REVIEWED BY MARYELL CLEARY:

   

RUTH FENISONG – Jenny Kissed Me. Doubleday, hardcover, 1944. Also published as Death is a Lovely Lady, Popular Library #173, paperback, 1949. [Possible reprint but not found: Collier, paperback, 1965.]

   The “Jenny” of the title 1s Gwen Mattice, beautiful, amoral, on  the make with any man who shows promise of giving her a good return on her investment. There are men for fun, and there are men for making. Gwen a living; she has no trouble catching either kind, and they stay caught.

   Her desirability is also her death knell. Men want her so badly that they will do anything to keep someone else from having her, and one does.  So Gwen dies, and a young naval officer is involved. His father is a celebrity; Joseph Wheaton, Fact Photographer, writer   of a daily column for a newspaper,   “one of the outstanding brains of the century.” First task, find out for his son who has killed his loved one, then to save his  son  from suspicion.

   Wheaton does the detecting himself.  One more killing later, he catches up with  the murderer, but not before he has investigated everyone who knew Gwen at the Hotel Whitman, where Bud Wheaton fell for her. Even old Mrs. Wheeler is interrogated, for she introduced Gwen to the men.

   The people in this book are real, with real feelings. Their motives ring true. And they are not without compassion, a quality lacking.in too many mystery characters.

– Reprinted from The Poison Pen, Volume 3, Number 4 (July-August 1980).

   

   

Bio-Bibliographic: For a long biography of the author, complete with considerable discussion of her mystery fiction, check out Curtis Evans’ blog here.

   His essay begins thusly:

   “American author Ruth Fenisong published twenty of her twenty-two crime novels between 1942 and 1962, putting her at the temporal heart of mid-century American murder fiction, yet like many of the prominent women crime writers from that period, she fell out of publishing fashion after her death. Most underservingly so, for in her day she was a justly praised crime writer, with the dean of American crime fiction critics, Anthony Boucher, leading Ruth’s estimable cohort of admirers.”