These Names Make Clues

September 1, 2022
An invitation to a "treasure hunt" open to thriller writers and lesser mortals confronts Scotland Yard's Chief Inspector Macdonald with two baffling deaths. Though Macdonald doesn't really want to attend publisher Graham Coombe's party, he feels certain he'll look equally foolish if he declines. So he braces himself, goes off to Caroline House, where Coombe lives with his sister, Susan, and accepts a tag identifying him as Izaak Walton The other pseudonymous guests include Ben Jonson, Madame de Sevign�, Thomas Traherne, Samuel Pepys, Laurence Sterne, Fanny Burney, Anna Seward, Jane Austen, and Mrs. Gaskell. All the players are immersed in various stages of deciphering individually dispensed clues when Caroline House is plunged into darkness. When Susan Coombe finally finds enough candles to provide minimal lighting, they realize that Samuel Pepys has disappeared, and he's shortly found dead in the telephone room. Although one of the guests reports having seen a gray-haired man lurking in the vicinity, Macdonald, condemned to playing who's-on-first with suspects who spent the evening flitting from one room to the next, considers himself lucky to figure out how Pepys, who's actually the mystery writer Andrew Gardien, was killed. A visit the next day to Gardien's agent, Mardon-Elliott, reveals that he's been shot dead, the name "Gardien" scrawled on a nearby sheet of paper. This golden age curiosity, previously out of print since shortly after its initial publication in 1937, proceeds from one head-scratching riddle to the next. But alert fans will recognize a late-blooming clue as pivotal and share honors with Macdonald for identifying the culprit. Crime and punishment as the ultimate parlor game, aimed at readers who'll keep its title front and center.

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Starred review from September 12, 2022
First published in 1937, this superior entry in the British Library Crime Classics series from Lorac (1884–1959) is an exemplar of the golden age closed-circle whodunit. It opens with Chief Insp. Robert Macdonald of Scotland Yard receiving an invitation to a treasure hunt from Graham Coombe, a book publisher. Macdonald accepts, and on arrival at Coombe’s London home finds that the eclectic group of guests, including an economist and several mystery authors, are to have their real names kept secret. They compete to decipher the clues Coombe has carefully prepared for the game, only to have the lark end abruptly when one of their number is found dead in a room he shouldn’t have been in, as no clues directed anyone to it. At first, the cause of death appears to be a heart attack, but Macdonald ascertains that the dead man was electrocuted by an elaborate device straight out of the fiction penned by one of Coombe’s guests. Lorac plays scrupulously fair, but few will anticipate the denouement. Fans of clever puzzle mysteries will clamor for more Lorac reissues.