DOROTHY GARDINER – The Seventh Mourner. Sheriff Moss Magill #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1958. Popular Library, paperback, 1964.

   Sheriff Moss Magill of Notlaw, Colorado, functions best in his beloved mountains and is reluctant to leave them. However, when local resident Harriet Farquhar Orchard dies, she makes it a condition of her will that he deliver her ashes to her home in Rowanmuir, Scotland. Moss is convinced to go only when he learns that Harriet also wanted him to investigate her sister, Lizzy, who has been released by a Scottish court with the verdict “not proven” on a charge of murder.

   Wearing his customary whipcord pants, boots, and black-and-yellow striped shirt with his silver badge pinned to it, Moss evokes many stares during the trip, especially on the train from Edinburgh to Rowanrnuir, which, coincidentally, all of the mourners have taken that same August morning.

   The assorted group is all staying at the hotel where Lizzy works as a maid. During a day trip to Glasgow, Moss hears bagpipes for the first time and, in an enchantment born of ethnic memory, falls in love with Scotland.

   When one of the party is pushed under a truck that same day, he puts his investigative talents to use and works with the local authorities both to discover the murderer and to fulfill Harriet’s last request.

   This is an unusual idea, for a mystery, with excellent background and an appealing main character. Other amusing Magill adventures are Lion in Wait ( 1963), in which a toothless circus lion is accused of murder; and What Crime Is This (1956), in which Moss uses a hula-dancer statue with a clock embedded in her stomach to help clear up a murder.

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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.