Nancy Barr Mavity (1890-1959) was a U.S. journalist, author, and critic. Born Nann Clark Barr in Illinois, she was a reporter, feature writer, and book reviewer for the Oakland Tribune for more than 20 years. She also wrote about her solo trips to Japan, China, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1920s for Sunset Magazine. She produced a considerable number of newspaper and magazine articles on various subjects in addition to a range of fiction and nonfiction books, including a series of mysteries, most of which featured crime reporter James Aloysius “Peter” Piper of the fictional Herald. She incorporated some of her research for the biography she wrote of Aimee Semple Macpherson, the charismatic evangelist of the 1920s, into her fourth mystery, The Case of the Missing Sandals (Doubleday Crime Club, 1930).
Over a chatty lunch the local district attorney tells his good friend crime reporter Peter Piper about an irate man who reported that his wife donated $20,000 US (about $380,000 US in 2025) to a local evangelist who was rumored to be a witch. He was convinced his wife was tricked or coerced and wanted the money returned. While the district attorney didn’t have enough evidence to press charges, Piper suspected violence was in the future of the hypnotic visionary if more angry relatives surfaced. He decided a visit to the cult’s isolated base of operations known as the Luna Colony was in order.
Piper found the strikingly attractive evangelist not at all what he was expecting and left more persuaded than ever that trouble was in her future. He was prescient. Luna was found dead the next morning, wearing the same clothes in which Piper met her, except that her delicate black sandals were gone, as was the murder weapon. The huge sightless gatekeeper for the complex was convinced the devil had taken her. The police unfortunately couldn’t accept that explanation. They found bank statements suggesting that Luna had a substantial income from unknown sources. They also learned the victim was being pursued by several men despite being married to another one and settled on one of them, Earl Vincent, a naïve young man, as her likely killer.
Vincent fled the city, clinching the authorities’ belief in his guilt. Piper helped the police search for Vincent, locating him onboard a ship from which he vanished again. When finally found on dry land, Piper decided that Vincent could not possibly have harmed Luna and settled in to find the real criminal.
Interesting contemporary references to witchcraft, covens, and spells, including a real book called Witches Still Live by Theda Kenyon, published in 1926. Luna was similar to many magnetic spiritual leaders of the twentieth century, Tammy Fay Messner or Aimee Semple McPherson for instance. After the nation encountered a run of heartrending experiences in the first quarter of the century–World War I, the influenza epidemic, and the economic crash–the general population’s interest in the occult and the hereafter became more pronounced, allowing unscrupulous individuals like Luna and McPherson to exploit sad and desperate people. This book is an inside look at that segment of time as much as a homicide investigation.