Scarlett: Murder Among the Angells

The austere and forbidding abode of the Angells, located on Boston’s Beacon Street, is a great L-shaped mansion curiously divided into two identical halves, which are respectively occupied by two aged brothers and their families and connected only by an elevator. The two Angell brothers, Carolus and Darius, have for decades been locked in a grim contest of survival in their divided mansion, on account of their eccentric health faddist father’s queer will, which devises his entire estate to whichever brother outlives the other, as a way of encouraging the pair to live healthfully. Before the novel is over, however, both of the brothers will have died violently—one of them while traveling alone in the mansion elevator! Thus is keen-minded Inspector Kane of the Boston police—who for the last recorded occasion is accompanied on a criminal investigation by his admiring friend Mr. Underwood, who happens to be Darius Angell’s attorney—presented with what proves to be the strangest and most perplexing problem in homicide that the pair has encountered.

Note

First published in 1932

Author

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