Pamela Branch (1920–1967)

The Asterisk Club is comprised of murderers who have been acquitted of their crimes in court. They now live in luxury, gloating over their past misdeeds, and smugly basking in the fact that they managed to get away with their crimes. Their leader is a man who savagely attacked and hurled four women to their deaths from fast-moving trains…and he is still amused by the memories.

The Asterisk Club resides in a home next door to two couples who are each odious in their own way. Members of the Asterisk Club begin dropping dead in their neighbors’ home, and the neighboring couples try very hard to hush the deaths up and keep the dead bodies under wraps, but they are not terribly successful.

The Asterisk Club has a resident tomcat that gets threatened with death and has crystal glassware thrown at him. The neighbors have a resident dog that gets kicked and threatened with demise as well. And rats are smashed to death with tennis rackets and one poor creature is even glued alive to a piece of board…and then killed.

So, a lot of the characters are brutal murderers who got off scot-free, all of the characters are positively despicable, and all of the action occurs against a backdrop of rampant animal cruelty. And the author just assumes that readers are going to find all of this uproariously hilarious.

I found myself wishing everyone in the book would get brutally murdered, and I didn’t care a fig who the culprit was; I gave up reading about a third of the way through this tasteless piece of whatnot.… (more)

Rather odd book. The characters exhibited very little resemblance to real life--a bit like a Wodehouse cast, except without the delightful charm that reconciles the reader to the characters nonetheless. In her dead the author was considered rather funny, but it doesn't quite come off as intended nowadays, or at least didn't for me.

I'm intrigued enough to risk reading her again--despite it's sort of a 2 1/2 stars book for me, upgraded due to historical circumstances (if it were a modern book it would be 2, no more).

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).… (more)