The Gloriette at Schönbrunn is all about views.  You get a great view of the Gloriette from the Palace and a great view of the Palace from the Gloriette.

Given this conspicuity, the Gloriette would seem an unlikely site for a murder, but this is the setting for a memorable showdown at the conclusion of Golden Age crime fiction writer E. C. R. Lorac’s novel Murder in Vienna.

The book is a late work by the author, first published in 1956 by Collins Crime Club and recently republished in the British Library Crime Classic series.  It paints an interesting portrait of Vienna, post-Third Man, shortly after the city has been vacated by the occupying powers of Britain, France, the US, and the Soviet Union.

The Gloriette appears on several occasions in the novel, often described through the lens of Ernest Henry Webster, an opportunistic freelance photographer, whose keen eye for interesting vistas and dramatic backdrops for his camera’s shots sees more than is healthy for him, in a Vienna still teeming with Cold War espionage and intrigue.

It seems fitting, too, that Lorac’s series detective, Superintendent Robert MacDonald should chance to encounter one of the novel’s other most memorable characters, the elderly operatic soprano Hedwige Waldtraut Körner, close to the neoclassical colonnades of the Gloriette.

There is an impressive, if slightly faded, elegance about the both of them.

© Fergus Longfellow

Fergus Longfellow enjoyed the Gloriette both in fiction and in fact.