The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933) by Harriette Ashbrook

Harriette Ashbrook was an American mystery novelist who embarked on her underappreciated literary career as a writer of plot-oriented detective stories, penned in the tradition of The Van Dine-Queen School, but she abandoned the puzzle detective in the early 1940s to write suspense fiction – which were published under the penname of "Susannah Shane." During her short-lived career, Ashbrook received "short shrift" from reviewers and was "never taken seriously in the mystery arena."

So, as a consequence, she was ignored by the paperback publishers of the day and her untimely passing, in 1946, ensured her novels would be consigned to obscurity. Not a single one of her detective or suspense novels were reprinted in nearly seventy years!

But was this deserved? Not on your life! I've only read three of her novels and agree with John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, that Ashbrook not only was a good writer and smart plotter, but her ideas were "often very original for the time they were written." I believe it was John who brought her back to everyone's attention with his 2013 blog-post, "The Detective Novels of Harriette Ashbrook." Since that blog-post, she has been slowly clawing her way back onto the printed page.

A small, equally obscure publisher, Jerry Schneider Ent., reissued the fascinating A Most Immoral Murder (1935) in paperback in 2016 and this was followed by a couple of reprints from a dodgy publisher of ill-repute, Resurrected Press – known for altering the original texts of their reprints. A year later, Coachwhip Publishers republished one of her Susannah Shane dames-in-danger suspense novels, Lady in Lilac (1941). These were the first reprints in nearly seven decades, but, after they were published to little fanfare, everything quieted down again. Until a few months ago!

Back in late September, Black Heath Editions reissued all seven titles in the Philip "Spike" Tracy series and this includes one of her more expensive, hard-to-get detective novel, which is the subject of today's review.

The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933) is the third novel about Ashbrook's Philo Vance-inspired series-detective, Spike Tracy, who's the smart aleck, playboy brother of the Manhattan District Attorney, R. Montgomery Tracy. This personal relationship allowed Spike Tracy to cultivate a reputation of someone who "goes around nosing into affairs" that aren't his and unearthing closely guarded secrets that doesn't make him exactly popular with "certain parties." This is opinion held by the murderers he helped bring to justice and Inspector Herschman of the New York Homicide Squad.

However, The Murder of Sigurd Sharon finds Spike Tracy stranded in rural Vermont with a dead car battery and there he watches a young woman rushing down a hill in a futile attempt to catch the last train out of the village.

Jill Jeffrey is a woman with a fluctuating personality. One minute she's "a charming, delightful creature" and the next moment she turns into "the most cold blooded, heartless hussy" you'll ever meet – especially for the time. A fascinated Spike is torn between "a desire to kiss her" and "break her neck," but quickly catches on something is going on back at her house. A lonely, isolated house occupied where she lives with her ill, bedridden twin sister, Mary, who she seems to loath. There's also their guardian, Dr. Sigurd Sharon, who used to be a Methodist preacher and a frigid live-in nurse, Miss Wilson. And their only contact with the outside world is their only neighbor, Jerome W. Featherstone, and Mary's physician, Dr. Carmack.

Jill tells Spike that Dr. Sharon is trying to kill her, when the only thing she wants to do is to live, but what he's trying to do is "just plain murder." Spike meets a household who greets him with "frigid politeness" and they resent his presence, but he's stranded there for the night.

During that night, Dr. Sharon is fatally stabbed in his bedroom and Jill is carried out of the room by Featherstone and Wilson muttering that he can never hurt her again, because he's dead. Murdered! However, the case soon becomes increasingly complicated with a false confession and impossible disappearance from the house with all the exists either locked or guarded by policemen. So nobody could have left the house unseen and place is searched, top to bottom, without result. This is followed by an equally inexplicable reappearance and this person tells them that even "Houdini himself would have given millions" for the secret. I think shows how obscure and little-known Ashbrook had been for the better part of a century, because The Murder of Sigurd Sharon is not listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). And this impossible disappearance/reappearance functions as a clue of sort.

However, this is the point where the plot becomes tricky to discuss as time, alas, not been kind to the primary plot-thread of the story, which was very innovative and original for the time, but has since been done to death – robbing the story of the effect of its bewildering premise and surprise ending. A reader today will have no problem figuring out a large chunk of the plot. Fortunately, this came with one (plot-technical) upside. You get to admire how fairly Ashbrook played with her readers throughout the story.

