Neglected to mention

That Affair Next Door (Anna Katherine Green, 1897)
The Emperor’s Snuff Box (John Dickson Carr, 1942)
Murder by the Clock (Rufus King, 1929)
Murder Must Advertise (Dorothy L. Sayers, 1930)
The Film Mystery (Arthur B. Reeve, 1921)
The Roman Hat Mystery (Ellery Queen, 1930)
He Who Whispers (John Dickson Carr, 1946)
Marsh-Fire (Mateel Howe Farnham, 1928)
Extricating Obadiah (Joseph C. Lincoln, 1917)
Whose Body? (Dorothy L. Sayers, 1923)
The Moving Finger (Agatha Christie, 1942)
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Agatha Christie, 1920)
The Hand in the Glove (Rex Stout, 1937)
Death Points a Finger (Will Levinrew, 1933)

Strong Poison (Dorothy L. Sayers, 1930)

Phillip Boyes is dead from arsenic poisoning. Harriet Vane, his one-time lover, is the number-one suspect as the coffee she gave him is the only food or drink he had that wasn’t shared by others at dinner—others who, of course, didn’t die from arsenic poisoning. Lord Peter Whimsey is convinced Harriet is innocent and looks to find the real murderer before she’s convicted.

My first Dorothy Sayers novel, and I have to say, I rather liked it. I’m especially fond of Miss Climpton and her interplay with Whimsey. It reminded me a great deal of Carolyn Wells’s Penny Wise and Zizi characters, what with her hiding her investigation under a cloak of mediumistic charlatanism.

It’s not all that hard. I had a pretty good idea how things must have been worked when the paleness of one of the characters is brought up, and the book completely gives the game away when Whimsey brings up Mithridates.

Inscription: on the front flyleaf, “From Mary + Dick, Christmas, 1936”.

Patty’s Summer Days (Carolyn Wells, 1906)

This is the introduction of Nan, Patty’s stepmother, who apparently is only six years older than Patty.

There’s not really a plot—just a series of incidents during Patty’s summer vacation. Stand out scene to me was definitely the Christmas in July party where they’re on a lake throwing firecrackers at each other while singing the Star Spangled Banner and a bear in a skirt and ruffled bonnet eats peppermint sticks.

No inscriptions.

Red Masquerade (Louis Joseph Vance, 1921)

So, going by the prologue, or the “apology” as it’s titled, this book is a sequel to a film called The Lone Wolf’s Daughter. I’m going to assume the first quarter or so is a recap of that story, in which Michael Lanyard, a former thief turned British intelligence officer known as the Lone Wolf, helps Princess Sofia Vassilyevski recover compromising letters that her husband, Prince Victor, has been using to blackmail her.

Skip forward twenty years. Sofia is dead and Victor is trying to strike back at Michael by tricking her and Michael’s daughter, also named Sophia and whom Michael may or may not know exists (she certainly isn’t aware of him), into thinking that Victor is her father. Also, he’s collaborating with the Germans, Irish, and Chinese to poison the gas supply to London and kill the prime minister. Michael, meanwhile, is posing as Victor’s butler Nogam to thwart his plans. And Victor is a mystic and hypnotizes Sophia into stealing Lady Randolph West’s jewels. It’s all a bit convoluted.

No inscriptions.

The Three of Hearts (Berta Ruck, 1917)

Billy, a young subaltern in the military, has been psyching himself up for weeks to propose to his girlfriend Nora. Hunter, the medical officer, is in love with Nora as well and most jealous. He slips a special drug of his own concoction into Billy’s drink on the night of the dance, when Billy intends to pop the question.

Billy does propose to Nora and she accepts. He goes on to propose to Lorne and Lily, confusing them both for Nora in his drug-induced stupor, and they accept, too.

It’s a mess until Hunter’s sister shows up, figures out what’s going on, and gives her brother a taste of his own medicine—literally.

No inscriptions.

The Brown Study (Grace S. Richmond, 1917)

Donald Brown is living in… well, let’s not say a slum—the denizens, though poor and mostly recent immigrants, are good, clean, hardworking people making the best of what little they have. But Brown is plainly from somewhere else entirely. He takes on the role of a counselor—although those who come to him with their problems see him not as any kind of authority but as a dear and trusted friend.

It comes out, slowly enough, that Brown’s family is rather wealthy and Brown is, or was, the pastor of St. Timothy’s, one of the most exclusive churches in New York City. His doctor told him that, unless he gets out of it and takes a long, restful vacation, he’s fast on his way to a mental breakdown.

The doctor, and Brown’s fiancée Helena, were thinking someplace sunny and gay—the French Riviera, perhaps. But that’s not for Brown. While not an ascetic by any means, he dispenses with all the fineries and gewgaws that never meant much to him to begin with and settles down to a slow-paced, casual work among people who need him terribly more than the St. Timothy’s crowd ever did.

The one dark little cloud over Brown’s head is that he’s lost Helena. Surely, that patrician, borne and bread to high society, could never get along with Brown’s new way of living. But there’s he’s wrong. Resistant at first, she’s won over by the neighbors in Brown’s tenement court and begins to see beyond the funny accents and customs to the true worth inside them all. She marries Brown to help in his work.

No inscription.

Poor Man’s Rock (Bertrand W. Sinclair, 1920)

Jack MacRae returns home from the war to find his father destitute, barely clinging onto his cabin and a scant bit of land surrounding it of what had been his 600-acre ranch on Candle Bay in British Columbia. And it’s all that dastardly Horace Gower’s fault.

