THE ODOR OF VIOLETS

Blind private eye Captain Duncan Maclain agrees to look for a missing daughter and ends up involved in a whole lot more in this lively reprint from 1941.

Something strange is going on at The Crags, the Connecticut eyrie where Thaddeus Tredwill lives with his latest wife, Norma, a much younger actress, and two of his three children, Barbara, 18, and Stacy, 15. First Norma literally smells something that suggests her stepdaughter is involved with Paul Gerente, her ex-husband. Then Gerente is found beaten to death under circumstances that suggest that he'd already died before he apparently called on the Captain to discuss top-secret American defense plans. Meanwhile, Babs has disappeared under circumstances that would suggest she’d have eloped with Gerente if he were still alive, and the Captain is dispatched to The Crags to suss out her trail. The skulduggery will continue with a second murder, a secret code, and enough espionage and counterespionage to make even the most jaundiced modern heads spin. In the hands of Kendrick (1894-1977), the Captain, whom Otto Penzler’s introduction calls “as close to a super-hero as the Golden Age detective can be,” displays such a keen sense of smell, such a keen ear for spoken English, and such a skilled pair of companion dogs that he’s certain to come out on top, unless of course he and Spud Savage, his partner and friend, get decoyed into leading Thad’s protégée, playwright Cheli Scott, into dire peril.

A genuine curio, part traditional whodunit, part spy thriller, with the spies getting top honors.