All of the clues and red herrings are present. Some strange, illogical remarks with one line being as good a clue as the verbal-clues from Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (1937) and Five Little Pigs (1942). Why everyone in the household was against Jill. The impossible disappearance from a guarded house. There's even a bookshelf clue and in particular a hefty, Danish tome they can't read and gets stolen. Most of these clues spell out a very clear solution to the modern read, but Ashbrook, who knew how to plot a detective story, actually managed to add a twist in the tail of the story that averted an ending now considered cliché!

So even with time completely obliterating the novelty of a truly innovative and original idea, Ashbrook still turned it into a good, old-fashioned Golden Age detective novel towards the end – complete with an unbreakable alibi and surprise ending. And that, my friends, is talent.

The Murder of Sigurd Sharon has most of the hallmarks of the Van Dine-Queen School and could even be given the Queen-ish book-title The Danish Tome Mystery, but I thought the book had a closer resemblance to the work of Helen McCloy than either S.S. van Dine or Ellery Queen. An early foreshadowing of Ashbrook's switch from detective to suspense fiction in the 1940s. So I think admirers of McCloy will get a little more out of this book than the adherents of Van Dine and Queen, but I believe The Murder of Sigurd Sharon is still recommendable as an original piece of crime fiction, possibly a first, from a long, unjustly ignored mystery writer.

I'll return to Ashbrook with my next read, which is going to be a three-cornered fight between The Murder of Stephen Kester (1931), Murder Makes Murder (1937) and Murder Comes Back (1940).

The Purple Onion Mystery (1941) by Harriette Ashbrook

A year ago, Black Heath resurrected the long-forgotten, criminally underappreciated Harriette Ashbrook by republishing her Spike Tracy series of seven novels, originally published between 1930 and 1941, which can now be marked as one of the best and most consistent bodies of work of the American detective story – sporting clever plots, lively characters and originality. Some of her novels were a good decade ahead of their time and likely contributed to her breakneck plunge into obscurity.

Ashbrook began conventionally enough with The Murder of Cecily Thane (1930) and The Murder of Steven Kester (1931), which are lighthearted takes on the Van Dine-Queen School, but The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933) was both a game changer and a rule breaker. An original piece of detective fiction praised by both Nick Fuller and John Norris. A Most Immoral Murder (1935) is a relatively minor detective story, but with a moving and original motive. Ashbrook reached her zenith with the superb Murder Makes Murder (1937) and the excellent Murder Comes Back (1940). This brings me to the last title in the series.

I approached The Purple Onion Mystery (1941) with some trepidation because it's the only title in the series that has gotten decidedly negative or lukewarm comments and reviews.

Mike Grost "thought it was awful" and a contemporary reviewer called it "tame game," which made me suspect that the series was going to end with a whimper instead of a bang, but now that I've read The Purple Onion Mystery, I can describe it as a very fitting end to the series – as it incorporated elements from all of the previous novels. The Purple Onion Mystery takes the same good natured, lighthearted approach to the Van Dine-Queen detective story as The Murder of Cecily Thane and The Murder of Steven Kester, but with an original motive and backstory as dark and serious as those found in A Most Immoral Murder, Murder Makes Murder and Murder Comes Back. So it turned out to be a better and stronger conclusion than expected!

The Purple Onion Mystery finds our playboy detective, Spike Tracy, drunk and hijacking a taxicab, as part of a drinking game, with a young couple inside and wakes up the following morning in the apartment of Cassie Framp. A middle-aged woman who shares the place with another woman, Miss Anne Penton, who was in the taxicab. Cassie cooks him a fine breakfast and would have been the end of a fun night in the city, but then "the long arm of coincidence" is stretched "from here to hell and back again."

Inspector Herschman, chief of the New York homicide squad, calls on Spike and pressures him into taking charge of a red hot murder case. Spike is not only given full reign over the investigation, but pretty much spends the whole case impersonating a police officer and never bothers to correct people who think he's a real policeman. I'm not jealous. Just disgusted with a world in which this isn't an actual possibility. I would make a great amateur detective!

