1936

Murder in Mesopotamia (Agatha Christie, 1936)

Dr. Leidner, an archeologist on a dig in Iraq, hires nurse Leatheran to attend to his wife. Mrs. Leidner has “fancies”. She’s terribly afraid of her former husband, a man convicted of being a German spy in the war and thought to be dead, but she’s lately been the recipient of threatening letters from him. One afternoon, Mrs. Leidner is found with her skull crushed in in her bedroom. No one could have entered or left the compound. It had to have been one of the archeologists on staff.

Again, following the Christie pattern, we’re invited to suspect Father Lavigny, the epigraphist. He is indeed an imposter and he’s there with no good intent, but he’s not the murderer. There’s too much against him.

Why did Leidner hire a nurse for his wife? And not one trained in mental cases, an ordinary hospital nurse? He gives a kind of explanation to Poirot, but it’s the kind that explains nothing. Only three men have alibis. Two were away from the compound and numerous people swear Leidner never left his work on the roof.

I knew which way I was leaning when the paper Anne Johnson finds clinched it. The letters to Mrs. Leidner were in her own handwriting or something very near it. What Johnson found was evidently Dr. Leidner’s rough draft of one. It’s just a matter of how, and again, Johnson tells us that just before she, herself, is murdered: the window. Leidner didn’t have to leave the roof. He coaxed his wife to look out the window then dropped a heavy stone on her head. He hired a nurse to prove his alibi. When she saw the body, she would know how long it had been dead, and all knew that Leidner was on the roof at that time.

The why was less clear and the explanation is incredible. He was her former husband escaped from prison and death, who over the course of twenty years was so changed that Mrs. Leidner didn’t recognize him anymore.

No inscriptions.

The A.B.C. Murders (Agatha Christie, 1936)

Hercule Poirot receives taunting letters from someone known only as A.B.C., a supposed serial killer who’s working his way through the alphabet, killing first Alice Ascher, then Betty Barnard, and finally Sir Carmichael Clarke.

Now, I’m a man who’s read a lot of murder mysteries and I was very much in agreement with Poirot when he said that these crimes don’t follow the pattern of a serial killer. There’s no discrimination in who they choose for victims. And as someone who’s read stories like this before, my immediate thought was that we’re not dealing with a serial killer at all. We’re dealing with someone who wants to kill one person in particular and is trying to cloudy the waters with all these meaningless adjacent murders.

Of all the victims, who’s the odd one out? Who’s the one that’s got money and who stands to inherit it? Not hard to solve once you’ve divested it of the A.B.C. killer distractions.

Inscription: On the upper-left corner of the front flyleaf, “Grace Shelby Cornish / May 21, 1936”

Money Musk (Carolyn Wells, 1936)

Randolph Sayer is blown up while opening his presents at his sixtieth birthday party. It would seem the curious cigar lighter that nobody knows the origin of was filled, not with lighter fluid, but with gunpowder. Later, Hester, daughter Barbara’s maid, is stabbed to death. All this occurs right around the reappearance of John Lymann, who’s been abroad for the last eight years but has now come to hold Barbara to the engagement they entered as children.

So John looks the part but doesn’t act it. He’s altogether too assertive, too boorish, too cocksure. In short, after eight years away, he seems to have undergone a complete personality change. Assuming he is who he says he is.

Inscriptions: Signed Louis Desmond at an odd angle on the front end paper.

The Huddle (Carolyn Wells, 1936)

The Huddle is The Clue meets The Doomed Five.

I could just leave it at that, but to say a little more: four business associates join forces to create Robert Allenby’s latest and most brilliant concept: a freak show at the World’s Fair, but get this, the freaks are all erudite and conversant in the latest and most fashionable topics of the day. Between them, they raise a hundred thousand dollars to make this incredible idea a reality.

Oh, and should one or more of them die, the remaining money will be distributed among the survivors. I say “survivors”, plural, but we all know there’s only going to be one before the story’s over. It’s exactly the plot of The Doomed Five, only with four people instead of five, and a scholarly freak show instead of rooftop gardens.

Allenby and Davis are stabbed to death, but Crosby appears to have died of natural causes and/or the curse of King Tut. One of the characters (the murderer, in fact) at one point runs down the list of drugs Crosby regularly took, these being hashish, aspirin, and Pyramidon. Wait a minute, I said to myself, isn’t Pyramidon aminopyrine? Pretty sure it is — antique poisons are a hobby of mine and I’ve got a still sealed bottle of it in my collection. It’s a potent antipyretic but even a slight overdose can prove fatal. But did they know that in 1936? It wasn’t banned in much of the world until the 1970s, but no, I’m right. Crosby didn’t die of pharaoh-induced anemia but of agranulocytosis brought on by an aminopyrine overdose. So apparently they were aware of how dangerous it was as early as the 1930s.

