Book Review: Murder Yet to Come (MBTI, Broadway play, Baltimore Pike)(OT)

Murder Yet to Come, by Isabel Briggs Myers (A. L. Burt Company, 1929, 244 pages)

Questions

Will a murder be solved by logic or by a hunch? Or, was it a murder after all or merely an accident? Or a murder arranged to look like an accident? And how on earth do the protagonists figure that a second murder will take place?

The Author

Isabel Briggs Myers, one half of the team* that created the personality questionnaire, the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), quickly penned a mystery and entered a contest, which she won, beating out Ellery Queen! If you are familiar with the MBTI, perhaps you will recognize some of the letters in the characters depicted: at least perhaps S and T and J (Sensing, Thinking, Judging).

The Setting

Reminiscent of the tales of Miss Marple or Detective Poirot or even the great Sherlock Holmes, Murder Yet to Come is set in an old mansion on the Baltimore Pike in a different era – an era of stay-at-homers and servants, back in the 1920s. The cast stars a playwright of mysteries on ‘vacation’ from Broadway with his side-kick in tow who narrates the tale. Toss in a first–rate detective, an astute observer and our crazy playwright along with an old hag of a cook, a Hindi servant, revenge, a jewel, a will, an insane asylum, love and marriage, a possible kidnapping – sound like Alfred Hitchcock before he became famous?

The Plot

An Armistice Day (subsequently known as Veterans Day) annual get-together takes two of the characters away from New York City for a weekend right before a Broadway play opens. They end up in a pub in Pennsylvania and are hoodwinked into helping kidnap a 17-year-old girl so a 39-year-old can marry her.  Upon arrival at the mansion, they find a death to solve that takes a few days and many many up’s and down’s. The playwright of mysteries is our hero but he often does not know what to think of the goings-on: in this, he is more human than some detectives.

The Style

Author Myers’ first and only stab at fiction that still survives** is quite the success if you can accept the way wealthy people lived in the 20s. The writing style is almost contemporary. The page count is rather short but the reading requires concentration, due to the number of characters and the incredible convoluted plot. You will be drawn into the second half, though, and things do fall into place with plenty of clues that are later explained in this very satisfying tale.

Caveat: This book was purchased for review.

*Our author, Isabel Briggs Myers, is the daughter half of the team that also includes her mother, Katherine Briggs.

**Her second book, Give me Death, stars the same characters but portrays a Southern family that commits suicide one by one as they find out they have some African-American blood in their lineage