OBELISTS EN ROUTE

In 1934, the same year Agatha Christie published the definitive railroad whodunit Murder on the Orient Express, King (1895–1963) matched her with this tale of murder aboard the maiden voyage of a nonstop train across America.

The Transcontinental has every amenity imaginable: a breathlessly accelerated timetable, luxuriously appointed staterooms, late-night snacks, ping-pong tables, and a 5-foot-deep swimming pool in which the train’s barber finds bank executive Sabot Hodges’ body—sunk, not floating—the morning after the train leaves Grand Central Terminal. The suspects, of course, are limited to the passengers aboard the fast-moving train. But Lt. Michael Lord, NYPD, focuses even more narrowly on Hodges’ secretary, X.L. Entwerk; his daughter, Edvanne; and her beau, Hans Summerladd, the publicity director for The Transcontinental. Assisted, or at least provoked, in succession by integrative psychologist Dr. L. Rees Pons and a background trio of prattling psychologists of different persuasions, he keeps reconsidering the case. Lord must return repeatedly to the question of whether there’s a case at all because Dr. Loress Black, the medical examiner who comes aboard the train in Chicago, insists that Hodges didn’t drown (there’s no water in his lungs) and wasn’t murdered (there’s not a mark on his body or any trace of poison in his organs). The most striking developments apart from the theories Lord and Pons keep generating in response to incoming evidence are conversations in which they take turns pontificating to each other about psychology and economics—exchanges Otto Penzler’s introduction pointedly suggests skipping—and a sudden violent episode that narrows the pool of suspects even further.

Extravagantly brainy, gloriously dated in every possible way, and no threat to the preeminence of Agatha Christie.