Helen Francesca Traubel (1899 – 1972) was an American opera and concert singer. A dramatic soprano, she was best known for her Wagnerian roles, especially those of Brünnhilde and Isolde. She began her career as a concert singer and went on to sing at the Metropolitan Opera from 1937 to 1953. Starting in the 1950s, she also performed as a nightclub and cabaret singer and appeared in television, films, and musical theatre. Traubel wrote a mystery short story, The Ptomaine Canary, which was serialized in U.S. newspapers via Associated Press in 1950. A full-length follow-up, The Metropolitan Opera Murders (Simon & Schuster, 1951), was ghostwritten by noir author Harold Q. Masur and features a soprano heroine, Elsa Vaughan, who is similar to Traubel. The Library of Congress Crime Classics series, which features some of the best American crime writing from the 1860s to the 1960s, reprinted Traubel’s only book in February 2022.
In the middle of the second act of the Wednesday matinee at the Metropolitan Opera, the prompter unaccountably began to make faces at soprano Elsa Vaughan who was in the midst of a solo and most definitely did not need a grotesque distraction. The tenor also noticed and was struggling to focus on the job at hand. The orchestra took over and they anxiously finished the act as the prompter slid out of sight, clearly in agony.
While the stunned singers delivered a mediocre performance for the rest of the opera, the police arrived. The bottle of scotch the victim had been drinking out of contained strychnine. The prompter was not popular, but it turned out the bottle had been purchased for Elsa Vaughan, who had been the target of more than one potentially dangerous accident. So, did the dead man somehow get poison intended for someone else or was it deliberately meant for him?
With links to an earlier unsolved death, stolen jewelry, and old rivalries and grudges that went back years complicating the present, Detective-Lieutenant Sam Quentin of the New York Police searched for the killer even as he navigated the unfamiliar dramatic setting and the not always logical behavior of its performers.
A nicely complicated mystery with an introduction and extensive explanatory footnotes by crime historian Leslie Klinger. These footnotes are essential for those unfamiliar with opera, because the book is peppered with esoteric references to artists and composers of the time. While Masur is the acknowledged author of the book, he had to have had help from Traubel on those sections. Especially for fans of theatrical and musical mysteries.