Jack makes it his life’s mission to ruin and Gower and reclaim his father’s land.

And he does, but in the end, well, Gower was never the demon old MacRae believed he was. He never undermined his business or soured his professional relationships. MacRae did all that quite nicely, himself. Gower never had much to do with Jack’s father at all. MacRae’s fiancée did leave him for Gower, that’s true, but she was an awful lot of people’s fiancée and Gower rues the day she decided he was the one rich enough to marry her.

Inscription: On the front fly left, “M. Cummings from D.J. Xmas 1921”.

The Leavenworth Case (Anna Katherine Green, 1878)

Horatio Leavenworth is discovered dead in his library, shot in the back of the head with his own gun. The door was locked but from the outside. Living in the house with him were his secretary, Trueman Harwell, and his two orphaned nieces, Mary and Eleanore. Eleanore is doing quite all she can to throw suspicion on herself: she’s found trying to hide the key, she burns some paper snatched from the dead man’s desk, the gun was cleaned with her handkerchief, and—when they think they’re alone and no one can hear—Mary flat out accuses her of the murder. When it’s the coroner or police asking questions, neither of the nieces will say a word.

All that’s suspicious, yes, but when you get down to basics—motive, means, and opportunity—Eleanore couldn’t have done it nor could Mary. I discounted the butler, cook, and maid simply because they’re not really characters. We don’t even meet the maid until after she’s dead, too. That only leaves Henry Clavering, Mary’s secret husband, and secretary Harwell, and only one of those men was not only in the house but in the room at the time of the murder.

No inscriptions.

Neglected to mention

I’ve fallen way behind on updates here—load of books I’ve read and said nothing at all about these last couple months.

Burned Bridges (Bertrand W. Sinclair, 1919)
Tongue of Flames (Mary Clark MacFarlane, 1923)
The House of the Whispering Pines (Anna Katherine Green, 1910)
Shavings (Joseph C. Lincoln, 1918)
The Perfect Murder Case (Christopher Bush, 1929)
Harvey Garrard’s Crime (E. Phillips Oppenheim, 1926)
The Black (Edgar Wallace, 1930)
Friend, You are Late (Alice Herbert, 1925)
Pass the Gravy (A.A. Fair, 1959)
Kept Women Can’t Wait (A.A. Fair, 1960)
The Case of the Worried Waitress (Erle Stanley Gardiner, 1966)

Timothy’s Quest (Kate Douglas Wiggin, 1890)

So, I read this because the film adaptation of it is going to play at the next Maine Silent Film Festival, which I suppose you could say I’m showrunning. The story is simple enough, save for one annoyingly convoluted point.

Timothy and Gay are orphans living in Minerva Court, a slum somewhere. Whoever had been caring for them has just died and the two old drunks they seem to fall to intend to break them up, sending Timothy to the state orphanage and Gay to the Lady’s Relief Society.

Timmy overhears this and so, that night, they slip away to the train yard and hop aboard whichever train will take them the farthest away. In the book, they actually consult the conductor and attempt to buy a ticket before being told it’s a freight train and being allowed to ride for free. In the film, they just find an open boxcar, read that it’s going to Pleasant River, Maine, think that sounds pleasant, and hop on.

Actually, in the book, it’s never said where Pleasant River might be. For that matter, Minerva Court is never pinned down to any specific city. The film doesn’t say outright, but it heavily implies Minerva Court is in Boston and Pleasant River is most assuredly in rural Maine. (There actually is a town here called Pleasant River, up near Milo, but the film was shot in Hollis.)

Timmy has a sort of image in his mind of what their destination is, and he sees that image realized at White Farm, owned by one Alvida Cummins, who does not like the way Timothy looks and very much does not like his asking about Martha Cummins.

This is the convoluted bit. Timmy gets the name off a tombstone in the front yard, which he, being unversed in such things, mistook for a nameplate. Now, the story doesn’t make any secret of it, so neither will I: Martha became premaritally pregnant, was sent away, died in childbirth, and when the body was returned, was refused burial in the Christian cemetery, and so now lives in the front yard. This makes perfect sense until you start adding the numbers together.

Ignoring Gay, because nobody knows where she came from, Timothy is about ten years old. Martha died at age seventeen. All right, that takes us up to twenty-seven years in the past. So, Vildy is Timmy’s grandmother and is transferring the resentment and grief she still holds for her daughter onto— wait, Vildy is Marthy’s sister? But she’s sixty!

The film just ignores it all and hopes the audience does, too, but the book does provide some kind of an explanation. Marthy died in childbirth, but not with Timmy, it was to some unknown and nameless girl who looked just like her. This girl also died giving birth to an illegitimate child who also looked just like her and Martha—and that’s Tim. So, Vildy’s reason for resenting Timmy is as I said, but Timmy is really Vildy’s grandnephew.

That… sure, it works, but it’s so needlessly complicated when it could have been so simple.

Vildy, deep down, knows that she and all the other “good orthodox Christians” in town were wrong to turn their backs on Marthy when she most needed their help, and now Timothy’s coming has forced her to come to terms with that—to finally admit that the anger she’s held onto all these years isn’t directed at Martha—that she’s really angry at herself.

And so, Alvida lets go of her grief and Timothy and Gay find a home at White Farm.

No inscriptions.