Sleeping Dogs by Carolyn Wells

Eileen Abercrombie is dead. Admired and envied, she was the idol of the Long Island community. She inherited a good deal of money from an uncle, but her second husband Hugh is also wealthy. Twelve years her junior, gentle and self-sacrificing Hugh was swept off his feet by charismatic Eileen when he was 17 and she was recently widowed. Her grown daughter Maisie, from her first marriage, is delightful and attractive. After a lawn party, Eileen complained of chronic digestive pains and took to her room, no doctor required. When her maid found her unresponsive, Dr. Garth was called. The coroner will confirm: death by bichloride of mercury poisoning.

Sergeant Downing arrives to meet the rest of the household, including Miss Mercer, Eileen's private secretary; her lawyer Troy Loring; and Maisie's suitor Percy Van Antwerp. With a cast who love and respect each other, you wonder where the villainy is hiding. Could it have been an accident? A house search turns up no poison, yet the next day every bathroom has a box of mercury. Downing calls in his friend Kenneth Carlisle to help investigate. Handsome Carlisle rose to become a motion picture star before throwing it over for his love of detection. He finds there was no discord between Hugh and Eileen, although Hugh has a love for the Doctor's daughter Lorna, a spiritual affection never acted upon. Things take a very surprising turn (for a mystery written in 1929!) when a shocking death turns the tables. As Carlisle would say, it knocked me galley-west. A sharp reader will deduce who could have done this, but the reveal is still satisfying.

For being written almost 100 years ago, this had a lot of charm, with words of the time being used I had never heard of (peroration, ebullition, and defalcation). One neat item was a character reading a novel for the first time, using a paper knife as the thick pages were not yet separated after printing. Carlisle is a charming detective and the case is notably solved through the absence of clues.

A successful female author of her era, Wells wrote over 170 novels, with a successful series of Fleming Stone mysteries. Sleeping Dogs is the first in the Kenneth Carlisle series, followed by The Doorstep Murders (1930) and The Skeleton at the Feast (1931).

My Crime Club hardcover is courtesy of the D. & S. MacDonald library.

1929 / Hardcover / 300 pages