Volume 19. Vincent Starrett Memorial Library
Black Cloth, Hard Cover, a Tumble-Turn
with double Dustjacket, 272 pp.
ISBN 1-55246-122-X @ $38.00
The Lateness of Percy Jones at the party in the luxurious Lake Shore Drive
apartment was the first wrong note. Midnight and the popular, honey-voiced radio
announcer inevitably arrived together at every important Chicago function. But
the minutes ticked by, and no Percy appeared at Janice Hume's.
Riley Blackwood, cynical drama critic and amateur detective,
began to be puzzled. A sixth sense told him that something was wrong. He was
hardly satisfied, however, when Percy eventually turned up with a strange story
about a red-headed girl, a blue Persian kitten, and a turbaned Hindu. He was
still less satisfied when a police call came over the radio announcing that
murder had been done in the apartment below.
Rita Wingfield, the concert singer, lay dead on her bed.
When Percy Jones disappeared the next day, Riley Blackwood
knew that the mystery was far more complicated than the pedestrian police
detectives suspected. Events were moving faster even than Riley's quick brain.
They piled on each other so rapidly that when he finally reached his astonishing
solution, he was almost too late.
The incidents in Janice Hume's apartment introduce an exciting yarn which
becomes one of the swiftest and most satisfying detective stories of the season,
fully up to the standard that Vincent Starrett has set for himself.
Thirteen white men and women and a glamorous Chinese girl are enjoying a weekend
house party given by an American woman in a rented Buddhist temple in the lonely
Western Hills of China, near the ancient city of Peking. In the group are a
brilliant writer of mystery tales, the curator of a famous American museum, a
noted English explorer, and a Hollywood director on vacation.
When a fantastic murder incongruously interrupts their
holiday, all these and others — Chinese, American and foreign — fall under
suspicion. In a sleeping chamber innocently extemporized in an old gallery of
idols, formerly a place of worship, a beautiful foreign woman is found brutally
slain ... and this first murder is not the last....
What background could be more absorbing for a detective story than mysterious
old land of China? Vincent Starrett, one of America's best writers in the field
of crime and detection, tells not only a thrilling story of murder and pursuit;
he paints a vivid picture of native and foreign life in the old walled capital.
Investigation of the mystery unrolls a rich and colorful
panorama of oriental nights and days that gives the story a sense of reality
rarely found in a novel of this sort. One enters intimately into the curious
circle of expatriates living among an alien people, an authentic revelation
based an the author's own experiences in China.
The Other Volumes in The Vincent Starrett Memorial Library
