TIMOTHY FULLER – Three Thirds of a Ghost. Jupiter Jones #2. Little, Brown, hardcover, 1941. Popular Library #81, paperback, 1946.

   When his first novel, Harvard Has a Homicide, was published in 1936, Timothy Fuller — just twenty-two and a Harvard undergraduate — was hailed as an important mystery-story prodigy. He never quite lived up to the promise of that first book, however, either in his productivity or in the quality of his later work.

   It was five years before he published his second and third mysteries, another two years until his fourth, and seven more until his fifth and final book. And only Reunion with Murder (1941) and This Is Murder, Mr. Jones (1943) can be said to equal or surpass Harvard Has a Homicide in plotting and technique.

   Despite its inherent flaws, however, Three Thirds of a Ghost may well be Fuller’s most appealing work. One of the reasons-perhaps the main reason-is that it is set primarily in a Boston bookshop, Bromfield’s, where writer Charles Newbury (who specializes in roman a clef novels about important Boston families, not to mention mysteries featuring an Oriental detective known as the Parrot) is shot to death while addressing 200 guests at Bromfield’s 150th birthday celebration.

   In Catalogue of Crime, Barzun and Taylor call Three Thirds of a Ghost “disappointing.” And so it is, in terms of its rather thin plot and dubious gimmick to explain how Newbury could be killed without any of the 200 witnesses seeing who fired the shot.

   But Harvard Fine Arts instructor Jupiter Jones, the amateur sleuth who also stars in Fuller’s other four novels, is an engaging bumbler; the cast of characters — especially Jupiter’s girlfriend (later wife), Helen, Newbury’s non-stereotypical. Chinese secretary, Lin, and some refreshingly intelligent cops — is diverse and well drawn; and there are amusing bits of business interspersed with plenty of barbed commentary on the writing and selling of books and on pre-World War II Boston society.

   If your taste runs to the humorous, sophisticated, slightly screwball type of storytelling popular in the 1930s, this bibliomystery (and any of the other Jupiter Jones romps) is definitely your sort of Boston tea party.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.