JUMPING JENNY

Berkeley games the conventions of golden-age whodunits yet again in this ghoulish bonbon first published in 1933.

At a tasteful party given by Ronald Stratton, whose guests are attired as famous murderers and their victims, Roger Sheringham finds his attention divided between a triple gallows installed on his host’s roof with three stuffed corpses dangling from their nooses—two “jumping jacks” and a distaff “jumping jenny”—and the figure of Ena Stratton, the striking wife of Ronald’s brother, David. Soon after he chats with Ena and finds that a little of her goes a long way, she does him the favor of focusing his attention on a single point again by getting strung up on the gallows herself after the party has ended. It hardly seems possible that she could have leaped into the noose herself without the support of a chair, whose precise location becomes the focus of the police investigation. If she had help getting into her last scene, her killer was clearly one of the party guests, and Colin Nicolson, who was dressed as the poisoner William Palmer, is convinced that that killer was Roger, whom he caught wiping the fingerprints off the chair in question. Unmoved by Roger’s desire to protect someone else, Nicolson assures him that he’d never turn Roger in, since he surely had his reasons. As Roger embarks on a quest to identify the real murderer to spare himself further genteel embarrassment at Nicolson’s hands, readers privy to a fateful encounter of Ena’s that Roger missed will have their own very definite ideas who the culprit is.

Berkeley makes his highly artificial plot consistently lively, amusing, and treasurable.