There are times, when reading Golden Age mysteries, that an experienced reader will have no difficulty predicting the identity of at least the first murder victim. As an example, consider if you will the following descriptive passage which opens a Mr. and Mrs. North mystery by Frances and Richard Lockridge called Murder Within Murder:
"Miss Amelia Gipson presented a firm front to the world; she stood for no nonsense. For the conscious period of her fifty-two years she had stood for no nonsense in a world which was stubbornly nonsensical. The nonsense in the world had not been greatly abated by her attitude, but Miss Gipson's skirts were clean. What one person could do, she had done. If that was inadequate, the fault lay elsewhere; there was a laxity in higher places. Miss Gipson often suspected that there was."
After that description of a thoroughly unpleasant and vindictive woman, I suspect that the experienced reader will not be surprised when, in the next sentence, the authors advise us that Miss Gipson was then living out " the last evening of her life," though she was obviously unaware of that fact. A spiteful and most disagreeable character indeed, much hated by former colleagues and current family members for her pomposity and her interference - but why was she murdered - and in a reading room of the New York Public Library, no less?
Amelia was poisoned with a rather unusual poison – sodium fluoride. She had been doing research for a publisher about several old murder cases, and her notes were being turned over to some writers who would put them together and flesh them out into a book of stories about true crimes – some of them still unsolved. The publisher who was going to publish that book was Jerry North. Whose wife was Pam North. Who had a hunch - and regular series readers of the Mr. and Mrs. North mysteries will know that it is always a mistake to ignore Pam North’s hunches – that the real key to this murder lies somewhere in one or more of those old cases on which Miss Gipson had been doing her research. Pam North sets out to talk to some of the other people involved in the case – and finds a good deal more than she may have expected. And that explains why Pam and Jerry North had to get involved when Amelia, who was one of Jerry’s researchers, was murdered.
That's the starting point for the crime and the investigation that will occupy the attention of Pam and Jerry North - Mr. and Mrs. North - in Murder Within Murder, originally published in 1946 and one of some fifty books by the Lockridges starring the Norths. If you'd like to listen to the complete audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, please click here.
The Lockridges were expert at creating memorable characters with a few careful phrases. I think Murder Within Murder is a fine example of the Norths – and the Lockridges – in action.
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