Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 19, No. 99, February 1952

“No, on the whole I don’t think criminals get much help from detective stories. And if by any chance they are addicts, that fact by itself is almost certain to scupper them, since their training in imaginary crime — which is almost always extremely complicated — tends to make them overelaborate in the contriving of their own actual misdeeds; and that, of course, means that they’re easy game... For instance, there was the Munsey case.”

“It has always been my opinion,” said Wakefield to the ceiling, “that after-dinner conversation should be general rather than anecdotal. More-over—”

“I’d known the family slightly,” said Fen, unperturbed, “over quite a long period of years. There were five of them, you remember: George Munsey, a little, round, chuckling man who’d made money on the Stock Exchange; his wife Dorothy, vague and stately and benign, who acquired something of a reputation as a poetess in the earlier twenties and lost it again, conclusively, in the later; Judith and Eleanor, the two daughters, aged twenty-two and twenty-five respectively, and both uncommonly pretty; and George Munsey’s sister Ellen, a dour, disapproving woman who battened on them, being herself genuinely penniless. With the exception of Judith, they all endured Aunt Ellen very patiently; and Judith’s dislike of her hadn’t, I think, any rational basis, but was more in the nature of a violent temperamental aversion such as sometimes crops up between dissimilar personalities. Aunt Ellen didn’t reciprocate it, by the way: if anything, she was rather fonder of Judith than of the others.

“Aunt Ellen apart, they were a well-to-do family, since Mrs. Munsey and Judith and Eleanor had all inherited substantially from Mrs. Munsey’s father. However, they kept no servants, preferring, on the whole, to lead a mildly Bohemian existence, looking after themselves. Their house was — is, I suppose I should say — in St. John’s Wood; and I was staying there on the night of the murder.

“I’d traveled up from Oxford to deal with some odd scraps of business and to get myself a new portable typewriter (eventually it was a secondhand one I bought, in Holborn). On the following morning I had to attend a Ministry of Education conference, and I was proposing to stay overnight at the Athenaeum. At lunch-time, however, I chanced on George Munsey in the Authors’ Club bar, and when he heard how I was placed he suggested I should stay with him instead. I warned him I’d have to work — there was a long memorandum to be typed out for presentation at the M. of E. conference — but he was quite agreeable to that; and so at about half-past two in the afternoon I duly appeared on his doorstep, typewriter and all.

“I wasn’t the only guest, it turned out. The second spare bedroom was occupied by Eleanor’s current fiancé, an over-handsome but tolerably pleasant young man called Tony Odell, the owner (I was told) of a chain of milk bars in the West End. In addition to being Eleanor’s fiancé, he was Judith’s ex-fiancé; and I gathered, indirectly, that it was he rather than Judith who had been primarily responsible for the breaking-off of their engagement. However, none of the three seemed much discomfited by the exchange, and until the next day I wasn’t in the least aware of anything’s being amiss in the house.

“On arrival, I found that Judith was in the kitchen, concocting something or other; that Aunt Ellen was upstairs refreshing herself with an afternoon nap; and that the other four — Mr. and Mrs. Munsey, Eleanor and Odell — were playing Racing Demon in the drawing-room. Now, I have a fondness for Racing Demon, so having dumped my bag and typewriter in my room, I joined in; and the five of us played uninterruptedly for the next two hours. At half-past four, on the Munseys’ departing in a body to make tea, I retrieved my typewriter and settled down in the library to work. There I stayed — recruited by food and drink which the family brought in to me at irregular intervals — until nearly midnight. I hadn’t any occasion to leave the library, so I’ve no idea what the others did with themselves; and I don’t remember that anything more eventful happened to me, during the remainder of the day, than having to put a new ribbon into my machine. By the time I’d finished my job they’d all gone to bed, and I wasn’t at all sorry to follow them.

“But next morning, Odell being not yet up and the others unitedly engaged in cooking breakfast, Judith took me aside, in a state of considerable agitation, and confided to me certain matters which I must confess disturbed me a good deal. Summarized — for conciseness’ and Wakefield’s sake — what she told me was as follows: