MERLDA MACE – Blondes Don’t Cry. Christine Andersen #2. Julian Messner, hardcover, 1945. Black Cat Detective #28, digest paperback, 1946.

   In this, her second and final detective murder case (after Headlong for Murder, Messner, 1943), a young working girl moves to wartime Washington DC, where she finds housing to be as difficult as she was warned it would be. Her new boss comes to the rescue, however, and offers her a small apartment in a building he owns on the outskirts of town.

   The previous tenant seems to have disappeared, with a small mystery attached to that statement, as she had told no one she was leaving. Christie has no reason to worry about that. She is only happy to have a place to live. And what’s more, all of the other residents are friendly, including a neighborhood cop named Shamus O’Reilly. And even though Christine has a boy friend fighting the war overseas, the relationship between herself and this new neighbor becomes closer and closer as time goes on.

   Nothing at all naughty, I hasten to add. This was still only 1945.

   But when Christine finds the body of a woman in her dumbwaiter, she finds the presence of the other man in her life most reassuring — especially when, feeling the steely eyes of the policeman investigating the case directly upon her, she decides she had best be doing some work in that regard herself.

   In an apartment building jammed with tenants, there are lots of suspects in the case, but not much headway can be made when the identity of the dead woman is – and remains – unknown for most the length of the book. I know the story takes place 80 years ago, but to me this is a flaw in the telling that’s extremely difficult to swallow. I just didn’t believe it.

   And yet, otherwise, the aforementioned telling is pleasant enough, with lots of background into what life was like in our nation’s capital during a time of war. It’s not enough to make the book anything of a success, however, but it does have a kind of cozy charm to it that may keep you reading onward (slogging) through a detective case that should have been solved in a few hours, not a full week.

   Not to mention the fact that there was not a third book in the series that might have resolved the dilemma Christine finds herself in at book’s end.