The murder in question is that of Lina Lee, "beautiful and crooked," who was the personal secretary of the president of Penton Press, Felix Penton. Lina Lee had been shot in her office, where she lay over the weekend, but, when her body was finally discovered, two people have unaccountably disappeared – namely Felix Penton and Stanley Bishop. Their names appear in the logbook of Friday evening together with that of Helen Martin. A character who's "trying to act like a 'mystery woman' in a detective story" and she's not the only one to assume that role. One of the main characters has an almost unearthly link with mysterious veiled woman, dressed in all black, who "always appeared like a deus ex machina" to extricate him from a dire situation. The first time happened on the Western front of the First World War. A very well done plot-thread that was neatly tied to the solution.

It's not just the parade of vanished, incapacitated, lying and ghost-like suspects and witnesses making things needlessly difficult for Spike, but the physical clues, such as emerald jewelry, jagged pieces of paper and a little purple-skinned onion, tell a muddled story. They actually turn out to be supporting evidence with all the tell-tale clues hidden in the characterization and dialogue (very Christie-like) that revealed a rare kind of criminal (ROT13: n fvyrag fgnyxre/yhexre qevira gb zheqre).

However, if you've read the previous novels and have some idea how Ashbrook's mind worked when she plotted her detective stories, you can instinctively guess the murderer's identity and motive with the rest of the story filling in the blanks. A bit of a double-edged sword since you can only truly appreciate The Purple Onion Mystery, if you have read the previous novels. You almost get the idea Ashbrook wrote it as a fond farewell to her readers as she began to move away from the detective story to try her hands at writing suspense thrillers as "Susannah Shane."

So, no, The Purple Onion Mystery is not the best detective novel Ashbrook produced during her too short career, but it's still a very readable, solidly plotted and fitting end to the series with a plot drawing on previous novels – like a band playing its greatest hits. If I have anything to complain, it's that Patsy didn't return to play Jeff and Haila Troy with Spike. Something that was vaguely alluded to in Murder Comes Back. Otherwise, The Purple Onion Mystery comes especially recommended to fans of the series, but readers new to Ashbrook are advised to begin at an earlier point.

The Murder of Cecily Thane (1930) by Harriette Ashbrook

The Murder of Cecily Thane (1930) is Harriette Ashbrook's debut as a mystery novelist that simultaneously launched the career of her dilettante detective, Philip "Spike" Tracy, who's a lighthearted, irreverent reflection of S.S. van Dine's Philo Vance – leading only seven of Ashbrook's dozen detective-and suspense novels. Spike makes a memorable entrance.

The Murder of Cecily Thane opens with Spike's older brother, District Attorney R. Montgomery Tracy, wondering out-loud why God allows his troublesome younger brother to live. Or why his little brother lacked the good sense to get himself arrested "in some place besides New York." Spike had been taken into custody on a charge of being drunk and disorderly. So his older brother had to come down town to bail him out.

Ashbrook briefly explained why there's such a stark difference, in personalities and life philosophy, between the Tracy brothers.

R. Montgomery Tracy grew up under "the stern Purnitan rule" of his father, which, combined with an occupation entrenched in "the majesty of the law," gave him a humorless disposition and life, he felt, was "not to be taken lightly" – a mirror opposite of his carefree brother. Mrs. Tracy had enough of her husband Puritanism and picked up her youngest son, Spike, and went to Europe. So he grew up as "a charming hybrid," half American and half continental, who lived an utterly useless, but infinitely amusing, existence. A careless lifestyle backed with "the unceasing flow of dollars from the paternal estate."

So, to nobody's surprise, they ended up with clashing personalities and their verbal exchanges ("Philip, I refuse to permit such levity") reminded me of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin (who first appeared in Fer-de-Lance, 1934).

Montgomery dreads that every "damned paper in town" will plaster the story of Spike's arrest on the front page, which comes on the back of editorials chiding him that has three unsolved murders on his desk. And he had been on his way to the scene of another murder when he had to get his brother out of jail. A murder that promises to be a real headline grabber.

Cecily Thane is the wife of a well-known jewel merchant, Elton Thane, who amassed a small fortune as an importer of rare, precious gems which had once "adorned the now defunct crowns of Europe" and Cecily had quite a collection of jewelry – worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cecily's body was found in the bedroom of their brownstone, shot through the heart, with the door of the private wall safe standing wide open. An estimated "$200,000 worth of diamonds, emeralds and pearls" had been taken from the safe!

