A Taste for Honey

A Taste for Honey A Mystery Gerald Heard MURDERED BY BEES? Until the last few years, there had been quite a lot of bee-keeping in the Ashton Clearwater district. But lately nobody, except the sinister and solitary Heregroves, had managed to make their bees thrive. This was tiresome for Sydney Silchester who had gone to the country to be on his own and undisturbed by friends and garrulous neighbors. It was even more tiresome for him when Mrs. Heregrove was stung to death by her...
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A Taste for Honey A Mystery Gerald Heard MURDERED BY BEES? Until the last few years, there had been quite a lot of bee-keeping in the Ashton Clearwater district. But lately nobody, except the sinister and solitary Heregroves, had managed to make their bees thrive. This was tiresome for Sydney Silchester who had gone to the country to be on his own and undisturbed by friends and garrulous neighbors. It was even more tiresome for him when Mrs. Heregrove was stung to death by her husband''s bees. His situation suddenly became fraught with mysterious terror when he met his extraordinary neighbor, Mr. Mycroft, a scientific apiarist who had made discoveries about Heregrove''s bees which pointed to murder on wings. Who is Mr. Mycroft? The true identity of this magnificent, inscrutable old gentleman is a deep secret--but there are echoes of Baker Street in his voice, and a familiar gleam in his eyes that miss no clue. In A Taste for Honey, he meets one of the most sinister murderers of all time, and encounters one of the most fiendishly ingenious murder methods ever devised. from the back cover of the 1964 Lancer Books paperback edition Endorsements "A Taste for Honey is intriguing and sinister, somewhere between G. K. Chesterton and John Wyndham; Heard has Chesterton''s conviction that the most important mysteries are moral questions reaching beyond ''whodunnit,'' and he shares Wyndham''s fascination with the disquieting, almost alien forces that threaten the quiet of pastoral England. But Heard''s style is entirely his own. Few crime novels of the period take quite so much pleasure in language, except maybe for the lyrical evocation of the mean streets of the American private eye, but even then Heard is definitely of the English school; his prose is more rarefied than muscular." Dr. Christopher Pittard, distinguished University of Exeter scholar of British Detective Fiction "With a seemingly omniscient detective, a reluctant sidekick and a disturbed rural idyll, A Taste for Honey is firmly embedded in the Golden Age detective genre. Yet it also seeks answers for wide-reaching questions about personal responsibility and ethics, questions which anticipate later developments in the genre. While definitely a paean to the Holmesian tradition, A Taste for Honey does not rely on simple answers¿we may know whodunnit, but the question of why is altogether more disturbing." Dr. Stacy Gillis, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University, UK. www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/staff/profile/stacy.gillis "More than 30 years before Nicholas Meyer''s The Seven Percent Solution opened the floodgates of Sherlockian imitation, H.F. Heard''s A Taste for Honey was the first significant book-length Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and it remains one of the very best. This new edition should be welcomed by all lovers of classic detective fiction." Jon L. Breen, noted mystery and crime-detective wiriter, scholar and critic "The narrator of A Taste for Honey is a prissy dilettante who closely guards his privacy from the hubbub of the tranquil English village he has moved to. Mr. Silchester likes honey, is persnickety about its quality and therefore seeks out the only beekeeper in the neighborhood. But there is something odd about his supplier, who is unfriendlier than Silchester himself. When the beekeeper''s wife dies horribly of bee stings, Silchester becomes the next-intended victim of a killer who is experimentally breeding fatal bees." February 9, 1981, Newsweek review "I thought I knew all the tricks of the horror trade but I never expected to have my hair stand on end when a bee flew in through an open window... A triumph of ingenuity and horrific simplicity." Boris Karloff "...the most original and enchanting crime story of the year." Christopher Morley "A veritable triumph of modern mystery...packing plenty of horror." Will Cuppy, The New York Herald Tribune "Slow-moving, whimsical, somewhat weightily allusive, this tale is definitely caviar to the general; in a sense, it may be called a bookman''s book." New York Times Book Review "Terrifying...perfectly done...The most original contribution in many years." Vincent Starrett "Starting in the 1970s there was a proliferation of Sherlock Holmes pastiches that is still going on today. The vast majority of them have been written for the author''s self-aggrandizement. They also don''t capture the essence of the Victorian era (and some don''t even try). Professor Moriarty, Irene Adler, a long chase scene, an international crisis, famous personages - one or all of them are often present. The more absurd ones have Holmes trekking off to the United States to solve a case. Having him get married or piloting an airplane as an octogenarian even occurs in several instances. The best thing about all these imitations is they show how good the original stories were by comparison. Thank goodness H. F. Heard eschewed the above. His Mr. Mycroft tales are not pretentious but instead encompass the style of the ''old-fashioned'' mystery. A delightful read!" Paul D. Herbert, founder of the Cincinnati-based Sherlockian society, The Tankerville Club; member of the Baker Street Irregulars; author of The Sincerest Form of Flattery and articles for The Baker Street Journal, the Sherlock Holmes Journal, and Baker Street Miscellanea