W. BOLINGBROKE JOHNSON – The Widening Stain. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1942. Hardcover reprint: Cornell University Library Associates, 1976. Trade paperback reprint: Rue Morgue Press, 2007, as by Morris Bishop.

   W. Bolingbroke Johnson is the pseudonym of Morris Gilbert Bishop (1893-1973), and this is his only mystery novel both facts courtesy of the Bibliography of Crime Fiction, by Allen Hubin. For a first and only, it is extraordinarily good and well worth looking out for.

   It is set in a University, largely in its library, and the characters are all university employees. Some are professors,one a custodian, several are young women who catalog the books, and the narrator is the Chief Cataloguer herself, Miss Gilda Gorham.

   A minor subplot keeps us wondering whether Gilda is going to be captured into matrimony by one or another of the professors, but this does not distract from the major interest, the murders.

   First one and then another profess or is murdered in the library. The first might have been an accident, for the beauteous and seductive French professor, Mademoiselle Coindreau, had climbed onto a high balcony, and thence onto a ladder in an evening dress. She might have fallen, and yet there is strong suspicion that she was pushed.

   When an elderly bachelor is found strangled in a locked press which also contains erotica, murder is certain.

   A handful of professors who all came to the library after the President’s reception are the suspects, along with the custodian, who knows a great deal more about the private affairs of the professors than would seem desirable.

   The police are singularly inept, awkward in the face of so much erudition. Gilda begins to detect, and continues in spite of warnings. By interrogating everyone involved and by psyching out the murderer, she traps him in the basement stacks. Both police and innocent male professors are there for her rescue, and Gilda is triumphant.

   The book is enlivened by a scattering, of limericks, which one of the professors makes up on the spur of the moment. Just as a sample:

         There was a young miss of Bermuda
         Who said of her fiance, who’d a
            Thought that he would look
            Like a god in a book!
         She must have been thinking of Buddha.

Bio-Bibliographic Data:   In case anyone was wondering, as I was as I was getting this review ready to post, the “W.” in the author’s pen name stood for Gladys, the author being Welsh. This and a good deal of other information about the author can be found on the Rue Morgue Press website, Tom & Enid Schantz as publishers having made life a whole lot easier for anyone wishing to locate an inexpensive copy of this book to read.