THE FOUR QUEENS OF CRIME

As World War II looms, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham headline a fundraiser in an aristocratic manse that promptly turns into a murder scene.

The morning after the four bestselling authors—who, along with Baroness Emma Orczy, coincidentally starred in Marie Benedict’s The Queens of Crime just last month—join ranks to raise money for real-life activist Lady Stella Reading’s Women’s Voluntary Service, their host, ex-MP Sir Henry Heathcote of Hursley House, smokes his last cigar, which someone’s dipped in cyanide. Since the baronet’s idea of supporting his native land’s values includes looking down his nose at Communists, Blacks, Jews, and women, the assembled party is full of people who, as one of them acknowledges, “won’t mind very much that he’s dead.” But it could well be that members of Sir Henry’s immediate family—from his son, Charles, now the 12th baronet, to his daughter, Kate, come home from boarding school, to his fiancee, Lady Sarah—had the best reasons of all to kill him. Although real-life DCI Lilian Wyles of Scotland Yard is eager to enlist the help of the Queens of Crime, fictional DCI Richard Davidson, her partner on the case, won’t hear of it, and the pair’s dutiful, endless interrogations of Sir Henry’s family and staff shunt Christie, Sayers, Marsh, and Allingham to the sidelines, where they remain chatting among themselves to the very end; their detection is pretty much limited to elucidating a single clue that baffles the Scotland Yard sleuths.

Bonus: Readers can congratulate themselves on having the enlightened social attitudes the victim and suspects sorely lack.