WIRT VAN ARSDALE – The Professor Knits a Shroud. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1951.

   Pedro Jose Maria Guadaloupe O’Reilly y Apodaca, B.S., M.A., Ph.D., more familiarly and shortly known as Peter or Uncle Pete, is a professor of anthropology, not, as Doubleoday’s dust jacket would have it, archaeology. The young lady to whom he is a former guardian invites him, somewhat to the displeasure of her husband even though he usually enjoys Uncle Pete’s company, to their farm, presently occupied by Henri Von Fliegel, a best-selling author.

   Apodaca describes Von Fliegel’s books this way: …Oh, he had good story ideas. That I will grant you. But then he’d take those good ideas and embellish them with all sorts of impossible characters and impossible situations and throw in a lot of cheap sentimentality and as much fornication as he thought he could get by with and call the whole nauseating mess a novel…

   Ah, how the literary world has progressed since the 1950s.

   But I digress.

   As is usual with successful authors — though only in fiction, one hopes — Von Fliegel is loathed by almost everyone, and apparently with good reason. As is to be expected, he comes to no good end, shot in the head while working on his current novel.

   Luckily, Professor Apodaca’s experience in anthropological fie!d work leads him to make some sterling deductions, and these convince the police that he should be part of the investigation. He solves the case, to the appreciation of almost all concerned. As an aid to his cerebration, the professor knits socks. At last count, he had completed 2,736 individual ones, I believe, not pairs.

   The only unbelievable item in the novel, if one accepts the sock count, is Apodaca’s inability to recall for a lengthy period where he had read about the word rache written in blood. There are well-read people who wouldn’t immediate|y know that, but what are they doing detecting in mystery novels?

   Wirt Van Arsdale, a pseudonym of Martha Wirt Davis, wrote only one mystery. A pity, for Van Arsdale showed lots of promise in this book. Of course, you have to accept the usual caveat that people act unreasonably for purposes of the plot in this bib!io mystery.

Bio-Bibliographic Notes: As Bill points out, this was Martha Wirt Davis’s only work of detective fiction. She may have written others if not for her untimely death in 1952, at the age of 46. She was married to author and occasional pulp fiction writer Clyde Brion Davis, who died in 1962. According to Wikipedia, their son, David Brion Davis, is an “American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world.”