#1121: Follow As the Night, a.k.a. Your Loving Victim (1950) by Pat McGerr [a.p.a. by Patricia McGerr]

Follow as the Night

star filledstar filledstarsstarsstars
Having finally achieved all he has so long dreamed of, Larry Rock has just one lingering problem: one of the women from his chequered past must die in order to not stand in the way of his continued success. Realising that the balcony of his swank new apartment represents the perfect opportunity to kill someone and make it look like an accident, Larry throws a dinner party and invites his ex-wife, his soon-to-be ex-wife, his mistress, and his fiancée…and the whole city sits back and waits for the fur to fly while we, the reader, wait to find out whose body it was that dropped out of the sky in the prologue. As set-ups go, Follow As the Night (1950) by Pat McGerr takes some beating.

Continue reading

#803: Pick Your Victim (1946) by Pat McGerr [a.p.a. by Patricia McGerr]

Pick Your Victim

star filledstar filledstar filledstarsstars
The cover of this Dell mapback edition of Pick Your Victim (1946) by Pat/Patricia McGerr is one of the oddest I have ever encountered. Not only does the front imply a masked — or, y’know, deformed — serial killer disposing of their victims with the eponymous pick (in the book it is the verb and not the noun, and the sole victim is strangled), but the map on the back is…sorta useless, since the environs of the strangulation are completely irrelevant, making them ill-suited to illustration. The book has other problems besides these, but quite what Dell thought they were selling would probably take a book of its own to explain.

Continue reading

#523: Death in a Million Living Rooms, a.k.a. Die Laughing (1951) by Patricia McGerr

Death in a Million Living Rooms HBstar filledstar filledstar filledstar filledstars
Quite apart from having the best damn title ever, Death in a Million Living Rooms (1951) by Patricia McGerr employs one of my favourite conceits of classic-era detection: the Live On Air Murder. With The Dead Are Blind (1937) by Max Afford, Murder in the Melody (1940) by Norman Berrow, and And Be a Villain (1948) by Rex Stout giving us death on the radio, McGerr turns to the television studio to kill her poor victim live in front of the several million who tune in to Podge and Scottie’s weekly comedy show, with — as in Stout’s take — poison in the sponsor’s drink responsible.  That you know it’s coming makes it no less horrible, so whodunnit?

Continue reading