This book is quite old, 1933, but I liked it and it didn't 'feel' old. There is no action in this book, but I didn't miss it. There are good characters and a good ending, and that I liked a lot. It's not easy to write a good ending, so often a bad ending has ruined an otherwise decent book or movie, and the ending is the most important thing! How it ends is much more important to me than how it starts, and this book was at times a bit boring (due mostly to its age and all the 'sergeant, call the butler and tell him to call Miss Stamm' things, and also to the descriptions of the locations and murder scene, very detailed to give us readers all the information we need, but totally wasted on me because I couldn't picture it in my head at all), but at the very end I closed it satisfied, with the feeling of having read a good book, and that is a good ending's clever trick.
It starts slowly, without a clear crime as such. Sergeant Heath received a call from Mr Leland, and he involved D.A. Markham (I think that's the right title, but I'm not 100% sure because unfortunately I didn't have this in English) and Philo Vance (and therefore Vance's friend Van Dine, the man that writes his stories :-D). Once on site they learn all the facts. At Mr Stamm's house there are various guests, along with his sister Bernice Stamm and their old, crazy mother. One of the guests, Montague, went to swim in the lake and never came out, so Mr Leland called the police, insisting for an investigation. All the guests, Leland included, had reasons to dislike Montague, but Markham is deeply annoyed because there's no proof of any crime yet. They keep investigating because Vance is very much interested in the mystery and sure enough Montague's body is eventually found, rather distant from the lake and not drowned but clearly murdered, and soon enough another guest will have the same fate. The title is due to a legend that puts a dragon in that lake, and the old woman believing the dragon protects her family against its enemies. Basically the book consists of Vance interrogating everyone then going to personally watch the 'crime scene' then coming back to interrogate some more , and so on, back and forth. It moves on very slowly, and yet the characters are well written, I could 'feel' their character and I really liked Leland, so quiet, intelligent, but with a beating heart.. :-)
He could not be the murderer, it would have been absurd, but since I liked him I feared for him, but luckily the explanation makes sense. On with the spoilers on the ending!
The murderer was Mr Stamm himself, using his diving suit and experience, and both Leland and Bernice had known it, but could not say it. All the time Leland had been torn in two between his love for Bernice and his sense of duty in front of a murder. He had decided to call the police out of duty without expressing his suspicions, hoping they would find out by themselves. Near the end, after Vance had discovered everything, Stamm died in an accident, which made things easier for everyone. The book ends with Vance fully explaining the events, plus a note or two on what happened next: Leland married Bernice and Stamm's butler, who shared his passion for exotic and rare fish, went working in a tropical fish shop :-) I found all this quite nice, because it's sweet that he didn't forget about the characters involved, like so often happens :-)
ITA il mistero del drago
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