Corey: Crime at Cobb's House

This mystery has a smart, saucy, ironic manner. The principal background is a Virginia country place, accessible to Washington and owned by Charley Cobb, a wealthy young man, addicted like his neighbors to horses and racing. Six months before the action starts, an attractive widow, Mrs. Etta Gallatin, whose house was not far away from Cobb’s, has been murdered. Cobb was known to have been fond of her, had driven her home on the night of the crime, and his revolver is a thirty-eight, the calibre used, on the widow. Suspected, among others, by the sheriff, Cobb was reluctant to believe in his own guilt. But he had been blind drunk that night and he wanted to know. Among the twenty guests at a recent house party—and a wild, amorous party it had been—he was sure there was someone who was linked to the mystery. And so, as the novel opens, we find him reassembling these twenty guests at a drinking party of his own. To help him he has called Thomas Milne, a Washington lawyer, who is engaged in detective work as a sideline. What happens at this rather scandalous party—the drunken and hilarious pursuit in the night of one of Cobb’s bulls, pastured in a meadow outside, the first death, the return to the house, the playing of the game of murder, then the second death—all this and other complications makes an intensely baffling mystery which is not solved until the final pages.

Note

First published in 1934