Résumé
Résumé de La Balle d'argent
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
Readers who love puzzles, secret codes, old country houses and amateur sleuths will enjoy this. It also suits anyone who likes a warm friendship, a lively heroine and a hint of the supernatural.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
The Silver Bullet is a murder mystery by Fergus Hume, set in the English countryside of the late nineteenth century. Hume was a prolific writer of crime fiction, and here he builds a puzzle around a dead man, a blazing house and a heap of buried treasure. You get a detective story told through the eyes of an ordinary doctor, not a professional policeman.
Two friends cross a lonely heath on a summer night and come upon a mansion lit from cellar to tower, with its door standing open and nobody at home. In the tower lies the owner, shot through the heart. From that moment the book follows a growing circle of people who all seem to know more than they say: a bumbling inspector, a clever girl reporter, a nervous rector, a quarrelsome stepmother, a family nicknamed the Biffs, and a foreign visitor with a taste for gold.
In the pages ahead you will hear how the case unfolds, who stands to gain, and why each new clue seems to point somewhere different. We begin on the heath, with two tired walkers and a light in the trees.
Dans ce résumé
- 1A lit house and a dead manFree
- 2The village weighs a dead Colonel
- 3A will with a stranger condition
- 4The Biffs and the boy who sees
- 5A message in a code
- 6A friend's lies and a Mexican's stories
- 7Money, greed and the question of loyalty
- 8Reason, the unseen and a doctor in love
- 9Lights, towers and the way the tale is told
Point clé 1 sur 9
A lit house and a dead man
The story opens on Southberry Heath, a wide moor in the English Midlands. Dr. James Herrick, a big, sunburned and practical physician, is leading his friend Robin Joyce on a walking tour. Joyce is a small, nervy writer who has lost his mother two months before and has been nursing his grief like a treasure. Herrick has brought him out into the open air to cure him, and after thirteen hours of walking Joyce drops to the ground and declares he cannot go on.
While they rest, the two men talk. Herrick confesses that he fell in love at first sight with a tall, dark-haired girl he saw in Southberry church. Joyce explains that he has just come back from two days in London, where he saw his lawyers about his mother's property. He is oddly exact about which day he went, which hotel he slept in and when he returned. A careful reader will want to remember that.
At nightfall they push on through a belt of pine trees, following a strange steady humming sound and a white light high above the branches. They step out onto a smooth lawn and find a gray Tudor mansion standing alone, without a wall or fence. A slim new tower rises at one corner, and every single window blazes with electric light. Joyce, who loves fairy tales, calls it the palace of the Sleeping Beauty.
The front door is open. Inside they find marble, red velvet curtains and Greek statues holding glowing globes. A dining table is laid for one person, with withered flowers and stale bread. They wander through a library, a gallery of art, a Japanese room, a shooting gallery, a gymnasium and a marble bath, and they call out in vain. They open a bottle of champagne, because it seems the only sensible thing to do, and Herrick decides the owner must be a rich hermit with a taste for Roman luxury.
The last place left is the tower. At the top a plain door opens onto a bare room with a camp bed and a deal table. A man in evening dress lies face down beside the bed, a revolver in his left hand and blood on his shirt. Herrick judges he has been dead more than a day. Was it suicide or murder? Before he can say, Joyce laughs wildly and falls into the nervous fit his friend has long expected.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about La Balle d'argent
What is The Silver Bullet by Fergus Hume about?
It is a Victorian murder mystery. A doctor and his friend find a rich recluse shot dead in a tower, and the doctor, with a clever girl reporter, tries to work out who killed him and why.
Who is Frisco in The Silver Bullet?
Frisco is the nickname of the Colonel's servant, a stout American sailor with a cross-shaped scar on his forehead. He disappears after the murder, and the whole district believes he is the killer.
What does the silver bullet mean in the story?
The bullet that killed the Colonel is made of silver. An old superstition says that only silver can kill a witch or wizard, so the bullet suggests the killer feared that the Colonel had dealings with the devil.
Is The Silver Bullet easy to read?
Yes, in the sense that it is a lively, fast-moving puzzle. The chapters are short, the dialogue is brisk, and each one ends with a clue or a surprise, which makes it easy to follow.
Is The Silver Bullet based on a true story?
No, it is a work of fiction written in the late nineteenth century by Fergus Hume. Its coded messages, strange will and country-house setting come from the popular detective stories of the time.