Anyway, as in The Doomed Five, who the killer is is decided by a matter of attrition: Allenby’s dead, Crosby’s dead, Davis’s dead, that just leaves Barton standing.

No inscriptions.

Knights of the Range (Zane Grey, 1936)

Fresh back from school in the east, Holly Ripple assumes control of the Don Carlos Rancho after her father’s death. They’re beset by cattle rustlers and horse thieves, but Holly forms a posy of hard-fighting cowboys who manage to kill the ringleader of the outlaws. Not a bad western, though it couldn’t be any more generic.

No inscriptions.

Murder in the Bookshop (Carolyn Wells, 1936)

Philip Balfour is a rare book collector with a large and valuable library, looked after by his personal librarian, Keith Ramsay. Ramsay has tried to give him his notice — he’s in love with Philip’s wife Alli — but Philip refuses. His librarian is more valuable to him than his wife, he says, and he’s only half joking. Late one night, Philip and Keith break into Sewell’s bookshop to make away with an inconspicuous little book about taxation laws that happens to be signed by Button Gwinnett, the most elusive of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a strange thing for them to do but no one seems to regard it so. Even Sewell sees nothing wrong with it. Nevertheless, the escapade ends with a silver skewer in Balfour’s heart and the book missing.

Unusual in that Fleming Stone is involved for pretty much the whole book — he usually only steps in towards the end, after the police have thoroughly bungled the case. My question is, Stone gets a piece of Alli’s jewelry to bribe the woman holding her hostage. He tells this to the butler but pointedly to no one else. How did the murderer find out about it?

Inscriptions: All on the flyleaf, in order: “Gift Mama 12/12/42”; “Walter H. Cohen 6973739“; “Mitchell O’Barr”; “Annie Blackwell 2006”.

The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece (Erle Stanley Gardner, 1936)

Edna Hammer is worried that her sleepwalking uncle Peter Kent is going to kill somebody one night. And one night, someone does wind up stabbed to death with the very knife Edna was so worried about her uncle carrying in his sleep. Perry Mason is on the case.

I guessed pretty early on — and most certainly after Mason’s test with the duplicate knife — that it was Edna herself who had a sleepwalking fascination with the knife. Who the actual knifeman was I deduced along with Mason when Harris’s alibi falls apart.

No inscriptions.

The Desert Lake Mystery (Kay Cleaver Strahan, 1936)

Adam, tyrannical mayor of Oakman County, Nevada, has just learned that his ex-wife had a daughter after their divorce and has kept it hidden from him. He invites Betty-Jean to his camp on Memaloose Lake along with several other guests, notably his adopted son Kent, who he obviously intends to marry this Betty-Jean to consolidate his multi-million-dollar fortune. Unfortunately, also among the guests are Rosemary and her crippled brother Twill, respectively engaged to Kent and Betty-Jean. Old Judge Shivley, who raised Betty-Jean, is also at the camp with his son, Clyde, who is probably involved in a Hollywood scandal magazine and might dabble in a bit of blackmailing.

It’s blisteringly hot and most spirits are already pushed to the breaking point when a thunderstorm bursts. Almost everyone was in the club house playing bridge — including Betty-Jean, who completely forgot about the complicate dessert she was going to make for dinner — when Rosemary hysterically cries that she’s killed her brother. A search is made, evidence of a shooting is found, but Twill’s body isn’t. At the Shivley cabin, though, Clyde is found shot to death and his father is missing, leaving behind all his clothes.

There are a lot of murder mysteries were you’re faced with the simple problem that dead bodies can’t just up and walk away. They were either hidden by somebody else, weren’t actually killed, or where never even there. There’s a good bit of all three going on here.

No inscriptions.

Cards on the Table (Agatha Christie, 1936)

Mr. Shaitana, an eccentric who likes to model himself after Mephistopheles, invites Hercule Poirot to a bridge party. He’s a collector of many things and wants to show Poirot his rarest collection of all: his murderers. The four other guests, he says, have all killed in the past and gotten away with it.

But Shaitana, it turns out, wasn’t really an immortal evil — he’s proved quite mortal indeed when, at the party’s close, he’s found stabbed to death with a stiletto dagger. No one else entered the room and nobody left. One of the guests must have done it, but a motive is lacking, they’re largely unacquainted with each other, and none of them had more than the slightest familiarity with Shaitana. Is it the manly Major Despard, the timid Miss Meredith, the jovial Dr. Roberts, or the bridge champion Mrs. Lorrimer?

Good ending, very Clue-ish to give it away a bit, but for the one who actually did in Shaitana, the set up and reveal there was very well done.

Inscription: on the front fly leaf, Margaret E. Breckens, Dec. 10, 1944