at the family home, oblivious of the crime, only to discover he is the number one suspect. He is seen only by Edie…

Edie, a Whitman relative, has her own gripes with the wealthy family and on the spur of the moment decides to take justice and the investigation into her own hands.

The Whitman household has three generations under it’s roof. Individually they are strange and at times whacky. But as a family unit, they are powerful. in the song, “Oh Whacking Day” in the Simpsons, the family and hired crew are ned to a pitchfork and baseball bat-bearing mob, ready to take out whoever they judge to be responsible. Harold, recently released from the psychiatric ward, is in far graver danger than he was in the institution.

To avoid spoilers, I will just say the locked-room mystery is very tight. No-one gets in, no-one gets out. The tension is high. So who dunnit and howdunnit? The one main difference from the genre is that the reader is let into the secret earlier than usual.

I’d recommend this to readers who enjoy Agatha Christie books. It was written in the 1960’s. The characters are interesting, there is a mega-b*tch or two. There is a gathering of the suspects reveal. The investigation is conducted by an amateur with a grudge, moreso than the police, although the police are involved. The mystery has lots of elements to it. united-states-of-america12 s7 comments Alan Teder2,260 151

Murderer in the Turret?
Review of the Mysterious Press/Open Road Kindle eBook edition (2012) of the Amereon Ltd. hardcover original (1965)

This was quite an unorthodox book in the crime/mystery genre for several reasons. The culprit(s) are revealed quite early, but everyone is oblivious as to how twisted they are, except for the heroine investigator Edie. Edie takes it upon herself to not only shield the main suspect, but to also solve the crime of an attempted murder in the mansion of her relatives the Whitmans. The title room only comes into it because that is where she is hiding the suspect. The police are at first reluctant to believe her explanations, but finally the craziness will out and all is revealed.


The front cover of the original 1965 Amereon Ltd. hardcover edition. Image sourced from Goodreads.

I was perhaps not as taken with The Turret Room as my GR friend Sportyrod, so I encourage you to read his 5-star review.

I discovered The Turret Room by Charlotte Armstrong from reading Christopher Fowler's excellent The Book of Forgotten Authors (2017) which I recently reviewed and rated as Five Stars. Charlotte Armstrong is the 2nd of the "Forgotten Authors" that I have investigated after 1st reading books by Gladys Mitchell.

Fowler describes Armstrong's style as follows:
She had abandoned a detective series to start this new style of writing, which largely avoids the whodunnit angle to portray women locked in psychological warfare with the members of their extended families and male-dominated workforces. Naturally she deals with stereotypes of the time, but the thrill comes in seeing her constrained protagonists gradually become empowered.

Trivia and Links
The Turret Room was not adapted for film, but several other Charlotte Armstrong books were. She also wrote for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television program.

Fowler cites her book Mischief (1951) which was adapted as the 1952 film Don't Bother to Knock directed by Roy Ward Baker and starring Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe. Two French movies by director Claude Chabrol were based on books by Armstrong. These were Merci pour le Chocolat (2000), based on The Chocolate Cobweb (1948)) and La Rupture (1970) based on The Balloon Man (1968).

Fowler also recommends Armstrong's Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense for both the title story and The Other Shoe.2023-reading-challenges crime-fiction ebook-edition ...more12 s3 comments Greg2,013 18

COUNTDOWN: - Mid-20th Century North American Crime
BOOK 166 (of 250)
HOOK - 4 stars: "His feet were lumps of pain. The foot he had once broken ached a little deeper than the other...His head was light...it had been too much...to walk all the way....He guessed it was afternoon, the third day he had been walking..." Where is he heading? Why is he struggling, walking 74 miles in so much pain?
PACE - 3: Armstrong tells her story in just 145 pages, just right for this story.
PLOT - 3: Harold Page (ex-soldier) had married into the Whitman family just before serving in the army. During his service, his wife has had a deaf child and has divorced Harold, who is now a hospital orderly and decides to return to the Whitman home to confront his ex-family and see his son. Edie is a poor relative of the family who is now a social worker and she too has returned to the family house for a 2-week vacation. But Harold has arrived right after a family member has been beaten and is hospitalized, and his ex-wife says she saw Harold around the house at the time of the beating. Edie hides Harold in 'the turret room' until the beaten woman dies in the hospital. Then things get messy. This is gothic flipped over: we already know who is hiding out "upstairs" and we're told up front who kills who and why. This could have gone awry but Armstrong keeps things just this side of a gothrom.
PEOPLE - 3: Harold has to fight, and fight for his word, his honestly. His ex, Wendy, is a spoiled child only marrying Harold to get away, then realizes she misses the money and doesn't want to be bothered with the deaf child. Mrs. Beck is a truly wicked housekeeper, no doubt this is an homage to "Rebecca". And the rest of the family is as dysfunctional as Wendy. But an hour or so after closing the book, Harold stands out, but no one else.
ATMOSPHERE - 2: A house has a turret, but there is no other description of the exterior of the house, other than a tree. It's as if this had been a stage play taking place in the foyer of the house then converted to a novel. Very little in the way of place: we could be anywhere.
SUMMARY: My overall rating is 3.0.20th-century mid-20th-century-american-crime reviewed5 s Joanne829 49

