THE CHUCKLING FINGERS

An extended family’s post-nuptial celebration at its Lake Superior estate is turned upside down by a killer who’s almost certainly a beloved relative in this acclaimed 1941 whodunit.

Stenographer Ann Gay was already close to her cousin Jacqueline Heaton before they were both orphaned by a drowning accident. Now their friendship will be sorely tested by Jacqui’s second marriage to wealthy older lumberman Bill Heaton after the death of her first husband, Pat Sallishaw, left her almost 3-year-old daughter, Toby, without a father from the moment she was born. Bill’s son, Fred, is clearly resentful of the new wife he considers an interloper at Fiddler’s Fingers, the estate owned by Myra Heaton Sallishaw, Bill’s cousin and the late Pat’s mother. Myra’s brother, Phillips Heaton, can’t stop sowing catty remarks in every direction; Cecile Granat seems to be trolling for a suitable man; and an escalating series of pranks—a tripwire that trips up Toby, a smashed motorboat belonging to neighbor Ed Corvo, a robe of Ann’s slashed to pieces—clearly heralds darker doings. The fatal shooting of one of the assembled party brings out Cook County sheriff Paavo Aakonen and his helpers (and inevitably attracts the unwelcome attention of the local press), but their conscientious detective work, which largely involves establishing alibis, breaking them down, and dipping into the family’s troubled past, seems if anything to spur the murderer to ever greater heights of industry and ingenuity as Ann does her best to defend Jacqui from a mounting pile of evidence and glances disbelievingly from one of her relatives to the next, wondering which of them could possibly be behind the mayhem instead.

A model of construction, cascading revelations, and controlled hysteria that will still fool most readers 80 years on.