Neglected to mention

Murder Plus (Carolyn Wells, 1940)
Crime Tears On (Carolyn Wells, 1939)
The Moon Gate (Carroll Cox Estes, 1954)
The Corpse That Came Back (Theo Lang, 1952)
The Thirty-First Bullfinch (Helen Reilly, 1930)
Try Anything Once (A.A. Fair, 1962)
The Mystery of the Blue Train (Agatha Christie, 1928)

Cap’n Warren’s Wards (Joseph C. Lincoln, 1911)

Captain Elisha Warren receives the shock of his life when, after the death of his New York stockbroker brother, he’s named the guardian of his two children, Steven and Caroline, and put in control of their trust fund until the youngest turns 25, which will be in three years. It’s a shock because Robert was always embarrassed by his rustic brother and hadn’t spoken a word to him in the last eighteen years.

Robert’s fortune is rather less than it was imagined to be. He was no millionaire and there’s something peculiar about his estate that the lawyers and accountants can’t quite figure out. It seems his entire fortune was built on a foundation of fraud that, in his final years, he was plunging trying to amass enough money to pay back the man he’d stolen from. And it boils down to a certified check left in his safe to the order of $500,000 payable to Elisha Warren. That wipes out the trust fund and $30,000 besides.

Caroline is engaged to Malcolm Dunn very much at the insistence of his mother. The Dunns are almost flat broke though they project the outward appearance of wealth as long as they can. When Caroline was rich, she was their meal ticket. Now destitute, the Dunns squirm away and the scales fall from Caroline’s eyes.

The crisis averted of Caroline marrying a fortune hunter and Steven simply going to waste, Elisha has no intention of keeping the money any longer—it will be split between the children as agreed.

No inscriptions.

In the Tiger’s Cage (Carolyn Wells, 1934)

Allan Moore keeps a menagerie of wild animals in his backyard. He has a variety of animals but he loves his big cats. One day, his wife Marcia is found dead in the tiger cage. She’d been mildly mauled but none of her wounds would have been fatal. An autopsy shows she was suffocated by human hands before being thrown in the cage. Some time later, little Pamela Brett is killed after crashing in Foster Pollock’s airplane. Pollock had been teaching her to fly and it was her first solo trip.

The police, in the time-honored tradition of Carolyn Wells mysteries, are utterly useless. Detective Dobbs pins the first murder on Moore and Pamela’s death he thinks is merely an accident, though Fleming Stone discovers evidence of a bomb in the plane wreckage. Pamela’s death followed hot on the heels of her noticing something unusual in an old picture from Moore’s mining days out west. What might that have been?

This is a book where pretty well all of characters might have done it, but few had any apparent motive, few had the means (that being the knowledge of tiger behavior), few had the opportunity to pull off both murders, and not one has all three of the components of guilt.

The solution is up in the air up until Pamela noticed whatever it was in the photograph. That clinched it for Pollock. His valet’s tipping off Stone that neighbor Kent tampered with the plane was transparent and only emphasized Pollock’s exclusive opportunity there. The means is, sadly, hand-waved away. How he was intimately familiar with tiger behavior is unknown—he just was. He did protest too much whenever the topic of big cats came up, loudly proclaiming he would have nothing to do with them. The motive is only clear after the reveal and it’s honestly pretty weak—an old grievance with Moore’s management. What Pamela noticed was the man standing behind Moore. Only his hands are visible, and his fingers are deformed just like Pollock’s.

No inscriptions.

The Man from Maine (Frank Carlos Griffith, 1905)

Asa King is a blacksmith whose hero, Daniel Webster, he tries to emulate, largely in dress. Though uneducated and though all he’s ever read are a few local papers and though he’s never traveled farther away than Augusta, he imagines himself very wise, and indeed most of the other inhabitants of Dixfield defer to his wisdom.

Cy Bailey hails from nearby Farmington though now he’s a major player in Washington. His son, Jim, persuades him to ask a favor of the president to have Asa appointed as the American consul to some backwater country. You know, as a lark. And so Asa and his suit (no matter how many times he’s corrected to suite, he only thinks the other person is calling him sweet) make the journey to far off Boolahackentula in southern Africa to the court of King Aoola I.

Expecting a mansion, they’re greeted with a mud hut. In fairness to the hut, it’s every bit as nice as the king’s own. Seemingly the only inhabitants of the place are Asa and his family, Jim, Aoola and his daughter, and his secretary Patrick O’Hara, who has taught the king English in the very finest Irish dialect. Once in a great while, a crazed diamond miner stumbles into the consulate to be dealt with by Asa, who it must be said isn’t entirely sure what a consul does.

After two years, Asa decides to relinquish his post and return to Maine to shoe horses again. The royal family comes with him, having been offered a job in a minstrel show that pays far better than the kingship did.

Inscriptions: “Allen Page / June 7 – 1943” on the front flyleaf. Beneath it is stamped “A.H. Page”

Septimus (William J. Locke, 1908)

Zora, thankfully widowed and having come into some wealth, decides to see the world and figure out what life is. In Monaco, she makes the acquaintance of Septimus. Septimus is an odd fellow with a stream of consciousness conversational style and an outlook on the world that rivals a child’s naïveté. Zora also meets Syphur of Syphur’s Cure, a patented bit of quackery that claims to cure all manner of skin ailments.

Zora’s sister Emmy is an actress—a profession that Zora is broad-minded enough to condone but not so broad-minded to approve. She’s in love with a fellow actor but he drops her at once to marry a wealthy widow. Pregnant, she’s at a loss for what to do until Septimus steps in and marries her that same day.

For the last two years, Syphur’s Cure has been losing its market share. At last, Syphur is faced with the choice to either sell out to his competition and collect a royalty for the Cure, or to shutter the factory and find some other business to enter. He calls on Septimus for advice and at last opts to close up shop. He and Septimus intend to go into arms and sell the new machine gun Septimus has designed.

Zora, back from her tour of the US, tries to dictate propriety to her sister but Emmy calls her out for being arrogant and self-centered. It was plain to see that both Septimus and Syphur were as much in love with Zora as any two men could be, but while Zora was fond of them both, her fondness was more of the sort you’d show to a friendly neighborhood dog. She did not see them as people and certainly not as people with any agency.

With a new appreciation for Septimus and Syphur, Zora realizing that, while she searched the world over for what life means, everyone else was already living life.

Inscription: signed Henrietta Urkel on the front flyleaf.

The Wind of Complication (Susan Ertz, 1927)

A collection of short stories. I would say the linking element is that each involves a conflict but I think that describes all fiction. The most memorable story is the last one. It’s a mashup of Gaslight, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A young woman comes to London both to be near her fiancé and to find work. She stays with her uncle, who’s not only a misanthrope, but only experiences joy by hurting others. While seeming to welcome her in his home, he begins a campaign to make her doubt her sanity. His end goal is to murder her and make it appear like she killed herself to avoid commitment. Meanwhile, his reflection in his mirror grows more alien and menacing. Just before he pulls off his scheme, he discovers there’s no one in the mirror at all. His reflection is now in the room with him. There’s the sound of a terrible struggle, with two voices clearly audible, but when the police break down the door, the uncle, dead on the floor, is all alone.

Inscription: On the front end paper, “J.S. Kitterlines, St. Augustine, Florida”.