Sometimes I wish I had notes on my 'To Read' list so I could go back and reference what made me want to read a book. This was mildly enjoyable and the writing witty but it belabored nitty details far too often. Why in the world did I want to read a murder mystery from 1938? Only my past self will ever know. ( )

Plucky Gwynne Dacres gets into all sorts of scrapes while solving a perplexing murder in the boarding house where she lives. I enjoyed the authentic 30's atmosphere and the dialogue between Gwynne and the other characters. The back story was surprisingly twisty and illustrative of the adage "old sins have long shadows." Despite some false starts, head bashings, and pervasive sexism which prevents any male from taking her seriously, Gwynne wins out in the end. ( )

Very slick little 1930s mystery, with an alarmingly gruesome crime scene (thankfully only implied, not graphically depicted) and a horribly tragic back-story. And yet, for all that, the narrative stays pretty light and stylized and readable. If you're in the mood for something that puts you squarely in the middle of a fast-talking black-and-white movie where the heroine is plucky and her main man needs a good hard kick for how often he calls her "baby," you'll probably enjoy this. ( )

Q gave me this as a gift and oh how delightful. Not exactly a mystery you can solve as you go, though parts of it you can--more like noir mystery. The dialogue is astoundingly good--like the best 1940s movie banter. And what a set-up, what atmosphere, what a heroine! ( )

After hooking me on Cornell Woolrich, my friendly local librarian handed me this one with a grin. And yes, it's another mostly enjoyable, crisply-written, plot-heavy mystery from the 1930s, which manages to combine a "closed population" setting (a boardinghouse with a set of characters in close quarters) with a locked-room (more than one, actually) puzzle. The main pleasure in this is the narrator Gwynne Dacres, a sharp, sardonic, intelligent, competent - and divorced! - young woman, who fetches up in this peculiar household because a pretty nice room is available cheap and she's just lost her job over a screwup her boss actually committed, but he fired her instead. She's what they used to call "plucky." A corpse appears at the base of a bluff behind the house, written off as a gangland hit, but then the creepy landlady is found dead, locked in her basement with a very hungry dog and a couple of cats (Seeley seems to have no appreciation of cats). Gwynne and the pushy guy upstairs end up working with the local cops to figure out what happened, as the back stories of the other tenants start to leak out. Gwynne is rescued from deadly peril twice, but is also the one to unearth and figure out significant clues - in spite of suitor Hodge from upstairs constantly belittling her "little noodle" and calling her "baby." There's a lot of that sort of smart-alecky 30s dialog, and Gwynne gets chops for handling it with some class...though the culminating marriage is downright icky. The plot goes in all kinds of directions and twists and complications involving multiple staircases, closets, door and window locks, train tickets, and assumed identities - which at some point, gets a little tiring. Still, a fairly fun period piece with a likeable heroine. ( )