PAT McGERR – The Seven Deadly Sisters. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1947. Paperback reprints: Dell 412, mapback edition, 1950; Macfadden 60-364, 1968.

PAT McGERR Seven Deadly Sisters

   It begins as a gimmick story, as you may already know, if only by reputation. Sally Bowen and her new husband have just moved to England, and there she receives a letter from a friend back home, expressing her sorrow over the fact that the husband of one of Sally’s aunts died of poison, and that when she was discovered as the murderer, the aunt committed suicide.

   Unfortunately for Sally, she has seven aunts, and between them they have at least that many husbands, and what the friend neglected to mention is what she most desperately needs to know — who was it that was murdered?

   Granted, the situation is contrived. As Sally begins to tell her husband the tangled story of her aunts’ various love affairs, however, with all of them eventually pressured into marriage by the oldest who raised them, often largely for the sake of family honor and “what people would think,” the reader (me!) becomes more and more wrapped up in affairs properly none of his or her business, and more and more fascinated by the kinds of messes people of supposedly good sense and breeding can get themselves caught up in.

   Considering the year that this book was written, I thought that Pat McGerr titillates the reader’s imagination with an amazing amount of scandalous behavior going on. Doris, deeply in love with Tessie’s husband, for example, is the chief culprit — and Bert is not the only husband in her life.

   The solution to the mystery is a knockout, but I think I’d have to admit that the sheer process of sorting through people’s dirty laundry like this could easily become habit-forming.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 3, No. 5, Sept-Oct 1979 (slightly revised).


Previously on this blog:

      Pick Your Victim, reviewed by Marvin Lachman.
      Death in a Million Living Rooms, reviewed by William F. Deeck.

Editorial Comment:   It surprises me more than you, I’m sure, to find this review here, the last of three in a row by Patricia McGerr. After uploading the first two earlier this evening, I went to the garage to continue my every November task of cleaning the garage of its summer accumulation so that Judy can get her car into her side this winter.

   When done repacking and rearranging some boxes of books, I idly picked up one of the copies of old mystery fanzines I’ve been using as sources of material to post here on the blog, when lo and behold, here I found this one.

   Coincidences do happen, happily so, even if this one of the more boring ones I could tell you about, and for that I apologize. Walker Martin asked me earlier if I could include the letter grades with these old reviews. I’m even happier to say that I gave this one an “A plus.”