FRANK GRUBER – The Laughing Fox. Johnny Fletcher & Sam Cragg #5. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1940. Serialized earlier (?) in Short Stories magazine, July 10 through August 25, 1940. Penguin, paperback, May 1944. Belmont-Tower, paperback, 1972.

   Book salesmen Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg, on the scene at a midwestern cattle convention, are forced to act as detectives when a man is found murdered in their hotel room. The man was a fox breeder, with enemies among the other exhibitors, but he was killed as the consequence of a mystery involving a missing heir who disappeared twenty years before.

   With a story meant primarily as fun, Gruber has too casual an attitude toward his plot, Fletcher and Cragg are happy scoundrels who mostly enjoy the scrapes they get into. But on page 49 [of the Penguin edition], Fletcher tells the police the whole story of how they found the body in their room, then on page 99, he is confronted with the story as if the previous episode had never happened.

   Not for serious deduction

Rating: **