Pamela BranchReseñas

The Asterisk Club is comprised of murderers who have been acquitted of their crimes in court. They now live in luxury, gloating over their past misdeeds, and smugly basking in the fact that they managed to get away with their crimes. Their leader is a man who savagely attacked and hurled four women to their deaths from fast-moving trains…and he is still amused by the memories.

The Asterisk Club resides in a home next door to two couples who are each odious in their own way. Members of the Asterisk Club begin dropping dead in their neighbors’ home, and the neighboring couples try very hard to hush the deaths up and keep the dead bodies under wraps, but they are not terribly successful.

The Asterisk Club has a resident tomcat that gets threatened with death and has crystal glassware thrown at him. The neighbors have a resident dog that gets kicked and threatened with demise as well. And rats are smashed to death with tennis rackets and one poor creature is even glued alive to a piece of board…and then killed.

So, a lot of the characters are brutal murderers who got off scot-free, all of the characters are positively despicable, and all of the action occurs against a backdrop of rampant animal cruelty. And the author just assumes that readers are going to find all of this uproariously hilarious.

I found myself wishing everyone in the book would get brutally murdered, and I didn’t care a fig who the culprit was; I gave up reading about a third of the way through this tasteless piece of whatnot.½

I don't know if the book really deserves 4 stars, but one of them is for the very start which is a hilarious attempt to get rid of a body. It's a gem.

Rather odd book. The characters exhibited very little resemblance to real life--a bit like a Wodehouse cast, except without the delightful charm that reconciles the reader to the characters nonetheless. In her dead the author was considered rather funny, but it doesn't quite come off as intended nowadays, or at least didn't for me.

I'm intrigued enough to risk reading her again--despite it's sort of a 2 1/2 stars book for me, upgraded due to historical circumstances (if it were a modern book it would be 2, no more).

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).

I was laughing uproariously. What a caper! Pamela Branch is a genius. Thank you Rue Morgue Press for bringing her back into print.

The Asterisk Club is a home for murderers who were acquitted. Newly released Benji Cann finds himself living with the artistic couples next door when there is not room for him at the club. When bodies (including Cann's) begin to turn up, both homes find themselves trying to hide the corpses. The emphasis is on comedy rather than mystery. Unfortunately, I don't think I was in the mood for this sort of book at the time I read it, and it didn't work all that well for me. I did recognize that it would be loved by persons who enjoy farces as well as many mystery lovers.

In most mysteries, when an amateur is confronted with a dead body, he or she spends the rest of the novel looking for clues to identify the culprit. Not in this mystery! Miscommunication, suspicion, and false assumptions lead to absurdity as two couples who share a house try to hide the bodies of the strangers who are making a habit of dying on their premises. The corpses have something in common. They were members of the Asterisk Club next door, with a membership roll filled with wrongly-acquitted murderers. The story is as much farce as it is mystery, and it's full of black humor. It's the sort of book you don't want to put down once the action starts. It's the perfect book for an afternoon or evening escape.½

Murder 101. Another hilarious installment for Miss Branch.½

Love, love, love it. Witty, ghoulish, intelligent, hilarious.½

After a little misunderstanding involving an oncoming train, the members of the Asterisk Club, a club so incredibly exclusive that one must be invited to join and even then it's not a given, decide to combine their expertise and make a little money by running a summer course in the country.

And what are they experts in? Murder, of course. Everyone, from the Colonel to Mrs. Braden to the new recruit Dina, has been acquitted of murder. Some of them more than once. So they set up shop in a run down country manor and begin offering courses on how to remove the Intended. Courses include Anatomy, Forensic Medicine, Poison, Grips, Electricity, Court Etiquette and Alibis, Automobiles and Firearms.

Classes are going well until one of the students gets a little carried away and actually Removes someone on the premises. This makes for great practice on Disposal, of course, but it does seem a joke in rather bad taste. Clifford Flush, in charge of the course, does not want to accuse anyone, but naturally, such behavior must stop.

I was very pleased to find this book at the secondhand store, after just loving her first book, The Wooden Overcoat. This one has the same crazy black humor as the first, with an entertaining cast. What really makes Branch a good writer to me is what she chooses to leave to the reader's imagination. Now I'm dying to read the next one!

This book started off kind of slow. Benjamin Cain was just acquitted of murder. He's adjusting to life outside of prison and thinking about what to do next when a stranger approaches and invites him to lunch at his club.

Cain enjoys his meal at the Asterisk Club until he learns that all the members there are also acquitted murderers - at least one charged with multiple murderers. He begins to wonder if the soup tasted a little off.

His new friend finds him a room in a boarding house just next door to the club. After one night in the house, his new landlady discovers Cain - dead.

As I said, the book got off to a slow start, and I was almost ready to give in. Then it started getting interesting. Then not much later, it got funny. Then it got completely hilarious! In a dark way, all right, but still - hilarious. An unexpectedly great read.

This novel is a hoot. It's a perfect old-fashioned who-done-it. Lots of silly stumbling around in the dark, polite shouting, and eating and drinking. For most of the book the characters are not trying to figure out where the bodies came from, but where to put them.

Pamela Branch regretfully wrote only four supremely funny crime novels before her untimely death in 1967.
This one concerns a group of murderers who for one reason or another have got away with their crimes,and who have banded together to form a school to train prospective killers just how to do the job well,and to avoid getting caught too.
Head of the school is Clifford Flush,assisted by Mrs Barratt,Colonel Quincey,Dina Parrish and last but by no means least The Creaker.
One of the funniest characters is Paget,the butler,whose smile is said to strike terror into nearly everone's heart.
There is also the present class,who are quite an interesting assortment of types too.A great read

Clifford Flush, falsely acquitted murderer, has to help out the amateurs next door when they bungle a body disposal. A deliciously ghoulish, helplessly hilarious crime novel!½

Enid Morley has done her best to kill herself, only to realise someone else wants to kill her as well. Not as good as Branch's three other novels, but still a classic!½

Sukie comes from a family of murderers... and it looks as though she's just followed in their footsteps. A fabulous, madcap crime novel!

If you enjoy black humour in a crime novel, then this is not to be missed!