Charlotte Murray Russell (1899-1992) published a dozen mysteries about Jane Amanda Edwards between 1935 and 1951. She converted her hometown of Rock Island, Illinois, into the fictional Rockport where Edwards lived. Russell wrote four mysteries with Police Chief Homer Fitzgerald and four nonseries mysteries before giving up writing and turning to the local public library for employment.
Edwards is a middle-aged unmarried lady with a finger in any number of pies. Inordinately curious and officious, she is sure she knows more than anyone else around her and sometimes she does. As one reviewer on Goodreads pointed out, in a contemporary mystery Edwards would have been the local sheriff or a private investigator but in the 1930s those careers were not an option. So Edwards lives in the family home with a younger sister Annie, a younger brother Arthur, and a long-suffering housekeeper named Theresa and she manages all of them. The local police lieutenant George Hammond relies on her ability to get information that he cannot as well as her regular invitations to sample Theresa’s cooking.
In the second book of the series Death of an Eloquent Man (Doubleday Doran Crime Club, 1936) Arthur decides to become involved in local politics. As Arthur tends to drink more than is good for him, Edwards decides to monitor his activity and bring him home from the various rallies early. She is therefore on site when Moke McCaffery, a local wheeler-dealer, is shot outside the auditorium where he had just delivered an impassioned speech urging his own election. The weapon used is nearby but the killer was gone by the time the crowd poured through the doors to investigate the source of the gunfire.
McCaffery was known to have multiple romantic interests outside his marriage and to be ruthless in his acquisition of power. His relentless climb upward left a trail of enemies behind him. Hammond was sure it was just a matter of finding the one who had been pushed over the edge. Edwards launched her own investigation, confident the lieutenant would not be able to identify the culprit without her.
The resulting story is a leisurely, chatty display of small-town dynamics with lots of had-I-but-known references. We learn about the various social groups, what they do for entertainment, what everyone is wearing, and what they are eating. Theresa does sound like a wonderful cook. The description of the local political machinations suggests that nothing much has changed in the intervening eighty plus years. All of this while Edwards and Hammond conduct separate investigations.
I found Edwards often hard to cope with. For instance, when she locks herself out of the house at night, she awakens the housekeeper by throwing gravel into her window. The housekeeper objects to being hit in the jaw by a stone but Edwards doesn’t consider the complaint valid, as it was only a small rock. Perhaps my sense of humor is failing but I also would dislike being hit by a rock of any size. Apparently I am in the minority, as the New York Times thought Edwards was hilarious.
Edwards jumps to a lot of conclusions to identify the culprit but perhaps I missed some of the clues in the welter of trivia. I suspect this is not the strongest plot of the stories. The wonderful Rue Morgue Press reprinted the seventh and the twelfth Edwards titles. They might be a better place to start and certainly are more accessible. Most of the books are long out of print, hard to find, and expensive if located. An interesting example of an early cozy.