Then There Were Three by Geoffrey Homes

The roving eye of Homes' cynical reporter-detective Robin Bishop was tamed when he married and became editor of the Herald in the seaside town of Los Pinos. His crime-solving in The Man Who Murdered Himself, The Doctor Who Died At Dusk, The Man Who Didn't Exist, and The Man Who Murdered Goliath left him quite a reputation, but Homes has stated he was bored with Bishop and introduced a new detective in this mystery where they both exercise their hunch for homicide.

Humphrey Campbell filled Bishop's job at Morgan Missing Person's Bureau, a chubby private eye who drinks milk and has a flair for the accordion. He arrives in town to find a missing heiress who left her fiancé the day before her wedding with $80,000 in her pocketbook. Bishop was helping find the missing dog of a wealthy resident, and the two cases come together when they discover a crate was just buried in the pet cemetery. Marjorie's father arrives with Humphrey's boss Oscar Morgan and her ex-fiancé. After another body is found in a local fire, strangled with telephone wire, the only credible suspects include a hotel clerk with a large gambling debt, the missing dog's owner who used to date Marjorie, and the ex-fiancé, who wasn't even in the state at the time.

Humphrey and Robin work together, with the help of Jackson in the Police. There are references to the previous Bishop cases, and while this may be a pleasant send-off for Robin Bishop, it didn't excite me to read the next Humphrey Campbell novels: No Hands On The Clock (1939 - filmed in 1941), Finders Keepers (1940), Forty Whacks (1941 - filmed as Crime By Night 1944), and The Six Silver Handles (1944; aka The Case of the Unhappy Angels). Interesting, but for me, it lost it's pace and meandered.

1938 / Hardcover / 308 pages