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    The Sinking Admiral
    The Sinking Admiral
    The Sinking Admiral
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Sinking Admiral

    Written by The Detection Club

    Narrated by Tom Clegg

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The Floating Admiral was the first of the Detection Club’s collaborative novels, in which twelve of its members wrote a single novel. Eighty-five years later, fourteen members of the club have once again collaborated to produce The Sinking Admiral.

    ‘The Admiral’ is a pub in the Suffolk seaside village of Crabwell, The Admiral Byng. ‘The Admiral’ is also the nickname of its landlord, Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons, as well as the name of the landlord’s dinghy. None of them are as buoyant as they should be, for the pub is threatened with closure due to falling takings.

    Tempers are already frayed due to the arrival of a television documentary team when Fitzsimmons is found dead in his tethered boat. The villagers assume a simple case of suicide and fear that their debt-ridden pub will now sink without trace. The journalists seem determined to finish the job by raking up old skeletons, but they weren’t banking on the fact that this story has been written by 14 extremely competitive crime writers – arch bamboozlers who will stop at nothing to save a good pub.

    The Sinking Admiral, edited by the Detection Club’s outgoing President – author and broadcaster Simon Brett, OBE – continues a tradition established by the Detection Club’s founders in 1931 when Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts and eleven other esteemed authors wrote The Floating Admiral, a ‘collaborative novel’ to challenge themselves, fox their readers and help to pay for the Club’s running costs. Now, 85 years later, 14 of today’s leading crime writers have repeated this unique game of literary consequences, producing an original, ebullient and archetypal whodunit that will keep readers guessing right up to what crime lovers insist on calling the dénouement…

    The contributors to The Sinking Admiral are:
    SIMON BRETT
    KATE CHARLES
    NATASHA COOPER
    STELLA DUFFY
    MARTIN EDWARDS
    RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS
    TIM HEALD
    MICHAEL JECKS
    JANET LAURENCE
    PETER LOVESEY
    MICHAEL RIDPATH
    DAVID ROBERTS
    L.C. TYLER
    LAURA WILSON
    all members of The Detection Club.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 16, 2016
    ISBN9780008106003
    The Sinking Admiral
    Author

    The Detection Club

    “The Detection Club is a private association of writers of detective fiction in Great Britain, existing chiefly for the purpose of eating dinners together at suitable intervals and of talking illimitable shop … Its membership is confined to those who have written genuine detective stories (not adventure tales or ‘thrillers’) and election is secured by a vote of the club on recommendation by two or more members, and involves the undertaking of an oath.” Dorothy L. Sayers.

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    Reviews for The Sinking Admiral

    3/5

    25 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I found this neither particularly good or bad. It was written jointly by members of the Detection Club, an invitation only British association for mystery writers. It was readable, but not gripping. One thing that is mildly entertaining is that there is a character named for each of the author's of the Detection Club's earlier effort, the Sinking Admiral. The story for the most part is decent, if a little implausible. After the police seem determined to consider pub-owner Geoffrey Fitzwilliam's death a suicide, the pub's skeptical bar manager, Amy Walpole, decides to investigate. She pairs up with a somewhat unlikely partner, Ben Milne, a sensationalist "reality" television reporter. While I'm sure that Ben is eager to be in on the investigation, hoping to dig up dirt, it is rather surprising that Amy wants to work with someone she is inclined to view with disgust and distrust.The police seem to be operating in another town. They are almost never seen to interact with, or question, anyone. Crofts, the more senior partner, is only marginally competent, and anxious to tie up the case before he has much evidence. Chesterton, the junior partner, seems a little more promising, but is impeded and cowed by Crofts.Maybe it is just that American and British mores are different, but I can't see that there is adequate motive for murder, or even physical confrontation. It just doesn't seem to me that anyone's life would be ruined by The Big Secret, in this day and age, particularly in view of what people accept about the character.
    • 2/5
      Convoluted, too long and included every cliche in the genre including a Hercule Poirot favorite -gather all the suspects together and expose the killer ending. Sometimes collaborations are not a good thing
    • 3/5
      A fine collaborative mystery, but not one that will stick with me in any way, and there were certain implausibilities that drove me a bit nuts. Overall, not much here to recommend this effort, I'm afraid.
    • 2/5
      A disappointment. I enjoyed the original collaborative novel by the Detection Club, The Floating Admiral, and had high hopes for this modern homage, but it didn’t achieve. This was written using a different approach to the Floating Admiral (in which each participating member of The Detection Club wrote a chapter each), with different authors writing each sub-plot and each part being weaved into the novel as appropriate. It’s lead to a disjointed novel, with little flow, several continuity errors, and a range of underdeveloped and unlikeable characters. The two detectives in particular are dreadful caricatures. Simon Brett’s introduction points out that because the crime genre has developed into so many different sub-genres, it wasn’t possible to write The Sinking Admiral in the same way as The Floating Admiral. Based on this evidence, I would go further, and suggest it just simply isn’t possible.
    • 3/5
      I found this neither particularly good or bad. It was written jointly by members of the Detection Club, an invitation only British association for mystery writers. It was readable, but not gripping. One thing that is mildly entertaining is that there is a character named for each of the author's of the Detection Club's earlier effort, the Sinking Admiral. The story for the most part is decent, if a little implausible. After the police seem determined to consider pub-owner Geoffrey Fitzwilliam's death a suicide, the pub's skeptical bar manager, Amy Walpole, decides to investigate. She pairs up with a somewhat unlikely partner, Ben Milne, a sensationalist "reality" television reporter. While I'm sure that Ben is eager to be in on the investigation, hoping to dig up dirt, it is rather surprising that Amy wants to work with someone she is inclined to view with disgust and distrust.The police seem to be operating in another town. They are almost never seen to interact with, or question, anyone. Crofts, the more senior partner, is only marginally competent, and anxious to tie up the case before he has much evidence. Chesterton, the junior partner, seems a little more promising, but is impeded and cowed by Crofts.Maybe it is just that American and British mores are different, but I can't see that there is adequate motive for murder, or even physical confrontation. It just doesn't seem to me that anyone's life would be ruined by The Big Secret, in this day and age, particularly in view of what people accept about the character.