Skeleton Key by Lenore Glen Offord (1905-1991) was first published in 1943 by Duell, Sloan & Pearce. Felony & Mayhem re-issued the book in print and digital editions in 2015. The latter has an informative introduction by journalist and crime historian Sarah Weinman, who outlines Offord’s life and career. She wrote nine crime novels and other books, short stories, and poems. She was also the full-time mystery critic for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1950 to 1982, a job she shared for a time during World War II with Anthony Boucher until he moved east to the New York Times. She won an Edgar in 1952 for her work as a critic. Most notably, Offord was the first woman to be inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars. Her activity in the group was limited, as she lived on the West Coast, but she was a huge Sherlock Holmes fan.

Skeleton Key introduced Georgine Wyeth and Todd MacKinnon, who became partners in sleuthing in three more books. Georgine is a widow with a child to support and she needs any respectable job that will pay her. She stumbles into a job typing a manuscript for a retired scientist, who insists that she work in his home to protect the confidentiality of the material. His house is in a small neighborhood peopled with clearly sketched characters, including MacKinnon and the air raid warden, whose bossiness has made him roundly despised. The blackout requirements along the West Coast were stricter than in other parts of the country, and the descriptions help set the time and the place of the story.

The warden ends up dead in what appears at first to be an accident during a blackout. Since Georgine was the first on the scene, the police had a lot of questions for her and she continued to offer them information as she undertook her own unofficial investigation, trying to understand what she heard that night. Multiple mysteries unfold, the death of the warden, the identity of neighborhood residents, and the contents of what appears to be a grave near the scientist’s house, among them.

This is another piece of crime fiction that does not fall into a clear category. It is not a police procedural, although a lot of the police investigation is described, and not really an amateur sleuth mystery, as the police arrive at the identity of the culprit. Weinman calls it domestic suspense but I think the police are too deeply involved to meet that admittedly amorphous category.

Whatever it is, this is a smoothly paced story with original characters and an unusual setting. The mystery itself is not the strongest I’ve ever seen but that should not deter students of mid-20^th century crime fiction from looking into this author.