The Page 69 Test: "The Game is A Footnote"

Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than forty books: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to

gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. She is currently writing four cozy mystery series: the Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books, the Catskill Resort mysteries for Penguin Random House, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates) for Crooked Lane.

Delany is a past president of the Crime Writers of Canada and co-founder and organizer of the Women Killing It Crime Writing Festival. Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. Delany is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

She applied the Page 69 Test to the newest novel in the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series, The Game is a Footnote, and reported the following:

From page 69:
He looked like he might argue, but then he sighed, leaned back in his chair, and let it go. Not for the first time, I got the feeling that the board members of the Scarlet House Museum had learned to pick their battles with the strong-willed Robyn.

Ethan bent his head over his laptop and typed away.

“Dave gave me an overview of the events of last night on the phone, but I’d like to hear again what happened,” Robyn said. “Dave, you go first, and then Gemma, please.”

When we’d finished, both of us keeping it brief and including a minimal amount of drama, Craig said, “Scared the life out of me. One minute everything’s calm and peaceful, and the next it sounded like the end times had arrived.”

“Hardly calm and peaceful,” Jayne said. “There was a storm going on.”

“Yes, but that was outside. I mean in the barn. In the house.”

“Could the storm have been what upset the animals?” Robyn asked.

“I wouldn’t have thought so,” Dave said. “They’re used to coastal weather. But you never know. If one of them got a fright and scared another . . . it all builds from there. Since helping out here, I’ve learned to expect the unexpected when working with farm animals.” He turned to me. “Except for the time I volunteered in Africa, I spent my career as a dog and cat vet. Totally different kettle of fish, those.”

“Were you and Craig together when the animals woke up?” I asked him.

The men exchanged vacant glances and half shrugs. Dave spoke first. “It’s difficult to be sure. It was dark and late, the storm building, and I might have been snoozing on and off.
The eighth Sherlock Holmes bookshop mystery, The Game is A Footnote, fails the page 69 test rather spectacularly.

On this page the characters are having a meeting in which they are discussing a previous night’s incident that had animals in the barn upset.

Meetings are not exactly the stuff of high drama. Someone is even typing at his computer, presumably taking the minutes!

Unfortunately, the page doesn’t mention that at the same time as the barn animals were causing an uproar, a suspected ghostly presence was wreaking havoc (or did it?) in the historical re-enactment museum in which much of the drama in the book is set. The meeting has, in fact, been called to discuss exactly what happened in the old house at midnight as a thunderstorm raged outside.

But this page presents none of the drama, confusion, and terror of what happened previously. It is, in fact, rather blah, and appears to be an unnecessary summing up of previous action. (It even says the events are told with “minimal amount of drama.”)

Of course, in a good mystery novel, nothing is ever just a retelling. A very important clue, and the catalyst for all that flows from here on in the book, is presented in this page. But, again in true puzzle mystery fashion, it is sort of slipped in among the rest of the conversation. On its own, it appears to mean nothing particularly interesting.

The characters are not well presented on this page either. There is no mention of the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop, or a hint that our protagonist, Gemma Doyle, is the “Sherlock Holmes” character in the series. Meaning, she is my interpretation of the Great Detective as a modern young woman. That does not come out from a simple reading of page 69.

In short, page 69 is a poor example of the rest of The Game is a Footnote.