Louis F. Booth (1903-1996) was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. He became a civil engineer with a firm in New Jersey, and he wrote two mysteries when he lost his job on a large construction project during the worst of the Depression.
From the Family Search website: Louis Frederick Booth was born on 23 January 1903 in Indianapolis, Indiana. His father was Lewis F. Booth and his mother was Rosa Lena Koeller. He had at least one daughter with May Belle Perkins. He was living in North Carolina in 1951 and in New Jersey in 1940. He died on 27 June 1996 in Florida at the age of 93 and was buried in Walnut Grove Cemetery, Danvers, Massachusetts.
A chatty article by Jane Joyce in The Times-Union of Rochester, New York, on 25 April 1935, says that Booth had no intention of ever becoming a writer and that heretofore his only proximity to literature was when he delivered newspapers to Booth Tarkington and Meredith Nichols in Indianapolis.
His first book The Bank Vault Mystery was published by Dodd, Mead & Company in 1933 and reprinted by Coachwhip Publications in 2016: It is full of construction and engineering detail, which I found interesting in itself. The engineers responsible for the new bank headquarters going up across the street from the Consolidated Bank are brought in by the bank manager to view the cracks in the walls no doubt caused by the blasting needed to set the foundation of the new building. Worse yet, the door to the vault was not closing properly. The three engineers and the bank manager visit the vault, assess the problem, and leave some two hours later. An hour after their departure, a bag containing $180,000 in cash ($4,487,843 in 2025 dollars) is discovered to be missing.
Fraud specialist Maxwell Fenner is promptly called in and asked to find the culprit with a minimum of publicity. Keeping the theft out of the newspapers might have been possible but the murders that began shortly afterwards couldn’t be hidden.
Fenner and Detective Inspector Bryce of the New York Police Department work together cooperatively, which is nice to see in such a complex case. All of the possible suspects would have found the money useful, so motive for the theft wasn’t hard to find. Motive for the murders was harder to determine.
Unlike Samuel H. Whippler of The Buffalo Times, who said in his review of the book on 5 March 1933 that he identified the culprit right away, I didn’t come to the same conclusion as Fenner, and I still was not convinced by the end of the book that he had the right person.
Curtis Evans reviewed the book on his blog The Passing Tramp when it was released in 2016: https://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2016/03/engineering-murder-louis-f-booths-bank.html
Isaac Anderson says in his column New Mystery Stories in The New York Times of 23 April 1933: “The story is guaranteed to keep one guessing to the very end—and perhaps even longer, for the author has seen fit to leave something to the reader’s imagination.”
I found this book surprisingly contemporary in its style and tone. Anyone who enjoys leisurely private investigator stories should add it to their TBR list.