Black Cloth, Hard Cover, A tumble-Turn book
with double Dustjacket, 312p.
ISBN 1-55246-120-3 @ $38.00
Stephen Garment was one of England's greatest novelists, and Stephen Garment was
found early one morning in a taxicab, dead. The taxicab stood outside the
fashionable Chicago home of the ultra-fashionable Howland Kimbarks, to whose
party Garment was exactly four hours late. Unfortunately, he had been detained
by a murder — his own. Somewhere between one house and another he had been
killed. He was alive when he entered the cab, dead when he left it, and the cab
doors had not been opened between the beginning and end of the ride.
Cicotte, of the Chicago detective bureau, found no clues to
help, except a flask outside a window, which seemed to have little bearing on
the case. That the next day a woman had lashed a man's face with a riding crop
he did not know; that on the night of the murder a man had been held up and
robbed of a pair of shoes he knew but did not care. And the case lapsed — until
Mollock saw his Friend Walter Ghost in New York and Ghost took up the trail. For
it was Ghost, the detective who solved the mysteries of Murder on "B" Deck and
Dead Man Inside, who found the clue of the galley-sheets, and ran a murderer to
earth.
Vincent Starrett, well known mystery-story writer and one of the country's
outstanding Sherlock Holmes experts, has again written one of the expertly
plotted, expertly told stories for which he is internationally famous.
When, in Chicago, a New York banker, under an assumed name,
is found dead from morphine poisoning in a hotel room registered in another
man's name, it seems at first glance to be an obvious case of suicide. But when
Riley Blackwood, young dramatic critic, close friend of the owner of the hotel,
and specialist in crime, happens on the scene, he soon discovers that it is a
crime unprecedented in ingenuity and complicity.
Why had the mysterious Dr. Trample spent the night of the murder in the dead
man's room? Who was the private detective, Cross, trailing, and for whom was he
working? Why was Kitty Mock, the well known actress, so coincidentally close to
the scene of the crime? What connection did a small Wisconsin village on the
shore of Lake Superior have with the crime committed in Chicago?
These were some of the questions confronting Blackwood;
questions for which no answer could be found until the sorrowful tolling of a
ship's bell drifted, on the night breeze, to Blackwood's ears. Then, and only
then, did Blackwood learn the identity of a particularly ruthless murderer.
The Other Volumes in The Vincent Starrett Memorial Library