Interestingly, Mr. Thane allowed Cecily to engage a professional gigolo, Tommy Spencer, twice a week to take her to dances, parties and the theater. Something Mr. Thane didn't care about at all. However, it turns out Spencer was involved in an identical murder, the Schlockenhass case, which had "stirred the city six months before" under different name. A simple, or so it appears, because the house was "simply teeming" with people who had "no particular fancy" for Cecily on the night of her murder. There's her estranged brother, George Griffis. A very old friend and his daughter, Mortimer and Nina Fennel, who had their private reason for hating Cecily. And even her husband is revealed to have had a gem of a motive.

So, when Spike learns his brother has "a murder on the pan," he decides to cancel his elk-hunting trip, to British Columbia, and stay in New York to hunt a murderer instead ("much better sport") – accompanying his brother as an unofficial observer. A vivacious Spike embarks on his first murder case in "a jolly spirit of fun," but everyone soon discovers there's "a quickness of perception" under his cheerfully irresponsible exterior.

Spike's airy comments about the construction workers outside the house, his strange behavior with the lipstick at the crime scene and fiddling with the pillows on the chaise lounge all turn out to have an important bearing on the case. Slowly, but surely, he not only wins the trust and respect of his older brother, but even Inspector Herschman slowly has to adjust his an opinion on Spike. An opinion Herschmen expressed with letting Spike know that the only reason he hadn't thrown into the Hudson River, with a five-hundred pound boulder tied to his feet, is the fact that he's the District Attorney's kid brother.

The Murder of Cecily Thane is a more breezily written detective novel than my two previous reads by Ashbrook, The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933) and Murder Makes Murder (1937), which were much closer to the psychological-driven mysteries by Helen McCloy. They also had knottier and original plots. By comparison, The Murder of Cecily Thane is an ultra-conventional with an ultimately simplistic plot that owes some debt to Van Dine's The Benson Murder Case (1926). But even when being highly conventional, Ashbrook couldn't help herself but show flashes of ingenuity.

One of the clues is reproduced in the book and, as John Norris pointed out in "The Detective Novels of Harriette Ashbrook," this is kind of an interactive clue allowing the reader to study the clue in exactly the same way as Spike did. A very innovative idea for the 1930s. Secondly, there's a cleverly done, tricky alibi worthy of Christopher Bush.

So, all in all, The Murder of Cecily Thane is a pretty solid and promising debut from a talented mystery writer who, inexplicably, never got the acknowledgment she deserved. Recommended as a lighthearted take on the Van Dine-Queen School of detective fiction.

I wanted to save the remaining three Spike Tracy novels, The Murder of Stephen Kester (1931), Murder Comes Back (1940) and The Purple Onion Mystery (1941), for next year, but might sneak in one more before the end of the year.

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.

Trading Places

"Eh bien, Mademoiselle, all through my life I have observed one thing--'All one wants one gets!' Who knows... you may get more than you bargain for."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train, 1928) 

Last year, I reviewed A Most Immoral Murder (1935) by Harriete Ashbrook, who also wrote suspense fiction under the name of "Susannah Shane," which tend to be smart, lively and well-plotted detective-and thriller novels, but most book reviewers at the time gave her a short shrift – resulting in paperback publishers largely ignoring her work. So she has rarely been reprinted and this condemned her to almost complete obscurity. And the keyword there is almost.

One of the usual suspects, John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books, wrote a positive blog-post about her work, The Detective Novels of Harriete Ashbrook, drawing comparisons with S.S. van Dine, Ellery Queen, Mignon G. Eberhart and Craig Rice. That was enough to place Ashbrook on my radar and we ended up agreeing that she got the short, grubby end of the stick in life (as she also died at the age of 48).

After finishing A Most Immoral Murder, I really hoped some of Ashbrook's other detective novels would make it back into print and (sort of) got my wish.

Recently, one of Ashbrook's dames-in-danger suspense novels was reissued by Coachwhip and the book in question, Lady in Lilac (1941), was originally selected as "a $1,000 Red Badge Prize Mystery" – representing one of her scarce triumphs as a published authors.

Lady in Lilac has been called a Woolrichian suspense novel on account of a plot-device apparently closely associated with the Father of Noir, which involves two strangers exchanging their identities. An impulsive decision that will place two women in mortal peril.

Helen Varney is an aspiring actress, who moved to New York, but in the five weeks she has been in the Big City she "tried to see every manager in town" without result and is down to half a dollar. And she's already two weeks behind on her rent. So Helen is forced to put her dreams on hold and take a job as a waitress, but fate appears to intervene when she saves the life of a woman, named Joanna Starr, who attempted to end her own life in the adjacent apartment – which has far-reaching consequences. Helen tells Joanna about her dreams and how she, one day, will get hold of a famous manager, like Hugo Steinmark, and get her chance to prove herself.

