A 1001 Midnights Review: ALAN GREEN – What a Body!

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Bill Pronzini ALAN GREEN – What a Body! Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1949. Dell, paperback, 1951. The dust jacket blurb calls this first mystery “the funniest, risibility-ticklingest book … since Wodehouse.” It isn’t that good, but it does have its moments — so many of them, in fact, that What a Body! was voted a Best First Novel Edgar. It is not only comical in the droll, barbed fashion of the Forties, but has an “impossible crime” plot of the sort that John Dickson Carr loved to hefuddle his readers with. When Merlin Broadstone is murdered in his fourth-floor room at the Broadstone Hotel on the island of Broadstone, Florida, millions of people cheer. Broadstone, the “Caliph of Calisthenics,” the “Dictator of Diet,” had made a fortune by zealously depriving people of liquor, tobacco, starchy foods, slothful behavior, and the joy of sex — all in the name of health and fitness. The Broadstone Hotel (and Broadstone Island) is a large and austere health spa,…