The Buffalo Box by Frank Gruber

In Hollywood, no one is surprised to see a bearded desert rat ride a burro down Sunset Boulevard. Lansford Hastings is the grizzled prospector looking to meet Private Eye Simon Lash, whom everyone seems to know. Lash has a large library of Americana and would be interested in the redwood box featuring ornately carved buffalo that Hastings wants to deliver to the rightful owner. It was made by a member of the doomed Donner Party who traveled West in 1846. Isaac Eckert and his wife never made it over the mountains, but this mysterious box may contain a clue to the location of a buried family treasure of $50,000 in gold that fortune hunters have been searching for ever since. Even odder is that this prospector, Lansford Hastings, wrote the foremost book on that event, then died over a hundred years ago!

Simon and his right-hand man Eddie meet Isaac's great-granddaughter Betty, who claims the box as her own; her inventor father Jim; his father Sheridan Eckert; radio personality Harold Wade and his guest Luke Lupton with his singing owls. Lansford turns up dead, but the man in the morgue is not the prospector Simon met. Nor is the dead man Anne Evanston's missing husband, whom she hired Simon to find. She is a cousin thrice removed.

It's a large and confusing cast to keep track of—they are all descendants and lying phonies using fake names to vie for inheritance.

This is a wordy (and sometimes confusing) mystery. Is there a treasure? Who inherits depends on which ancestor died first. Simon Lash is competent and amiable, humorously breaking the 'fourth wall' when asked how the secret compartment in the box works: he declines, stating one hundred and eighty-four magicians will bawl the heck out of Frank Gruber for exposing magicians' tricks!

This is the second Simon Lash mystery between Simon Lash - Private Detective (1945) and Murder '97 (1948). An entertaining curio with a wartime warning on the final page to watch out for spies in your midst: "They're listening!"

1942 / Hardcover / 292 pages