The Rasp
OCLC 10207126 | | |
Followed by | The White Crow (1928, the next Gethryn novel) |
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The Rasp is a
Plot summary
Anthony Gethryn, ex-secret service agent, is an occasional "special correspondent" for a weekly newspaper and is assigned to cover the story when a cabinet minister, John Hoode, is found murdered in the library at his country house, battered to death with a wood-rasp. Gethryn recalls his acquaintance with a member of the household and is thus invited to investigate the crime as a kind of "friend of the family". It soon seems as though everyone concerned has a cast-iron alibi for the time of the crime, but Gethryn comes up with an imaginative way for the murderer to have accomplished the deed and established an alibi, and reveals the murderer.
Literary significance & criticism
Anthony Gethryn is an early example of the amateur detective, the idea of which was soon to become popular in detective fiction. The focus on the breaking of an elaborate alibi is similar to the work of Freeman Wills Crofts, MacDonald's contemporary. "The story is the conventional body-in-the-study, with a fair amount of obvious detection. ... The killer's fakery is plain from the start. Despite all this, it has several times been declared "a classic" and "epochmaking" by students of the genre."[1]
Film
The Rasp | |
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Directed by | Michael Powell |
Written by | Philip MacDonald |
Produced by | Jerome Jackson |
Starring | Claude Horton, Phyllis Loring, C. M. Hallard, James Raglan, |
Cinematography | Geoffrey Faithfull |
Distributed by | Film Engineering, Fox |
Release date |
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Running time | 44 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
The story was made into a film with a screenplay by Philip MacDonald which was directed by
Cast
- Claude Horton as Anthony Gethryn
- Phyllis Loring as Lucia Masterson
- C. M. Hallard as Sir Arthur Coates
- James Raglan as Alan Deacon
- Thomas Weguelin as Insp Boyd
Critical reception
In a contemporary review,
References
- ISBN 0-06-015796-8
- ^ "The Rasp (1932)". Archived from the original on 12 March 2016.
- ^ "The Rasp". www.powell-pressburger.org.