A Dram of Poison by Charlotte Armstrong

Kenneth Gibson was a meek and mild fifty five year old university professor who was unmarried, and who had no plans to change this. That is until he met the daughter of one of his colleagues. Mr. Gibson had the gift of empathy, and when he met Rosemary James at her father's funeral, he felt that this young woman was exhausted from caring from her father. She was thin and tired and had been sheltered from the world. Mr. Gibson felt that he could help her to recover. Indeed, he did. Under his care, Rosemary flourished. They grew fond of each other and finally agreed to marry despite the differences in their ages - she was 32 and he was 55.

They settled down in Gibson's pleasant home, and all went well until they had a traffic accident. Rosemary was driving, and when she swerved to avoid an oncoming car, she instead ran into it. Mr. Gibson was seriously injured with several broken bones in his leg, but Rosemary was not injured. When Mr. Gibson was released from the hospital, his sister Ethel came to help Rosemary take care of him. Ethel was unmarried and had been successful in her career. She was a dominating person, and managed to see the worst in everybody. She saw that Rosemary was quite friendly with Paul Townsend, their next door neighbor. Ethel did not hesitate to tell Mr. Gibson about this. Gibson took her quite seriously and believed that he was losing his wife to the younger, attractive neighbor. He was also depressed about his inability to walk without limping. He was still off from his teaching position which gave him time to brood.

Mr. Gibson decided to commit suicide. He went to the laboratory of a fellow professor, found the poison he would use for his suicide and poured some of it into an olive oil bottle. He put the bottle in a green paper bag, and took the bus home. When Mr. Gibson got home, he realized that he had left the bottle on the bus. He called the police, and he and the police then set out to find out what had happened to the poison. This hunt is remarkably suspenseful.

This book won the Edgar award in 1957, and it was the fourth novel to do so.  It was originally published in 1956. The book was interesting, and the hunt for the bottle keeps the reader's attention. There is also a lot of speculation in the book about the causes of Mr. Gibson's reasons for suicide. An assortment of characters, including a bus driver, a society matron, and an artist, is added to the hunt, and their speculations cause Mr. Gibson to engage in a great degree of soul searching. I could not resist wondering about how a modern mystery writer would  handled this situation.

Swan Song by Edmund Crispin

Edwin Shorthouse was a marvelous singer and always received rave reviews for each opera in which he sang. However, Shorthouse was a very annoying person to work with, and his attitude and actions toward women would certainly end his career in 2018. Adam Langley was a tenor who was performing in Die Meistersinger with Shorthouse in Oxford. Adam was married to Elizabeth who was a writer for magazines and was currently working on an article on famous detectives. She was hoping that while they were in Oxford that she would be able to interview Gevaise Fen who was known for his detecting skills. She said that she was hoping to interview "H.M, and Mrs. Bradley, and Albert Campion and all sorts of famous people".


The rehearsals for Meistersinger were not going well. The conductor, George Peacock, was young and not very experienced. Shorthouse set out to get Peacock removed from the conductor's position. Shorthouse interrupted him during rehearsals, made annoying and pointless demands, and Peacock became more and more upset at each rehearsal.  Then one evening, Shorthouse was foung hanging from a hook in the ceiling of his dressing room. Murder or suicide?

The police in the person of Sir Richard Freeman, the Chief Constable arrived at the theatre. He was accompanied by Gervaise Fen, a professor of literature at Oxford. They examined the dressing room in which Shorthouse had been found hanging and determined that to hang him in this room was very difficul. Fen met many people in the cast of the opera. There was no shortage of people who would have like to kill Shorthouse either because of obnoxious personality or his inability to keep his hands off the women in the cast.

Another murder occurred  and an attack was made on Adam Langley. Fen, of course, found the murderer and explained how the murders were committed. These methods are very complicated in the best tradition of Golden Age mysteries.

I think that this book will appeal to fans of opera as well as the reader who enjoys a bit of humor in his mystery novels.  Edmund Crispin writes charming and literate novels which I have always found to be quite enjoyable. This book was published in 1947.

Death of a Fool by Ngaio Marsh

Every December on the first Wednesday after the winter solstice, the Mardian Morris Dance and Sword play was performed outside of the Mardian castle. The performers this year were the William Anderson(know as the Guiser)  and his five sons as the Morris dancers. There were also Ralph Stayne who was the Betty ( dressed half in men's clothes and half in women's) and Simon Begg as the Crack (as a horse in a heavy metal headdress). This performance had been performed for many, many years and was probably an ancient fertility ritual and a rite of resurrection.

Part of the performance was when William Anderson in the part of the fool was surrounded by his five sons who danced around him with swords. At the end of this dance, they pretended to kill him, and he went to sit behind the Mardian dolman. The sons danced some more and then their father was suppose to return brought to life again. At the end of this year's performance, he did not return. Instead his body was found behind the dolman with his head cut off.

