Anne Austin (1895-?) was a journalist turned novelist. Her books were originally serialized in newspapers and then published as books. Newspaper articles of the time report publication of romance novels before she took up writing crime fiction. Her bibliography varies from source to source, just how many books she wrote is not clear. Amazon has seven of her titles reprinted by Resurrected Press. Many of them are available on Project Gutenberg.
Austin’s mystery series character was James “Bonnie” Dundee, a special investigator attached to the district attorney’s office in Hamilton, a fictional mid-sized city somewhere between Chicago and New York City. In Murder at Bridge (Macmillan, 1931) a train ride to New York is 16 hours and Chicago is a few hours less.
Dundee tackles the case of a murder committed during a bridge game. Nita Selim is newly arrived in Hamilton from New York City, yet she lost no time in entering society where she captured all the men’s attention. She was hosting an afternoon of bridge before a dinner when she was killed in her bedroom with the other players still at play. No one professed to hear anything, their attention was on the game. Suspects were legion, as the women were jealous of the way she captured their men and the men were jealous of any look or word she gave any man except them. Alibis were tight though, so Dundee had to investigate further.
Dundee looked into Selim’s background in New York and learned more than she intended to tell the citizens of Hamilton. Just as he was digging more deeply into her past, a second murder is committed, again during a bridge game.
The investigation is described in overwhelming detail, perhaps to extend the word count as the story was originally serialized in newspapers in 1930. The culprit is well hidden and the reveal is the classic re-enactment of the crime with all of the original players present. Readable with a reasonable plot if unnecessarily long.
Austin herself is quite a mystery. She crops up often in newspapers of the 1930s which makes her virtual disappearance afterwards all the more peculiar. I found a 1940s census record for her in Los Angeles but nothing more. Her date of death is unclear. Wikipedia marks it as unknown, Fantastic Fiction says Austin died in 1960, Grokipedia says 1975. The Grokipedia article appears to be thoroughly researched and referenced, and I am inclined to believe it. See the entry here: https://grokipedia.com/page/anne_austin_writer
The front page of the Asheville NC Times, 19 February 1930, announced she had come to the area for an indefinite rest at the Asheville Physiatric Institute on Weaverville Highway. (Physiatry is a branch of medicine that focuses on rehabilitation.) The article, too long to reproduce here, describes her writing process and her journalism career.
The following article from The Independent-Record in Helena, Montana, on November 18, 1930, appeared in a number of other newspapers around the same time. It describes Murder at Bridge as easily Austin’s best mystery, mentions some of Austin’s romance novels, and states that critic William Lyon Phelps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lyon_Phelps) included an earlier Austin mystery in his list of seven best detective stories.
The Independent-Record, Helena, Montana, November 18, 1930