ROSEMARY KUTAK – I Am the Cat. Farrar Straus & Co., hardcover, 1948. Unicorn Mystery Book Club. hardcover, 4-in-1 edition, May 1948. Mercury Mysteries #130, digest-sized paperback, no date [1949]. Collier Books, paperback, 1964, 1966, with an introduction by Anthony Boucher.

   The Collier Books reprint is one in its series of Mystery Classics presumably chosen by Anthony Boucher. Momentarily stifling my bias against know-it-all psychiatrists, I concur with Boucher’s selection.

   Taking a break from treating veterans with war-induced traumas, psychiatrist Marc Castleman is spending his leave with his “Aunt” Emily and her houseguests, a fairly motley crew. One of the male guests apparently gets into Castleman’s medical bag and takes an overdose of morphia. When that falls to kill him, he brushes his teeth with a tooth powder made mostly of cyanide, which does the trick.

   Was he really trying to kill himself? His sister, as neurotic as he seems to have been, has doubts. The day of the inquest she is found at the foot of the stairs, with a broken neck.

   Was her death an accident, or is someone, involved with those two and other houseguests in a tontine, trying to increase his or her income? Will it get down to two, or maybe to one, if the murderer is cunning enough?

   Keen readers will spot the murderer the moment Castleman does, although all it is not what it seems.

BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL DATA:   Dr. Marc Castleman appeared in one earlier mystery novel, Darkness of Slumber (Lippincott, 1944). For more on that book plus some biographical data about the author, whose only two crime novels these are, check out this earlier post on the blog.