Inspector Appleby and his team was called in from London since the investigation of this crime was beyond the resources of the local police constable. They examined the scene of the crime, and interviewed all of the performers. They also interviewed some of those who had watched the performance. Dame Alice Mardian the ninety year old head of the family, and her great niece Dulcie who was a bit strange in the head, and Camilla Campion who was William Anderson's granddaughter who had returned to see the performance. Another who came to view the performance was Mrs. Bunz who had an avid interest in folklore, and who was always attired in handwoven clothes. The mystery of who killed William Anderson was not solved until there is a reconstruction of the original performance.

If you are interested in English folklore, I would highly recommend this book. It contains a great deal of information about this type of performance. Here in Philadelphia where I live, the mummers have a parade every year on New Year's day which I am sure must be derived from this type of English custom. This book was written by Ngaio Marsh and published in 1956. She is one of my favorite mystery authors and I have very high praise for this book. 

Fire Will Freeze by Margaret Millar

How did the bus driver disappear? Several people were on the Sno-bus from the train station to a ski lodge in Canada when the bus driver said that something was wrong, and that he would fix it. He got off the bus into the heavy snow. The group waited for him to return and he didn't. Indeed, the bus driver had disappeared. Mr. Crawford said that he would try to drive the bus, but he couldn't get it started.

So the group started off to find shelter and found a large and isolated country house. Some one from the house shot at them, but Crawford waved his hat in a friendly way, and the shooter stopped. The group went on to the house where they were grudgingly admitted. The house was occupied by Miss Francis Rudd, the owner, who definitely was mentally disturbed. She liked to hide and to cut up things. Also in the house was Miss Floraine Larue, her nurse. There were just the two

women living in the house which had seen better days. There were places on the walls where it was obvious that paintings had been removed, and places in the rooms where furniture was no longer.

Isobel Seton was a thirty five year old single woman from New York, and this was her first skiing trip. The reader views much of the action and the other members of the group through Ms. Seton's eyes.  She was quite taken with Mr. Charles Crawford who seemed to be quite decisive and who seemed to have a gun in his pocket. Ms Seton also believed that the missing bus driver had come to the house and was there somewhere. She even undertook a search for him which failed.

The members of the group settled in and spent the first night in their rooms. There was a scream in the night but they didn't know where  it came from until the next morning when they found the frozen body of Miss Floraine Larue in the snow. It seemed that she had fallen from the second floor balcony of the house. Another murder would occur, and the search continued for both the murderer and the bus driver, and another stranger showed up at the house seeking to get out of the cold.

This book belongs in the subgenre of country house mysteries which deal with a group of people trapped in a country house because of the snow. Some eager list maker should make a list of these books. It definitely has an appeal to readers who seeking a book to read while they are trapped inside by miserable winter weather.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book. There are definitely some good funny lines. The characters of the members of group are well drawn. Among them there is an incompetent poet and his overweight patroness, and a college girl who had taken a psychology course and understood everybody else. One can only wonder why most of the group wanted to go skiing.

This book was written in 1944 by Margaret Millar. She was a Canadian until she married the mystery writer Ross MacDonald. They moved to Santa Barbara. California which definitely had better weather.

Dark Death by Anthony Gilbert

Teddy Lane was petty crook who had earned his living as a gigolo and a blackmailer. Now he had added drug dealer to his resume. Teddy had big ideas for criminal schemes but most of the time they did not work out as he planned. This time he had a great idea for a blackmail scheme. He invited the four people whom he wished to blackmail to a party at his grubby apartment. He had brought them together to announce that he had material on each one of them which he would use to blackmail them unless they paid him 500 pounds each. Teddy's big mistake was to bring them together. When the four left the apartment and met again, they decided that it was essential to kill Teddy Lane, and they devised a scheme to do this. Teddy recognized his mistake and his life became unbearable as he suspected everybody he saw of planning to murder him, and he was terrified to leave his apartment.

Teddy needed money to get away from the city so he went to drug dealer for whom he worked and told him of a new scheme he had to get more drugs to distribute. This was a lie, and Teddy realized that the drug dealer would recognize this and try to kill him too. Life became even more complicated and dangerous. Teddy leaves the city only to suspect that he was being followed, and then returned to his apartment where finally he met his end.

One of the original four at Teddy's party was arrested for the murder, and two others of the four hired lawyer Arthur Crook to come to her defense. Crook believed in her innocence as he believed in the innocence of all his clients and sought the real murderer and almost loset his life in the process.

I enjoyed this book because it was well written, and Gilbert is wonderful in describing Teddy's fear as he tries to flee from the people who want to murder him. The reader truly feels what it is like to suspect a murderer to lurking every place he goes.

This book was written by Anthony Gilbert and published in 1953. The original title of this book was Black  Death.  Anthony Gilbert was the pseudonym of Lucy Beatrice Malleson. She wrote 69 mystery novels and 51 of them featured Arthur Crook who was a rather crooked lawyer who resorted to possibly illegal means to clear his client.

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Head of a Traveler by Nicholas Blake

Just suppose that a future Poet Laureate of England should write a mystery novel which features a notable English poet. This is what you have in the book Head of a Traveler. Nicholas Blake is the pen name of Cecil Day-Lewis who became Poet Laureate in 1968. He wrote this mystery novel in 1949.

Nigel Strangeways, the detective, was taken to meet established English poet, Robert Seaton, at his home, Plash Meadow, in the village of Hinton Lacey. Plash Meadow was a beautiful Queen Anne house set on beautiful grounds. Nigel met Robert and his second wife Janet whose name was Lacey before her marriage. Plash Meadow had originally been the home of the Laceys before Robert Seaton's father had purchased it. Plash Meadow had originally been the inheritance of Oswald Lacey, Robert's older brother, but it was now Robert's because Oswald had committed suicide 10 years before by drowning himself, but his body had never been recovered.

 Robert had two children by his first wife living at Plash Meadow. There was his son Lionel who had been a commando during the war, and Vanessa who was much younger and was an active participant in the Girl Guides. Also living with Robert, was Finney Black who was a dwarf with limited mental abilities who had been taken in by the Seaton's. Also living on the Seaton's property were a mediocre artist and his attractive daughter, Mara.

The quiet of the village and the house was disrupted two months later when a headless body was discovered in the Thames near the home of the Seatons. Superintendent Blount found out that Nigel knew the Seaton family and suggested that Nigel do a little polite snooping in the neighborhood of the crime. I will not provide any spoilers here by telling more about the crime and the investigation.

Nigel felt that Robert Seaton had not produced any important poetry in the last ten years although Robert did not admit to writer's block. It is on this subject, that Day-Lewis writes some interesting commentary on the poet's desire to write, and on the importance of poetry in the poet's life. It could be at this time, that Day-Lewis was also having difficulty in writing his own poetry.

2018 Golden Challenge Wrap-up

We have too rapidly reached the end of the year and of this year's challenge. I have enjoyed the books which I read this year, but did not get as much reading done as I would have liked. Below is the list of the books which I did read for the Golden challenge. Thanks to Bev for all that she does.

Books read for the Golden Vintage Cover Scavenger Hunt 2017.

1.  A Graveyard to Let   by Carter Dickson. 1949. Picture of a graveyard.

2.   Where There's Smoke  by Stewart Sterling. 1946. Picture of a red object.

3.    Dr. Priestly's Quest    by John Rhode. 1926.  Picture of a magnifying glass.

4.   The Book of the Lion  by Elizabeth Daly. 1948. Picture of a staircase.

5.    Antidote to Venom  by Freeman Wills Crofts. 1938. Picture of a building other than a house.

6.     Nothing Can Rescue Me   by Elizabeth Daly,  1943. Picture of a statue.

7.    Somewhere in the House    by Elizabeth Daly, 1946. Picture of a musical instrument.

8.   Crime Hound  by Mary Semple Scott. 1940. Picture of a hand holding a weapon.

9.   Do Not Murder Before Christmas   by Jack Iams. 1949. Picture of any holiday decoration.

10.  Blood Money  by Dashiell Hammett. 1927. Picture of a rope.

11.  Hamlet, Revenge!   by Michael Innes, 1937. Picture of a camera.

12. The Mad Hatter Mystery  by John Dickson Carr. 1933. Picture of a hat.

13.   Death on a Quiet Day  by Michael Innes. 1957. Picture of food of some sort.

14    Buried for Pleasure  by Edmund Crispin. 1949. Picture of a pipe.

15.   Minute for Murder    by Nicholas Blake, 1947. Picture of a clock.

16.   Cold Steal   by Alice Tilton, 1939. Picture of a mask.

17. Hanged for a Sheep   by Francis and Richard Lockridge. 1942. Picture of a skeletal hand.

18. The Plague Court Murders  by Carter Dickson, 1934. Picture of a dead body.

19. Mystery in the Channel by Freeman Wills Crofts. 1931, Picture of a boat.

20.  The Red Widow Murders   by Carter Dickson, 1935. Picture of a bird.

21. Death in Five Boxes   by Carter Dickson, 1938. Picture of a bottle of poison.

22.  The King is Dead  by Ellery Queen, 1952. Picture of a flower.

23.   The Man in the Brown Suit  by Agatha Christie, 1924. A map.