The Moon Rock

The Moon Rock (1922) is Australian mystery writer Arthur J. Rees' locked-room conundrum. In fact, the room -- the murder scene -- not only is locked from the inside, but also two hundred feet up the cold wall of Flint House. And the house looms on the edge of a cliff in Cornwall. Slip, and a falling body would strike the pale Moon Rock and its legend of doomed love. A lonely, weird place, Scotland Yard's Det. Barrant sums it up, and that's even before he finds out what happened. The deceased is Robert Turold, a bitter and silent man obsessed with proving his noble linage and claim to a great estate. At last, he succeeds -- only to be found dead in the locked room, shot in the chest. Suicide? Barrant suspects not. The house is full of suspects: servants, relatives, a lovely daughter with a ruinous secret. Rees knew all the conventions of a mystery novel -- he wrote more than twenty -- and how to set the table with plenty of red herrings. But the question is more than who-done-it. Tension builds, too, on the identity of the Moon Rock's next victim. The one word to describe The Moon Rock is, literally: Cliffhanger.