DEATH OF AN AUTHOR

Another rarity for the British Library Crime Classics: a witty, ingenious mystery finally returned to print after 89 years.

Against all odds, publisher Andrew Marriott succeeds in attracting his most unlikely author, reclusive crime novelist Vivian Lestrange, to a private dinner with another, celebrity author Michael Ashe, who wants to try his hand at a crime novel himself. The first surprise is that Lestrange turns out to be a young woman who engages Ashe in spirited argument. The second and third come three months later, when Eleanor Clarke, Lestrange’s secretary, reports to the police that both her employer and his housekeeper, Mrs. Fife, have vanished (two more characters will eventually follow suit). It turns out that Lestrange is a man after all, whom Clarke impersonated for that dinner with her employer’s full knowledge and amused cooperation. Inspector Bond, of the Hampstead police, and Chief Inspector Warner, of Scotland Yard, have distinctly different theories about the case. Their disagreements, sharpened by the discovery of an unidentifiable body in a burned-out rural cottage, give the pseudonymous Lorac (1894–1958), who clearly enjoys taking revenge on the early reviewers who thought she was a man, plenty of chances to bring different theories of the puzzle into dialogue with each other. “Detecting consists of asking the right questions,” Warner asserts, and the biggest conundrum in this case is clearly whether the right question is “Who killed Vivian Lestrange?” or “Who is Vivian Lestrange?” Alert readers will beat the sleuths to the answer, but probably not by much.

A rewardingly tangled discovery that’s aged like fine wine.