A REVIEW BY DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


ERIC HEATH – Murder in the Museum. Hillman-Curl Clue Club Mystery, hardcover, 1939. Mystery Novel of the Month, digest-sized paperback, unnumbered, 1940.

   Readers of Bill Pronzini’s book Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek will recall Eric Heath, author of the breathless classic, Murder of a Mystery Writer (1955), wherein the hero, Dr. Wade Anthony, propounds the “motion picture theory of crime solving.” The doctor’s secretary-assistant was one Penny Lake.

ERIC HEATH Murder of a Mystery Writer

   (The latter was previously reviewed here. The book was a rewrite of Heath’s own Death Takes a Dive (1938), the protagonists of which were Copey Clift and Winnie Preston. Forgive the interruption. Please continue reading.)

   There is nothing quite that wonderful in Murder in The Museum, but rest assured, in all other ways it is as alternative as alternative gets. And more fun for it.

    Museum also features that attractive sleuth Cornelius (Copey) Clift Jr., America’s outstanding criminologist; and his bride-to-be, Watson, and narrator of our little adventure, Winnie Preston, who conveniently is also Copey’s secretary.

   As the novel opens they are driving up the coast from San Francisco to Seattle where they are to be married in the home of Copey’s wealthy mother when they stop to visit Copey’s old friend Alexander Cameron, a millionaire obsessed with Egypt, and prone to eccentricities — not the least of which being his sultry and seductive French dancer wife Sidi, but Winnie isn’t worried, “because the average man does not want to marry that sort of woman.”

   And they are hardly settled in before they catch her performing a strange dance nearly nude around an Egyptian sarcophagus that belongs to her husband’s collection. You know how foreigners are.

   Things start popping soon after, when their host is found murdered in the strange triangular shaped museum attached to the house — locked in with no way out in a secret room, unmarked save for a small puncture wound on his jugular vein.

ERIC HEATH Murder in the Museum

    “You know Winnie, I think were up against an enigma here. It looks as though our trip to Seattle is delayed …”

    “We are together,” was all I said …

    “Swell guy…”

   And we’re off. Pretty soon Copey and Winnie uncover a crystal coffin with a perfectly preserved corpse of a beautiful Egyptian girl, and the suspects grow:

   Cameron’s adult son Dennis with whom he quarreled; Seilimann, his loyal butler; the French wife; Haroud, the curator of the museum; and Mannheim, who believes Cameron cheated him out of an ornate scarab ring found on the dead man’s finger.

   Captain Forquer of the police arrives and of course bows to Copey’s superior knowledge as any good policeman would… But Winnie is concerned:

    “Don’t laugh at me Copey, but I think there is something connected with the supernatural tied in with this affair.”

   Of course Winnie is just being silly, as Copey will prove, despite Cameron’s belief that his wife Sidi and he had been lovers in a previous life. Still, Winnie is a bit prone to melodrama for the wife to be of a criminologist.

   My mind drifted to moving pictures I had seen — murder mysteries. In nearly all of them there had been some element of comedy, some lightening touch. But of course they were based on pure fiction. In this real-life situation, it seemed that every moment I had been in this house had been wrapped in an atmosphere charged with electricity, and that any moment an explosion would occur, obliterating us all.

ERIC HEATH Murder in the Museum

   We can only hope, but instead we get a heavy fog — other than the one Winnie seems to be in perpetually.

   And you can’t really blame her when the body in the crystal coffin turns out to be Zuleyka, Cameron’s lost reincarnated love.

   Of course Copey brings it all to a solution after a bit of business on a boat and a storm and a missing body, and Heath pulls off a unique twist — the most likely suspect is guilty.

   Copey, borrowing a note from Philo Vance’s notebook, allows the suspect to commit suicide (“I detest executions…”) and he and Winnie are once again on their way to Seattle.

    “Right,” said Copey, “And now I just want to say two words before you shut your eyes and go to sleep.”

    “What are they, Copey?”

    “Swell guy.”

   It’s a wonder there isn’t another murder.

Editorial Comments:   It is I who added that parenthetical second paragraph to David’s review above. Following the link will give you more information about Murder of a Mystery Writer than you may want to know, along with a complete bibliography for Eric Heath, the author.

   For a complete gallery of the covers of the books in Hillman-Curl’s Clue Club series, you need go no further than this page from Bill Deeck’s Murder at 3 Cents a Day website.