You need a program to keep track of the characters! ( )

I first read this eight years ago, and retained little of the book. I remembered the opening scene, so realistic that any serious gardener could sympathize, and a general idea that the book was a superior read.
Coming to it again I was beguiled by the opening scene and impressed by the excellence of this mystery. Dickinson was obviously a writer who could tell an intriguing tale while developing interesting characters.
Paul and Lucy, two aging, off-and-on lovers, are in failing health. Bu chance an old scandal involving a death is brought to their attention. Aware that time is running low, Lucy asks Paul why he committed the murder. But Paul has always though Lucy was involved.
What follows is a sort of dual memoir as these two try to retrace events from the period between the wars to 1956. What actually happened all those years ago?
I loved this book. The only reason for not give no it five stars is that I found the ending unsatisfactory.
Highly recommended for an intelligent, out-of-the-ordinary reading experience. ( )

A pair of aging lovers set down their different versions of a 1956 scandal which involved British Intelligence, organized crime, and old-fashioned sibling rivalry. The narrators, the once beautiful Lucy and her devoted lover, Paul, each believed the other guilty of murder. An intelligent and well written mystery. ( )

This book is told through the alternating viewpoints of Paul and Lucy, an elderly couple who 40 years before were involved in a scandal of Profumo-esque proportions, with a mysterious death at its heart. One morning, Paul is weeding the garden, Lucy pottering in the kitchen, both with the radio on, when a satirical news programme starts to make joking references to the affaire. This leads the two of them to start talking about things which have been buried for decades. Lucy asks Paul to tell her, finally, how he managed to commit the murder. He replies, "I had always imagined it was you".

Cracking start, and incidentally the radio gameshow is a great device to introduce us to the dramatis personae. However, the story doesn't quite develop into the countryhouse mystery that you might expect - by the time the reader finds out what the crime is, it's pretty obvious who must have committed it. The pleasure is in hearing their distinctive voices as they tell the story, the portrayal of that post-war social milieu (half people who'd known each other at Eton, half up-and-coming types of dubious reputation), and the relationship between the five Mitford-esque Vereker sisters and their various lovers, husbands, and friends.

Highly satisfying. ( )

When I was twenty years old, I briefly met Mandy Rice-Davies, who was performing a quite chaste act in an Istanbul night club. Between sets I introduced myself and we chatted for a couple of minutes. I didn’t mention the Profumo affair of the previous year—that would have been too gauche even for me and even at that age. The books and the movie about the Profumo scandal made over the next decades were trash that failed in capturing any real interest in the story. But in 1994, Peter Dickinson wrote a book called The Yellow Room Conspiracy which transcended—even though it was obviously inspired by—the sordid British government scandal of the Foreign Office secretary John Profumo sharing a mistress with a Russian military attaché, call girls hired to service rich businessmen and politicians, the shady Dr. Stephen Ward and his stable of girls for hire, and so on.
Peter Dickinson is an author whose books are often mentioned as among the top mysteries of the twentieth century, especially The Poison Oracle and The Glass-sided Ants’ Nest. But his fifty books are in a variety of genres, including children’s stories, and he doesn’t repeat himself. The Yellow Room Conspiracy is another unique production. Dickinson recognizes that the interest of the story is not with the principals, and so he concentrates on the foreign secretary’s beautiful wife, whom he calls Lucy, and a man—he calls him Paul—who was at the very fringes of the scandal. Paul has loved Lucy since he first met her (and her four sisters) at their huge, ramshackle country house. The sisters’ attachment to the house, called Blatchards, and their bond with each other become active characters in the book.
Paul and Lucy tell the story in alternating chapters. Both are old and near death, and each thinks, until they urge one another to get the story down on tape and paper, that the other had something to do with the death of the man who first brought them together. This man, who later married another of the sisters, died at Blatchards of gas poisoning just before the explosion that destroyed the house.
The death at Blatchards is only one small part of the mystery surrounding these characters, a mystery that goes back to spy activities during the war and includes, over the decades, not only the five sisters but also nine men who were husbands or lovers of the five. The death at Blatchards, though it’s not definitively solved by the combined accounts of Paul and Lucy, is illuminated enough to let readers confirm their own guesses—or to decide they’ve been wrong. This slight open-endedness is one of many features making The Yellow Room Conspiracy unique. ( )