Philip MacDonald, The Choice (1931)

Dr. and Mrs. Hale-Storford, newlyweds of six months, are entertaining guests at their house on the Devonshire coast near Polferry.  A violent storm has struck.  Dr. Hale-Storford is downstairs with two male guests; his wife Eve, his young male cousin, the housekeeper, Eve's sister, and Eve's friend are sleeping upstairs.  When the doctor and his guests go upstairs, they find Eve dead, her throat slashed, and no weapon in sight.

Cut to several months later.  No one has been arrested in Eve's death.  And more tragedy has struck: the young cousin has died when the doctor's sailboat sinks under him, and Eve's sister has fatally driven off the cliff road near the doctor's house.  Are these deaths coincidence?  Some think not, and Colonel Anthony Gethryn has been called in to resolve the case.

Also published as The Polferry Riddle, The Choice was one of Philip MacDonald's enjoyable Golden Age mysteries.  Part problem in detection and part thriller (a significant part of the book involves a frantic search for Eve's friend, who has disappeared in a taxi), The Choice offers present-day readers a step back in time.

As a nod to its publication under two different titles, I am assigning this mystery to the category "A Mystery by Any Other Name" for the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge.

Rex Stout, Not Quite Dead Enough (1944)

Not Quite Dead Enough was originally published as a Nero Wolfe double--two novellas published in a single book.  The two novellas here are "Not Quite Dead Enough" and "Booby Trap."  While each covered almost 100 pages in the Bantam printing that I read, they were both printed with lots of space on the page, so they are really just long short stories.

Both are set in World War II New York.  For those of you thinking, "Well of course it was set in New York--Nero Wolfe never leaves his house," even when Wolfe stays home, his narrator and Watson, Archie Goodwin, frequently runs around New York City and the surrounding area.  And in fact in both stories Nero Wolfe is seen all over New York--quite actively so in "Not Quite Dead Enough," in which Archie comes back as a Major in the U.S. Army to try to convince Wolfe to help the government during the war.  Archie is horrified to discover that Wolfe has taken up healthy eating and jogging so that he can become a soldier.  Thus Archie has to come up with something to distract Wolfe from dreams of soldierdom.  Fortunately for Archie's hopes, a murder falls into his lap.  At its core, "Not Quite Dead Enough" is a puzzle with a very simple solution that is very hard to see.  At least it was for me.

In "Booby Trap," Wolfe is helping the Army with Archie's assistance when a grenade detonates in a senior officer's office.  Again Wolfe is out of the house, this time so he can go to the Army.  Readers of Nero Wolfe will know that the usual rule is that Wolfe never leaves the house on business, so this story suggests just how much the war has upset everyday life (at least in Nero Wolfe's household). This story seemed much more complex than "Not Quite Dead Enough," but I still enjoyed the first one more.

For the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge, the category is the "Dynamic Duo" of Wolfe and Goodwin.