Coincidentally, Joanna has an appointment with Steinmark, but also longs to escape from the complications of her own life. So she offers Helen her identity in exchange for a quiet, uncomplicated existence as a simple, unknown waitress in a New York Diner. In return, Helen receives an audience with Steinmark and an opportunity to experience untold luxury.

There's a lavish hotel room at the Waldorf in Joanna's name and she traded a fat roll of five-hundred dollar bills for the last fifty cents in Helen's pockets, which Joanna assured could be spend as she pleased. So their personal situations were completely reversed overnight and Helen experienced what it is like to shop for clothes without "the constraints of a budget," but she also learned that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

During her long-awaited meeting with the theatrical manager, Steinmark is fatally shot and the unseen murderer threw the pistol into Helen's lap. This has the unfortunate result that she was seen standing over the body with a gun in hand and she immediately high-tailed it out of there. However, everyone is now looking for the enigmatic woman in the lilac dress and bloodstained slippers. A woman who appears to have two identities!

The confusing caused by having assumed Joanna's identity is what allowed Helen to move through the city without being recognized by the public at large, but one of the people who knew Joanna intimately has catched up with her – a man named Paul Saniel and really wants to know what she has done to Joanna. Helen is not entirely convinced of Paul's good intentions and refuses to tell him the full story, which only complicated her personal predicament even further. And there are other stumbling blocks entering the picture in the background: a case of bigamy, an unsolved kidnapping/murder case obviously based on the Lindbergh affair, a suitcase with a secret and an Austrian actress who suddenly turned up in the United States.

There are two things I really appreciated about Lady in Lilac: one of them is the surprising complexity of the plot, full of twists and turns, which neatly tied all of its plot-threads together by the final chapter. You should not expect a plot à la Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr, but it was more than what I hoped to find between the covers of a woman-in-peril thriller. So that was a pleasant surprise. Secondly, I liked the use of newspaper headlines and excerpts that keeps both the reader and the characters in the story abreast of the latest developments in the case on the official end of the investigation.

It showed how the case captured the public imagination, but also explained to the reader why Helen continued to be unrecognized even when the police learned she was involved in the case under Joanna's name. Additionally, the story includes excerpts of an article penned by Lance Sheriton, an "ace detective story writer," who had been hired by the Gazette to write an exclusive reconstruction of the case with a final summation penned by the official sob sister of the paper. I liked how newspaper excerpts were used to tell parts of the story.

My sole complaint about the book is the sugary ending that was far too sweet. Ashbrook probably wrote the ending with a possible movie deal in mind, but she allowed a character to live who had been riddled by bullets. She should have allowed that character to be embraced by death, because it would have strengthened the sweet part of the ending. Granted, it would have made it a bitter sweet ending, but now it was one of those having your cake and eating it too endings.

Otherwise, Lady in Lilac is an excellent, fast-paced suspense novels and really hope more of her books reappear in print in the years ahead. Both her detective and suspense novels.

Murder Makes Murder (1937) by Harriette Ashbrook

A closed circle situation, not to be confused with the locked room mystery, is a trope beloved of Golden Age detective readers and, in its purest form, confines its cast of characters to a single location, such as a country house or train, which are often cut-off from the outside world – traditionally due to a freak blizzard or an ungodly rainstorm. Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) made the lonely, isolated island an emblematic setting for closed circle detective stories. Or, at least, that's the perception.

Over the years, I've come to regard the isolated island setting more as a staple of the Japanese shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) movement than of the Western, Golden Age detective story.

The Kindaichi Case Files series is littered with these tiny, isolated islands, where grisly deeds are done, but you can find them in practically every anime-and manga detective series like Detective Academy Q and Case Closed – a notable example is "The Koshien Murder Case" from the latter. But even among the translated novels there are three classics, Yukito Ayatsuji's Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987), Alice Arisugawa's Koto pazuru (The Moai Island Puzzle, 1989) and NisioisiN's Zaregoto: Kubikiri saikuru (Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle, 2002).

On the other hand, I can only think of a handful of (truly good) Western examples with an isolated island setting from the genre's golden era: Anthony Berkeley's Panic Party (1934), Robin Forsythe's Murder on Paradise Island (1937), Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun (1941), Anthony Boucher's The Case of the Seven Sneezes (1942) and Herbert Brean's The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954). So I'm glad to report that I can now add Harriette Ashbrook's Murder Makes Murder (1937) to the list!

