S.S. MURDER

Murder strikes a cruise ship bound from New York to Rio de Janeiro in this reprint from 1933.

Journalist Mary Llewellyn, recovering from an appendectomy, expects the only flaw of her 10 days aboard the S.S. Moderna to be the absence of her colleague and fiance, David Donnelly, to whom she addresses a series of letters that end up telling a much more eventful story. The first night out, which happens to be Friday the 13th, successful businessman Alfred Lambert gets a fatal dose of strychnine, presumably administered by one of the three other people at his bridge table or the three other passengers in the room. The most likely suspect is Robinson, not only because his bridge is utterly incompetent and he doesn’t have a first name, but because he promptly disappears, and there’s no record of anyone named Robinson among the ship’s cast or crew. Mary, an incurable reporter, asks enough questions to raise the hackles of Lambert’s sister-in-law, the widowed Mrs. Clapp, once famous as comedienne Marcia Manners, but not enough questions to prevent a second murder. There follow all the obligatory alarums and excursions you’d expect aboard a Golden Age cruise, creakily but deftly managed by the pseudonymous Patrick, whose actual identity as Richard Wilson Webb and Mary Louise White Aswell in one of four distinct permutations of authors behind the pen name is the biggest reveal of Curtis Evans’ introduction. The solution is surprising, though Mary’s letters never remotely approach Patrick’s promise of “emotion, not recollected in cold tranquillity, but poured on to paper while it was still molten.”

Decorous retro entertainment that would make perfect shipboard reading.