All I ask of a book these days, is that it's interesting enough to distract me from Treasonous Trump TV. 5 s Chana1,605 143

This book isn't a mystery per se, it is really more of a farce. I don't mean that in a negative way, I mean it more the classic French farce with people going in and out of doors unbeknownst to the others, a 'quick, hide in the closet' type of farce. This farce has nothing to do with sex as the French farce usually does. This farce concerns a young man who is thought to be a "madman", has already been accused of beating his ex-wife and spent time in a mental institution being analyzed to the nth degree, as a result of the accusations of his ex-wife and her family. After being released from the hospital, he shows up at his ex-wife's family home, having walked 75 miles to get there, and is lucky enough to encounter a poor cousin of the family who is a social worker and is familiar with his ex-wife. She believes the young man innocent and hides him in her turret bedroom. Let the farce begin! I thought it was amusing, well-written and had a much happier ending than if this happened in real life. I can indulge in happy endings.mystery-lite mystery-psychological2 s Oliver ClarkeAuthor 39 books1,264

I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the other two Charlotte Armstrong novels I’ve read (‘Mischief’ and ‘A Dram of Poison’) but it was still an entertaining read. The premise is really neat (a young man who has been in a mental institution returns to the family home of his wealthy former wife to find an assault on a member of the family has taken place and he is the prime suspect) and some of the characters are great (especially the plucky Edie) but it didn’t grab me her other two books did. It ends up feeling a little too contrived and convoluted to be truly satisfying, but it’s still gripping and the battle between Edie and her unpleasant, snobby relatives is great fun.1 Barbara Gordon114 7

Blurb: They said he was an insane killer. But young Edie Thompson did not believe them. She was certain that he was innocent, that his strangeness was only a mask for his terror. Was she right to hide him from the police? Was she saving a harmless youth...or setting the stage for another murder--her own?
Review: a short, tightly-focussed story of the leading family in a small town, and the unpleasantness growing in that stagnant pond. The omniscient PoV may be unsettling for a modern reader, as Armstrong shifts effortlessly from one character's thoughts to another, but this is still an absorbing fast read.1 Vintagebooklvr3,619 54

A good beginning but it began to drag for me. There was too much internal ruminations of some characters that really had nothing to do with the mystery. If that helped build the characters, that is one thing, here it just annoyed me. Also, I don't the use of "insane" characters during a mystery. It's just too easy.mystery1 Debra Bates156 1 follower

Charlotte is a master of intrigue and suspense. This book is no exception. I enjoy a strong female character and this book has both evil as well as sane . I found myself cheering for the sane one of course. I kept waiting for a stronger romance to develop nevertheless still enjoyed the book. Michal.F43 1 follower

Not as unforgettable as the cover claims. Rusty1,917 11

He has been treated and released. And, he has walked miles to the home of his former wife searching for his child. When he arrives he realizes that it will happen again. After all, he has just spent time in a mental institution. Yes, the woman he loved and married has involved him in yet another violent situation. He didn't do it but why protest. Who would believe him? Only his therapist knows that he is incapable of murder. Edie Thompson looks into his eyes and believes that he is innocent so she hides him in a room called the turret room. Edie grew up with his ex-wife, knows the woman well and how she manipulates others to serve her.

One character after another shares their thoughts with the reader. The tale is told from many perspectives yet the reader hardly notices because the author is so skillful. Will he be convicted? Can he survive, knowing himself as his therapist helped him to see inside himself? This is another tale skillfully woven by the author to entertain the reader. Very well done. mystery-thriller Laura Anne800 60

Omnibus: The Charlotte Armstrong Readergothic north-america suspense-thrills-chills Rae3,706

The author throws together a man accused of being an insane killer, the girl who befriends him, and one very strange house in this fun suspense novel.mystery Penwiper40 3

Pure gothic, right down to the creepy housekeeper. David R74 47

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