The Plague Court Murders by Carter Dickson

" I want you to spend the night at a haunted house" Ken Blake was approached by his friend Dean Halliday at their club with this strange request. Blake, who had been a bit bored with life lately, immediately accepted this challenge. Since both Blake and Halliday were novices at ghost hunting, Blake requested that he bring along an expert on the subject,  Detective Inspector Masters from Scotland Yard in an unofficial position because  Masters had quite a bit of experience in exposing bogus mediums in the past.

There is a lengthy back story involved in the episode which will follow and most of it deals with  Louis Playge  who was the common Hangman of Tyburn in the years 1663 - 65. It was for him that Plague Court was named. Curiously a dagger that was supposed to have belonged to Playge had recently been stolen from the London Museum.

Blake, Halliday, and Masters went to Plague Court in the evening. In this decaying building, they joined two women who were already there. There was young Marion Latimer and a much older woman, Lady Anne Benning, who was Dean Halliday's aunt. Also present were Marion's brother, Ted Latimer, and Major Featherton. A medium, Mr. Darworth, was there that evening to exorcise the evil spirit which haunted the house. Darworth had brought with him the boy Joseph who was able to receive spirits, but not to exorcise them. Darworth was now locked in a small house on the property. He had arranged a bell which would be heard in the house if anything happened to him.

That evening, Darworth was murdered in the locked house. Some said that they heard the bell ring and others did not. Masters had grown very worried about Darworth, and insisted they break down the door which the men did with great difficulty. They found Darworth who had been stabbed lying before the fireplace in a locked room with no footprints in the mud outside to show that anyone had entered the building.

Now entered Sir Henry Merrivale whose assistance was requested by both Blake and Major Featherton.  Sir Henry had been head of the British Counter-Espionage during the war, and was still associated with the war department. Sir Henry was a large, indeed very large, man who had been sitting in his office "fixing his mind in the coruscations of the infinite". He was very interested in taking on the mystery of the Plague Court murder. Soon another gruesome murder would occur to further complicate the solution of the crime. No crime was too difficult for HM, and he found the murderer and explained how it was done.

This is the first of many locked room mysteries which were written by John Dickson Carr using the pen name Carter Dickson in 1934. Sir Henry Merrivale is a master of solving this type of murder, and I have always found his exploits fascinating.

Hanged for a Sheep by Francis and Richard Lockridge

Aunt Flora had called Pam North for help because Aunt Flora believed that someone was trying to poison her with arsenic.  Jerry North was now in Texas reading a book for his publishing house, so Pam packed up her luggage and her two cats and went for a stay with Aunt Flora.

Aunt Flora was quite an eccentric character. She was getting along in years now, but she had been married four times. Currently she was seeking a separation from her fourth husband, Stephen Anthony, and  she had thrown him out of her house. Aunt Flora still maintained good relations with her children and grandchildren. There was her son, Alden Buddie, who was the product of her first husband, Alden Buddie. This son had two daughters, Clem and Judy. She also had a son Wesley Buddie, and he was the father of Christopher Buddie. Then she married Robert McClelland who had a son named Something or Other McClelland (Pam couldn't remember his name) and they had a son named Bruce McClelland who was a newspaper reporter. Her third husband was a man named Craig and they had had one son, Benjamin who was a very staid banker and who still lived with Aunt Flora. Aunt Flora had a house full of sons and grandchildren along with Harry Perkins who had been a friend of her first husband and who now lived in a room at the top of the house, and did odd jobs about the house.

Aunt Flora explained to Pam the reasons why she thought she had been poisoned though she could not see the reason. Aunt Flora did have a lot of money, but she had written a very fair will which  distributed her money evenly and which did not give an extreme benefit to any one person.

Then one morning, Pam came to breakfast and discovered the body Stephen Anthony in the breakfast room. She called her friend Lieutenant Bill Weigand who started the investigation. He interrogated  all of the members of the family, and he and Pam tried to discover a link between the murder and the attempted poisoning. There would be another murder which would involve Pam in a very scary manner, and at last Jerry North would return home to help in finding the solution to the crimes.

I have always liked Pam and Jerry North because they are nice people with a good sense of humor.. The mysteries are always well written and are not too blood spattered.  This book was written in 1942.