MURDER IN VIENNA

Serious accidents that overtake two British citizens who traveled on the same aircraft to Vienna add up to one misfortune too many for Scotland Yard’s Supt. Robert Macdonald.

Macdonald, who’s come to visit the family of psychologist Franz Natzler, an old friend he hasn’t seen in 10 years, intends his three weeks abroad to be a vacation, pure and simple. Those prospects darken when his airplane seatmate, Elizabeth Le Vendre, the secretary that Foreign Service retiree Sir Walter Vanbrugh—one of Natzler’s neighbors—has hired to help him write his memoirs, goes for a walk with his dog shortly after her arrival and before a violent thunderstorm and is later found unconscious after what looks like a fall down a set of steps. And they become well-nigh unthinkable with the death of Neville Walsingham, aka novelist J.B.S. Neville, a guest of Sir Walter’s, whom Anthony Vanbrugh, Sir Walter’s resident nephew, finds dead on a country road, evidently hit by a van. Chief Inspector Albrecht Nauheim, of the Vienna City Police, doesn’t accept the coincidence of accidents befalling two expatriate members of the same household within 24 hours, and he soon overcomes Macdonald’s reservations and persuades him to work the case during a busman’s holiday. It’s a good decision, because the Scot is the one who puts all the pieces (and the two incidents) together. In one of Macdonald’s last cases, the pseudonymous Edith Caroline Rivett (1894–1958) consistently prioritizes atmosphere over plot and characterization, and the denouement lands with a surprisingly gentle bump.

A welcome reprint whose view of 1956 Vienna has now grown as touristy in time as in place.