MURDER BY THE CLOCK

King’s third novel, originally published in 1929, shows a New York police lieutenant working the late shift to bring a killer to justice.

Despite the small number of suspects, there are lots of mysteries surrounding the death of Herbert Endicott. To begin with, is he really dead? His young wife calls the police when she becomes alarmed that he hasn’t returned from an errand after two hours. But when Lt. Valcour finds the missing man’s body hunched in the bottom of a cupboard, he’s so insistent that it remain undisturbed until Endicott is officially pronounced dead that he fails to notice—and keeps anyone else from noticing—that Endicott is still alive. Valcour’s plan to have family physician Sanford Worth keep Mrs. Endicott under sedation while Nurse Vickers or Nurse Murrow remains with Endicott until he comes around goes predictably awry, leaving Endicott really dead—no doubt about it this time—just as Thomas Hollander, the alleged best friend Valcour summoned so that Endicott could awaken to a friendly face, tries to stab him in the chest. Hollander is shot in the act by someone just outside the window, but who would be lurking there in the hours after midnight? If Endicott was being blackmailed, as the note his wife found reading “BY THURSDAY OR—” would seem to suggest, wouldn’t his blackmailer have a stronger incentive to keep him alive than to kill such a promising cash cow? And why is Mrs. Endicott so unconcerned about Marge Myles, her husband’s lover, that she keeps Marge’s name in her address book?

A dazzlingly artificial but highly readable Golden Age gem squeezed into 12 hours, plus a bittersweet epilogue years later.