Vintage Murders
I’ve had two books, sent by Dean Street Press, sitting on my iPad for ages and have only just got round to reading them. Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning were a husband and wife writing team. In 1930 they produced their first mystery, The Unseen Host. It’s famous (not, previously, to me) because many people think it inspired Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. In New Orleans, a select group of people, all known to each other, receive an invitation to a party to be held in their honour at a penthouse in the city. None of the guests can resist the mysterious invitation and all turn up. While they chat and speculate about who can have thrown the party, The Voice comes over the radio, informing them that by morning they will all be dead. Cue a tense psychological drama: suspicion as to whether a fellow guest might be the organiser of this death fest; nerves stretched to breaking point as the murders begin. Who is The Voice and how is he killing people so easily? Will anyone escape? The reveal, when it comes, I found a slight let-down but it remains shocking. The book is unusual for a murder mystery in that there is no detective involved, no aftermath, no clearing up of matters by the police (there are a lot of bodies to be accounted for). Rather, the reader is left to contemplate the results of a terrible evening. It’s a very short book, which you can easily read in a day and you’ll want to!
The following year came The Gutenberg Murders, which is slightly more conventional but still a page turner. There is a library in New Orleans, willed by a rich philanthropist and run by a very strict Trust. The director, Prentiss, has acquired for the library nine leaves of a Gutenberg Bible. Not everyone believes them to be genuine. The trouble starts when the leaves are stolen and one of the only possible suspects is found horribly murdered. Wade, a journalist, is recruited by the police to help out with the mystery and he’s the main character. Quite a small group of people have the connections to the library and the knowledge to have committed the crime. Wade is convinced that one of the suspects, a young woman, is innocent, but is she? There’s a confusion of movements and alibis around the time of the theft and the murder and the police are everywhere: watching, following, protecting. Two more murders follow, each as horrible as the first, before Wade, having as he thinks failed by believing a pack of lies told him by one of the suspects, then follows a hunch which proves correct. There can’t be many detective stories in which the hero solves a mystery by reading Euripides!