Arthur Maling’s 1979 novel The Rheingold Route may hold the dubious distinction of being the least remembered book to ever win the Edgar Award for best novel of the year. Vacuous creatures, these women occupy themselves with radio soap operas and movie fan magazines and play bridge “with the voracity of a hammerhead shark.

When Dr Nell Ward stumbles across a woman’s body amongst the purple heather on Furze Heath, she was on the lookout for nests of poisonous adders. I'll confess I found the main character bad company and only kept alive and out of prison by authorial fiat.The book is filled with blow by blow descriptions of the sort of workplace meeting I would take a pay cut to avoid, and the dialogue is pedestrian and cliché-ridden.

Though Wylie’s daughter disputes it, Wylie eventually came to believe that the wild success of Vipers became his albatross, overshadowing everything else he wrote. His family moved to Montclair, New Jersey and he later attended Princeton University from 1920–1923. Wylie’s 1934 novel Finnley Wren — His Notions and Opinions together with a Haphazard History of His Career and Amours in these Moody Years, as well as Sundry Rhymes, Fables, Diatribes and Literary Misdemeanors — A Novel in a New Manner was a cathartic exercise that was both partially autobiographical and didactic, setting a template for his future novels. The biggest draw of this episode for me was Toby Stephens as wealthy, embittered investor David Connelly -- a poor boy who made good and never quite lost the chip on his shoulder brought on by his time at Oxford with Miranda, Kit, and Samantha.Some nice touches of humour, especially in the opening sequences, but overall, this is a very good episode. which was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation by fans at the 1972 World Science Fiction Convention, was Philip Wylie’s last hurrah. It’s amazing how blind people can be, is probably the most important piece of wisdom this episode has to offer, the realisation that, just because you can’t see it, it doesn’t mean it’s not staring you squarely in the face. After spending sixteen years as an ecologist, crawling through undergrowth and studying nocturnal habits of animals (and people), Dr Sarah Yarwood-Lovett naturally turned her mind to murder.

The volume discussed here is a reprint of the 1955 edition, which includes Wylie's comments in the form of footnotes to the original text in the 50's. It features some very strong male performances, Lewis always tended to have strong female leads throughout, but here the episode is dominated by Toby Stephens, Daniel Lapaine, and I think fair to say by regular Laurence Fox.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. That is to be sure not without its amusing aspects, which leads to the question many others have posed before: Was Wylie really serious, or was he just having everyone off? Once it’s laid out, the menu of potential suspects reads like an ethics violations most-wanted list: a real estate developer, the founder of an Internet gossip site, the head of a computer dating service, a journalist, an arrogant student. They feel free to post your personal details wherever and whenever they choose, but just try to request access to their files in the course of a murder investigation. Not only because the project is turned down, not only because they spend every moment they are in each other’s presence regarding each other with wounded eyes up until Miranda is found dead in her flat, but because he has to learn that all this could have been avoided if he’d listened to her, if he’d read her letters, if he’d opened his eyes and considered that a gossip column isn’t the place to get relationship advice from.

I’m not sure if it was realistic, bizarre or slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it was brilliant all the same. An exception to Wylie's generally astute analysis is the advent of personal computers and the growth of the Internet.

Moments of brilliance but more moments that are purely ridiculous -- not necessarily because of the subject matter but because of Wylie's over-the-top, provocative style.