ALEXANDER IRVING – Symphony in Two Time. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1948. No paperback edition.

   After murder in the medical school [in Bitter Ending, 1946], Dr. Anthony Post returns in murder with music-some of it good, some of it not. Post is engaged to Paula Taft, pianist and composer, the niece of that grande dame, Mildred Taft-Manning.

   Mrs. Taft-Manning is the power behind the Taft Institute and its orchestra, a leader in the W.C.T.U., head of the Brooklyn anti-gambling league, president of the anti-vivisection committee, etc. You get the idea. She is married to a much younger man, another composer, who is poisoned and then apparently plays the piano in the wrong key in a locked room.

   Strychnine was available for the poisoning, but the murderer switched to the nicotine that Dr. Post had with him. Later, another person dies of arsenic poisoning.

   There arc no sympathetic characters here, just as there were not in Bitter Ending, Irving’s first novel, which I did not particularly enjoy. This one is much more amusing, even though Post may grate on many people’s nerves.

Bibliographic Notes:   Alexander Irving was the pen name of Anne Fahrenkopf (1921-2006) and Ruth Fox (1922-1980). Together they wrote only one other work of mystery fiction, a non-Dr. Post novel, Deadline (Dodd Mead, 1947).

   A mini-review of Symphony in Two Time from The Saturday Review, 18 September 1948: “Ultra-sophisticated in right sense of word; witty, knowledgeable on music matters, actionful — and semi-quaver disappointing in solution.”

   Bill Deeck mentions a locked room in his review, but since the story is not included in Bob Adey’s book on Locked Rooms, it seems doubtful that that aspect of the mystery has any other relevance than that.