AARON MARC STEIN – Moonmilk and Murder. Tim Mulligan & Elsie Mae Hunt #18. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1955. Curtis, paperback, 1968.

   Moonmilk consists of the cheesey calcium deposits the form on the surfaces of damp caves before it hardens into limestone, ad unlike archaeologists Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt, I didn’t know that either. Here they’re in France, looking for caveman art.

   And they find murder as well. Ten years after the war, passions against collaborators still run high, setting off a complicated puzzle spoiled only slightly by the intrusive smell of coincidence. While the pieces fit nicely, the story doesn’t quite jell.

–Reprinted from Mystery*File #14, July 1989.


Bibliographic Note:   This was the last appearance of archaeological partners Tim Mullligan and Elsie Mae Hunt. Their first of eighteen mysteries was The Sun Is a Witness (1940). All eighteen were published under Doubledy’s Crime Club imprint.