Mystery was published by Dutton in 1990 as the second novel in the Blue Rose trilogy (after Koko, before The Throat). Tom Pasmore, a boy on the fictional Caribbean island of Mill Walk, is hit by a car and nearly killed. During his long recovery, he becomes obsessed with a murder he witnessed before the accident — and with Lamont von Heilitz, a retired private detective who lives nearby and who takes the boy as a kind of apprentice.
The novel is Straub’s most deliberate homage to the detective story tradition (Conan Doyle, Rex Stout, Ross Macdonald) while simultaneously being a deconstruction of it. Von Heilitz teaches Tom not merely how to solve crimes but how to read the world — how to see patterns, how to recognize that the official version of events is always incomplete, how to understand that power structures depend on concealment. The murder Tom investigates connects to larger patterns of corruption on Mill Walk — patterns that lead back decades and implicate the island’s ruling families.
The Caribbean setting provides something unusual for Straub: warmth, color, and a social world (colonial, hierarchical, corrupt) quite different from the American small towns of his other novels. Mill Walk is a fully imagined society — its class structure, its racial tensions, its economy of sugar and tourism — and the mystery plot serves as a means of exploring its hidden mechanisms.
Collecting Mystery
First edition (Dutton, New York, 1990): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Very good: $10–$25
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation. Second of the Blue Rose trilogy.
A Caribbean Investigation
Mystery (1990) is the second Blue Rose novel. Tom Pasmore, a boy on the Caribbean island of Mill Walk, witnesses a hit-and-run that turns out to be connected to a decades-old murder. Mentored by an elderly detective, Tom uncovers corruption and secrets embedded in the island’s social hierarchy. The novel is a deliberate homage to the classic mystery novel — Straub references Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr — filtered through his own literary sensibility. Tom Pasmore is one of Straub’s most fully realized characters, and the Mill Walk setting is rendered with vivid, sun-drenched specificity.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to read the trilogy in order? Each novel works as a standalone, but reading them in sequence (Koko, Mystery, The Throat) enriches all three. Characters and events echo across the books in ways that reward attentive readers.