The Rynox Mystery

A classic Golden Age crime novel, and the first time Philip MacDonald wrote a crime novel without a detective.

‘Rynox’ is at that point where one injudicious move, one failure of judgement, one coincidental piece of bad luck will wreck it. So why would anyone send more than a million pounds in one-pound notes to Mr Salisbury of the Naval, Military and Cosmopolitan Assurance Corporation? Who would shoot F.X. Benedik, the senior partner of the firm, through the head in his study? And where is the choleric Mr Marsh, who had an appointment with F.X. on the night of his death? Rynox is on the edge of big things. But the edge of big things is a narrow edge. And narrow edges are slippery . . .

Philip MacDonald’s Rynox is an engrossing murder mystery set in the business world, a crime novel without a detective in which murder and big business are inextricably combined. Beginning with the Epilogue and ending with the Prologue, it is a subtle and exciting book by one of the greatest masters of the mystery story.

This Detective Club classic includes a rare introduction by author Philip MacDonald himself, never before published in the UK, and also ‘The Wood-for-the-Trees’, the only short story to feature his series detective, Anthony Gethryn.

Reviews

‘A book that I — against my better judgement, nature, and previous standards — unabashedly loved with every fibre of my being… A beautiful and very affordable edition.’TheInvisibleEvent.com

''Philip MacDonald has again supplied his expectant public with an excellent detective story. It is unusual both in its form and in its plot, written more in the style of a Scotland Yard document than in the form of a novel. There is one immense surprise for the reader, and several minor surprises, and it is improbable that anyone will be able to solve its mystery before Mr MacDonald chooses to disclose it.' SPECTATOR

'MacDonald, master of the mystery story rulebook, broke most of those rules in his unconventional 1930 novel The Rynox Murder. Long before the rise of the postmodern novel, MacDonald anticipated many of its techniques. He wreaks havoc with conventional narrative structure—opening the book with its epilogue and closing his novel with an account of the story’s beginnings. He reveals a postmodern zeal for texts within the text, devoting a substantial portion of his story to an array of disparate documents—diary entries, business correspondence, personal letters, police reports, memoranda, etc.—which impart a sense of discontinuity and authorial absence to a novel.' PostmodernMystery.com

About the author

British author Philip MacDonald wrote more than 30 accomplished crime novels, many of them after moving to Hollywood in 1931, where he also wrote and produced more than 100 scripts for the silver screen. His first solo novel, The Rasp (1924) introduced Colonel Anthony Gethryn, a gentleman detective who went on to appear in a dozen novels, including The Noose, The Maze and finally The List of Adrian Messenger in 1959.