Murder Makes Murder opens in 1921 with a passel of newspaper reporters en route to the Long Island estate of a multi-millionaire, Thaddeus Culver, on the shore between Brooklyn and Montauk.

Thaddeus Culver is a "president or director of some twenty-odd corporations in the chemical world" and has the astronomical sum of $50,000,000 to his name, which, adjusted for inflation, is close to $650,000,000 in today's money – making him quite a catch. However, Culver was "a notorious bachelor" and the world was surprised when he married, at the age of sixty, his widowed housekeeper, Mrs. Sarah Martineau. And legally adopted her five-year-old daughter, Elise. This meant that his sister and nephew, Mrs. Florence Anson and Maxwell, lost "a big slice" of that multi-million dollar pie.

The next two chapters skip eleven years ahead and Culver has passed away. Mrs. Culver and Elise, who has become a budding poet, live a reclusive existence on an island somewhere off the coast of Maine. A stroke forced Mrs. Culver to return to their Long Island estate, but, when Elise meets a charming young man, she promptly tells her daughter to pack her bags. And they return to Hallett Island. Finally, the story moved forward, to 1936, Elise has garnered recognition as an emerging poet with a slim volume, entitled Sky Song, but, more importantly, she's secretly engaged to her New York publisher, Hamish Hurd – a friend of playboy and amateur detective, Spike Tracy. Tracy is going to be his best man when he marries Elise on the Maine island in a few days time.

Hallett Island is a small, wooded island with Mrs. Culver's estate and a tiny village, whose only connection to the mainland is a ferry, but the wedding guests arrive on the island around the same time as a big storm. There are things going on the normally quiet, peaceful island that will prove to be a sinister prelude to brutal and shocking murder.

A few days before the wedding, Mrs. Culver came stumbling back from her evening walk in the woods, scared and shivering, after which she ordered her personal maid to lock up the house at night. Something that had not been necessary before. Somehow, the newspapers got wind that something was about to happen and "a swarm of reporters" tried to get to the island, but the storm prevented them from making the crossing. Only one of them was brave, or stupid, enough to steal a boat and make the dangerous journey. So the stage has been set!

On the eve of her wedding, a ruthless murderer entered Elise's bedroom and goes to town on her with a pair of scissors in a frenzied attack, but why would anyone want to butcher the lovely, kindhearted and innocent poet? Someone had seen "a ghostly figure" coming out of Elise's bedroom in the middle of the night and it had left a trail of muddy tracks that mounted a stairway, which led up to the third step from the top and then "vanished in thin air." Sadly, this aspect is not treated as a full-fledged impossible crime and the explanation pretty disqualifies it as such, but the rest of the story is as engrossing as it's baffling.

An observant reader, who pays close attention, is able to catch a glimpse of the truth early on in the story, but complete, fully-realized picture will probably elude them until very late into the story when they're in possession of all the known facts – only for Spike to turn around to a spring a surprise on them. A well-done twist with an original and powerful motive as the coup de grâce!

My only misgiving is Ashbrook waited until the last acceptable moment to divulge two relatively important pieces of information. Not late enough to make it unfair, but they took their time in getting to the reader. More importantly, this little smudge didn't weaken the plot or took anything away from the strong ending.

I've mentioned in my review of The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933) that Ashbrook was a mystery writer from the Van Dine-Queen School, as A Most Immoral Murder (1935) can testify to, but The Murder of Sigurd Sharon and Murder Makes Murder stand much closer to Helen McCloy. There's more emphasis on the psychological than the physical clues and they just struck me as something McCloy could have written. Just compare The Murder of Sigurd Sharon with Through a Glass, Darkly (1950) or Murder Makes Murder with The Man in the Moonlight (1940). I wonder if this has anything to do with Spike being away from usual stomping ground. So my next read is probably going to be one of Ashbrook's New York set mystery novels (likely The Murder of Cicely Thane, 1930).

So, all in all, Murder Makes Murder is a cleverly constructed, but very human, detective novel filled with tragic characters, anxiously kept secrets, obsession and a shockingly original motive. A highly recommendable detective novel. One that has left me seriously baffled why Ashbrook was so thoroughly ignored or dismissed in her days. She was great!