Scarlett: The Back Bay Murders

Arthur Prendergast insisted both to Inspector Norton Kane of the Boston police and to Kane’s loyal chronicler, the prim lawyer Mr. Underwood, that he was being menaced by some mysterious and malevolent unknown, but no one believed the terrified ravings of the neurotic young man. The very next day, however, Mr. Prendergast was found murdered, his jugular vein cruelly severed! This was only the beginning of the reign of terror that cuts a swath of death at Mrs. Quincy’s brownstone boarding house in the formerly sedate neighborhood of Boston’s Back Bay. It seems scarcely believable that one of the seemingly innocuous residents at Mrs. Quincey’s refined home could be guilty of the monstrous murders, but as Inspector Kane lectures Mr. Underwood, “You ought to know that under the surface of normal existence there are hidden currents which sometimes burst through. You shrink from them with horror, but I’m trained to expect their manifestations.” Fortunately the keen-minded Inspector Kane is able to damn the fearsome currents bursting over this particular Back Bay brownstone when he brilliantly solves the baffling Back Bay murders.

Additional

First published in 1930.

Author

'Roger Scarlett' was the pseudonym for writing pair Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page.