Perry: The Owner Lies Dead

“The action centers about the owners and locality of Haunted Mine, long regarded as a death trap by the people of the town. After an historic disaster, the legend grew among the old ones that the mine was curse and ‘Not until the body of an owner lies dead, will the spirit rest in Haunted Mine.’ Suddenly that which was expected happened: there was an explosion in the mine and 17 men were trapped. A nephew of the owner recklessly descends when the rest have given up, and the task of rescue grows more dangerous, and never comes back up the shaft. Further explosions follow. The openings through which fire and smoke escape are finally sealed over. But months later, when excavations are instituted, the young man’s body is found with a bullet through the back. The body of an owner indeed lay dead, but he had been murdered, not by the spirits of the mine, but by the hand of an assassin impossible to imagine. There was no other living soul in the mine who could have been there to murder him.” (Akron, OH, Beacon, 1930)

Additional

First published in 1930.

Review

Dashiell Hammett declared in the Saturday Review of Literature, “it’s good.”