CYOA: #9 Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? by Edward Packard

The final title in the five-book run of Edward Packard classics is #9, Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?, a classic murder mystery. Packard does a good job of trying to hit the rather strict beats of this very specific genre; the rich guy in his country estate mansion, murdered while a number of suspects, all with their own reasons to be suspicious, are all present. It also has the bumbling police detective and his rivalry of sorts with the brilliant amateur, played by you. The detective is even called Inspector Prufrock, even though Inspector isn't, of course, a title in American police structure. 

You supposedly have a reputation as an amateur detective, sufficiently so that wealthy plastics tycoon Harlowe Thrombey calls you because he's worried about his life and wants someone to keep an eye on things to protect him. In this, you're destined to fail, because no matter what happens, Harlowe Thrombey gets murdered; that's the whole point of the book—you trying to determine who did it.

Immediate suspects include his disgruntled wife Jane, his niece Angela and her boyfriend Dr. Robert Libscomb, as well as nephew Chartwell. Yes, it's really spelled like that. The cook Helga and the gardener Jenkins aren't really presented as suspects, but they are people that you can also talk to.

My copy is, I believe, a first printing (at least it doesn't mention being a subsequent printing) dated February 1981, and the cover price was $1.50. Unlike almost every other Choose Your Own Adventure title, it doesn't announce how many possible endings there are in this book on the cover; rather it simply says in the same place that you're the detective and it's your first murder case! I suspect that's because this book has considerably fewer endings than any published so far (and most published afterwards). I counted thirteen is all, compared to numbers in the upper twenties to mid-forties for a typical variant of this kind of book. Like all books in the series (so far) it was illustrated by Paul Grainger

My understanding is that this is considered one of the real classics of the genre. Not that this means that I recommend the movie or anything, but Knives Out makes overt homage to this book by naming the murder victim, played by Christopher Plumber, Harlan Thrombey. (It's really too bad that Knives Out wasn't a better movie.)

The structure of this book is a little bit unusual too. Not only do we have, as mentioned, very few endings, but there are a lot of branches that don't really branch at all. Immediately after the murder, for instance, you can question any of the four suspects, or search the pantry for clues, but after doing so for a brief page, all of them lead you to the same next page where the police in the form of Inspector Prufrock arrives. While you aren't exactly expected to solve the mystery yourself from the clues, given the nature of the book as a Choose Your Own Adventure written in the second person, it does allow you to gather the clues that you will gather, and ignore the ones that you will. There are more situations like this where you can interview a certain character, but regardless of what you pick, you go to the same place, presumably with having gathered whatever information you gathered by the choice that you made, and whatever you didn't by the choice that you chose not to make.

There's also a page near the end that you are very likely to end up at no matter what you've chosen where it simply says "WHAT WILL YOU DO NEXT?" with a small image of the brandy bottle that contained the poison that killed Thrombey, and then it gives you a dozen potential choices to make. By this point in the book, you're in the end game. A few of them are red herrings, and you're told that there's no information there, and sent back to the same page to pick something else, but many of them lead to the some of the endings that you end up with.

There's not really multiple guilty parties either, depending on the choice. In every case, the same suspects are innocent and guilty, although there some ancillary secondary characters that may or may not make an appearance, including a hitman named Keane, a rival young detective named Jenny Mudge (more on her on later posts) and the iconic Choose Your Own Adventure lawyer, Gilliam Prem.

While I can't say that a quintessentially British rich country estate murder mystery is my favorite genre by any means, this is one of the better classic titles, and it's really quite clever how Packard structured and wrote it to evoke that genre as well as he did. This is one of the classics of the series; absolutely one of the best to get your hands on if you care to get your hands on any of these at all. I thoroughly enjoyed this one, and it is probably one of the best of the early titles. Packard really showed, especially with these five in a row, that he could absolutely call up the classic tells of all kinds of genres, and make them work effectively. In fact, I think that that may be a big part of the appeal of the earliest classic titles in the series; while many later titles are also quite good, they weren't just iconic representations of a specific genre anymore after this.

After this, we have two R. A. Montgomery titles, The Lost Jewels of Nabooti and Mystery of the Maya, the first book to have a different illustrator. After that, is Inside UFO 54-40, the first in the series that 1) I don't have anymore and don't intend to replace, and 2) that I remember being released when it was new after I'd already discovered and fallen in love with the series. At some point here too, the series entered a new phase, even if only in my own perception; it was becoming more established and the novelty was being replaced by other things. For instance, in #14, The Forbidden Castle, Packard starts to become self-referential; you get to the middle ages through the Cave of Time, which he assumes you know about because you've read The Cave of Time before. New artists, and shortly afterwards, new authors start to populate the series, which changes the look and feel of the series a fair bit. Not that these new artists and authors are necessarily bad; I think Ralph Reese is every bit Grainger's equal and nearly as quintessential and classic to the series as Grainger himself, but others just don't really have the right look, some of them have a softer little kid approach and just in general, as the series matures and becomes more established, some of the classic appeal starts to wear off. Not that this happened too quickly; some of my favorite titles, at least when I was young (we'll see if I still think so on re-reading them shortly) are in the late teens and twenties, although by the twenties, I've also started to feel like there's a lot of missable titles in the series that I don't care to collect.

That said, Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? is certainly a title when the series was at its peak, and is a must-have. Let's review the endings that I encountered, shall we?

• I solved the case, and Prufrock rushed off to arrest the guilty party without thanking me. Twice, actually.
• I solved the case and got a $5,000 check for my trouble.
• I got hit on the head, and while recovering in the hospital, my rival and friend Jenny Mudge solved the case instead. People are now talking about her as the prodigy detective instead of me.
• I get shot and murdered by a hitman that I'm trying to question.
• I solve the case by cornering the hitman and turning him over to the police so he can spill all the details about what happened.
• Jenny solved the case by sitting behind the guilty parties at a movie and listening to them talk about how they did it.
• Bumbling inspector Prufrock actually solves the case instead of me.
• I got shot and murdered by the murderer.
• Jenny and I solve the murder together by comparing clues and decide to become partners.
• I give up on the case.
• I'm in the classic "all of the suspects and the Inspector in the library" scene where I accuse the guilty party in front of everyone and solve the case in the very classic British whodunit resolution scene.
• I solve the case, but it's kind of a cop-out, because the book doesn't actually tell me the resolution, just that apparently I solved it and told Prufrock exactly what happened.