The Murder of Steven Kester (1931) by Harriette Ashbrook

The Murder of Steven Kester (1931) is the second outing of Harriette Ashbrook's smart-alecky, playboy detective, Spike Tracy, which may have been her most commercially successful endeavor as it was adapted, in 1934, as the black-and-white movie Green Eyes – a movie with a minor footnote in the history of television. The movie received its first telecast on Sunday, February 25th, 1940 on NBC's experimental station W2XBS in New York City.

Just like its predecessor, The Murder of Cecily Thane (1930), Ashbrook's second novel is a thoroughly conventional detective story compared to her subsequent novels such as The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933), A Most Immoral Murder (1935) and Murder Makes Murder (1937). A typical, 1930s American detective story written and plotted in the traditions of the Van Dine-Queen School. However, as John Norris pointed out in his 2013 blog-post, "The Detective Novels of Harriette Ashbrook," her "tendency to be a bit risqué" is "on flamboyant display in this book."

You can hardly picture Philo Vance, or Ellery Queen, attending a fancy dress party "dressed only in a tiger skin" and "an air of irrepressible good-humour."

Spike Tracy is a friend of Miss Jennifer Vinton, granddaughter of Steven Kester, who left her parents when she was an infant, but Kester seldom found the time to be a grandfather and left her in the care of a kindly, adoring nurse, Dora. Who's now somewhat of an old family retainer privy to "the household skeletons." Kester's attitude towards his granddaughter changed when she returned from abroad as a young woman with "a complete set of friends" and began to have daydreams about launching his granddaughter in society, which would lead to a marriage with a suitable young man and a great-grandchild – preferably a boy who would bear his name. Jennifer shattered his "dignified daydreams" by falling deeply in love with a hardworking law clerk, Cliff Millard, who makes long hours to make ends meet.

Kester, "an awful snob," is dead set against Jennifer marrying a man "he considered his social inferior" and stopped her weekly allowance, but, when she pawned her jewelry, he threatened to cut her out of his will. And he even summoned his lawyer. Somewhat of a mistake when you're already an unlikable character in a detective story.

On an evening in June, Jennifer throws "a masquerade party" at her grandfather's Long Island mansion, Long Hills, but the party ends when the body of Steven Kester is found, stuffed in a closet, with multiple stabwounds!

Spike flippantly remarks to the local police how beautifully the murder of his host "fulfills all of the requisites" of the best detective stories with a house party (check), a corpse (check) and an amateur detective who happened to be present when the murder was committed (check), but rarely has an amateur detective slipped so easily into a murder investigation in such an unlikely situation – putting him to work when District Attorney Foxcroft recognizes him as "the damn fool that solved the murder of Cecily Thane." I suppose it also helped that he's the younger brother of the D.A. of New York City, R. Montgomery Tracy, but, even by Golden Age standards, it was somewhat amazing at how fast Spike was calling (most of) the shots.

As an aside, Chapter V gives a brief biography of Spike, but the biography was almost entirely copied from The Murder of Cecily Thane. I thought that the passage sounded familiar and remembered the phrase "a charming hybrid." So I went back to compare those passages and they are indeed the same. What a lazy way to pad out a chapter! Gratefully, I don't have to say the same about the busy plot, which has more complications than merely two headstrong lovers opposed by a family patriarch.

Several days before the party, Roger Herries arrives at the house and was introduced to everyone as an old friend of Steven Kester, who would be staying a few days, but Kester was clearly annoyed at both his presence and references to the Arco iron mines – even ordering his private-secretary to dump all of his Arco mining bonds. Something that becomes very suspicious when Herries attempts to flee the house after the murder. There's also money missing from the wall safe and something had been burned in the basement furnace. However, the most baffling aspect of the case is that the overly diligent murderer put "the phone and the cars out of commission," not once, but twice! One of those flashes of originality that would come to define Ashbrook's future novels.

Nonetheless, The Murder of Steven Kester is largely a conventional, typical Van Dine-like detective novel, crammed with clues and red herrings, which should help the observant, suspicious-minded reader with spotting the murderer well before the end. Even if the clueing was a bit dodgy at times. The pair-of-dice clue is a good example of a dodgy clue given very late into the story, but hardly enough to sink the story as a fair play mystery. More importantly, Ashbrook pulled all of the plot-threads together to my full satisfactory.

So, plot-wise, The Murder of Steven Kester is a competently constructed, charmingly told detective story with a splendid setting, a solid alibi-trick and interesting character backstories, but not a shining example of Ashbrook's ability as an innovative and original mystery novelist. You have to turn to the previously mentioned The Murder of Sigurd Sharon, A Most Immoral Murder or the superb Murder Makes Murder, if you want to see what she was capable of as a plotter and story-teller. Otherwise, The Murder of Steven Kester comes recommended as a good representative of the American detective story from the early 1930s.

This only leaves me with the last and somewhat contentious Spike Tracy novel, The Purple Onion Mystery (1941), but, keeping the end of Murder Comes Back (1940) in mind, I still hold out of hope for it.