Summary: A collection of 8 short stories (mysteries) centered around the character Horne Fisher, someone that knows everyone and know why the system usually frames the wrong person.
I have been getting a bit bored with my standard fare lately so I keep switching books in rapid succession trying to find the right book to hit my mood.
The Man Who Knew Too Much was not it. But the stories are relatively interesting. I am not a fan of short stories. I like more character development and a longer story arc. But I enjoyed Chesterton’s Father Brown Mysteries so I gave this a try.
Horne Fisher is an intelligent, upper crust Englishman. He “˜knows too much’ about how things work and who is behind them. So these are a fairly cynical bunch of stories mostly centered around how those with money and power can get away with things that other cannot.
But Horne is there to explain and figure out the solution that sometimes puts the real person back in the spot light, although in the cases that I listened to it wasn’t about putting them in jail or punishing them, but simply identifying them, often because the guilty party is either already dead or in some other method has already received their ‘reward’. These stories are more about the why something was done than the how of Sherlock Holmes stories (so still a similar different as the Father Brown stories.)
If you like short story mysteries, these are fairly good ones. It was not what I was looking for, so I did only read the first four (of 8) before moving on. I would also look at the Father Brown mysteries, which are less cynical, more humorous and overall I think a better collection.
The Man Who Knew Too Much Purchase Links: Free Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook ($0.99 with purchase of Kindle Edition)
