W. M. Hodijk Books

With a New Introduction by Colin Dexter The cunning incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the building's eleven occupants. And if one of Martin Beck's colleagues hadn't been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe since-for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain-a regulation firetruck has vanished. Was it terrorism, suicide, or simply a gas leak? And what, if anything, did the explosion have to do with the peculiar death earlier that day of a forty-six-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: “Martin Beck”?

Dr. Herbert Mentius, a character in The Methuselah Enzyme, asserts that death is "not natural at all" but rather an "avoidable mistake." This novel is one of many by Fred Mustard Stewart, who passed away at 75 without experiencing the DNA modifications he envisioned. Stewart, known for his intercontinental sagas, consistently produced lengthy works, diverging from his initial aspiration to be a concert pianist, which inspired his first novel, The Mephisto Waltz. Born in Anderson, IN, he was the son of a banker and attended prestigious schools, studying history at Princeton and piano at Juilliard. By the 1960s, realizing his limitations as a pianist, he turned to writing after marrying literary agent Joan Richardson in 1967, achieving immediate success with his debut. In The Methuselah Enzyme, Stewart displays wit, though it lacks the depth of Henry James. His later work, Six Weeks, tells the story of a married man running for a Democratic Senate seat, who becomes infatuated with a cold-cream heiress, influenced by her ailing daughter. While not on par with Nabokov, it surpasses the 1982 film adaptation featuring Dudley Moore and Mary Tyler Moore.