Sir Adam Braid was...well, I guess "peeved" would cover it. He was also quite nasty, and the only person who bore him any good will at all in his family was his granddaughter - and now he was busily writing a letter to his solicitors telling them to cut that granddaughter, Jill Braid, out of his will.
Unfortunately - or fortunately - Sir Adam never got to finish writing that letter. Somebody stabbed the old miser to death. Police clearly believed that Jill Braid had a pretty good motive. So it was fortunate that the policeman in charge of the case, Chief Detective-Inspector Fenn, knew Jill and didn't believe that the obvious and easy solution to the mystery was to arrest the young woman for murder. No, as he would quickly learn, there were a pretty fair number of people with a reason to dislike Sir Adam Braid - more than enough to make solving the murder a real challenge.
It's the story told in The Case of Sir Adam Braid, by Molly Thynne, a fine Golden Age mystery, originally published in 1930. It's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you are welcome to listen to the complete review by clicking here.
Score another "find" for Dean Street Press. "Molly Thynne" was another Golden Age authors who sank into what appears to be unwarranted obscurity once the age had ended. According to mystery historian Curtis Evans, who has contributed an excellent introduction to this new edition of The Case of Adam Braid, Molly Thynne was a member of Britain’s upper classes. She wrote just six mystery novels in her lifetime, all between 1928 and 1933, (along with one previous novel which was not a mystery). I’ve read and enjoyed several of them that Dean Street Press has published.. After 1933, it appears that she simply stopped writing, which seems a pity. The Case of Sir Adam Braid is a solid, well-written mystery. It’s definitely worth your reading time.
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