Eyes in the Wall by Carolyn Wells, 1934

 

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This is Fleming Stone #37.

About the author: Carolyn Wells (1862-1942) was married to Hadwin Houghton, the heir of the Houghton-Mifflin publishing empire. Like Mary Roberts Rinehart, being in a publishing family created an easy pipeline for getting her works into print. She wrote a total of more than 170 books. See this Wikipedia article.

Major Characters:

*Justin Leonard, a lawyer
Myrtle Leonard, his touchy-feely wife
Nathaniel Bancroft, millionaire portrait subject
*Eleanor Bancroft, his daughter
Ellis Kane, a painter
Ann Murdock, a painter
Alonzo "Lonny" Abbott, writer
Sammy "Pinky" St. Clair, a painter
*Mark Mason, art critic, the victim
Emily Mason, Mark's mother
Lily Dana, Mason's fiancée
Ellen Talcott, Lily's chaperone/companion
Hal Deming, next in line for Lily Dana
Fleming Stone, private investigator

*on the portrait selection committee

Locale: New York City

Synopsis: Millionaire Nathaniel Bancroft is going to sit for his portrait, and a committee has been formed to select a painter for the lucrative commission. The committee consists of Nathaniel's daughter Eleanor Bancroft, lawyer Justin Leonard, and art critic Mark Mason. The painters being considered are traditionalist Ellis Kane, modernist Ann Murdock, and bohemian "Pinky" St. Clair. At a gathering at Kane's studio, the principals are seated (mostly) at a round table, looking over Kane's collection of miniature paintings:

Suddenly Mason cries out that someone has stepped on his foot, although no one saw this happen. He turns ill immediately and soon is dead. There is no apparent cause, but an autopsy shows poisoning by strophanthin, a cardiac stimulant.

Review: This was a very good title. It was interesting how the three artists under consideration each had a different "school". 

One very refreshing aspect: Fleming Stone appears early in the book and actually does the detecting work himself. 

We could have used a sketch of the table arrangement, so I made one myself. It gets a bit tedious when Stone asks everyone to itemize the order around the table (they all agreed, incidentally), and Wells could have saved at least a dozen pages by providing an illustration and stipulating the arrangement.

There is are several lively exchanges between overbearing Mrs. Mason and the doctors and medical examiner, as she has her own ideas about proper procedures with dead bodies. 

The part I enjoyed most was near the end, when the "eyes in the wall" came into play. Are you familiar with the old trope in the 1930's-1940's movies, in which a portrait on the wall has the eyes cut out and able to be slid down, so someone in the adjacent room can look through the eye openings and spy? Well, here it is! What fun! Nero Wolfe has a similar trick in his office with a painting of a waterfall, but that is a bit less outrageous than the old cut-out-eyes-in-the-portrait trick.

Don't wait around for Nathanial Bancroft to appear - he never does.