Dolores Hitchens (1907-1973) wrote dozens of mysteries beginning in 1938, publishing them under her own name and under the pseudonyms D. B. Olsen, Dolan Birkley, and Noel Burke. Her series characters include Jim Sader, a PI; John Farrel, a railroad detective; and A. Pennyfeather, an English professor at Clarendon College who was sensitive about his first name. The Murdock sisters and their cat Samantha, with Detective Lieutenant Stephen Mayhew, starred in the most enduring of her series, some 15 books long. Nearly all of her books are set in California, usually in Los Angeles. She also wrote around 20 stand-alone mysteries.
The Murdock/Mayhew series is unusual in that Mayhew appeared in the first book of the series and the sisters joined him as investigators in the second one. Mayhew worked alone in the third book, the sisters worked alone in the fourth one. The three worked together in four of the next five books, and then Mayhew disappeared completely for the rest of the series.
In Mayhew’s debut The Clue in the Clay (Phoenix Press, 1938) he’s in San Francisco on his honeymoon with his new wife Sara. They encounter a former college friend, Franklin Charles, also in law enforcement, who tells them about a case his superiors felt he handled incorrectly. Something in the account catches Mayhew’s attention and he asks for more information, much to Sara’s disgust. So they go to the police station, leaving Sara to her own devices.
There Mayhew learned that Miss Mabel Edwards, a sculptor in an old and conservative neighborhood, hung herself in her home. Mayhew saw enough discrepancies in the photos to believe Edwards was actually murdered and he teamed up with Inspector Bailey to validate his theories. The investigation encompassed Edwards’ closest friends, two cousins, a fiancé, her grieving maid, neighbors she had antagonized, and a little man in a green coat who visited Edwards often but no one knew why.
A partly finished statue of a druid that makes everyone who sees it uneasy and an abandoned gold mine add some pep to this period piece that sets up a traditional confrontation scene with all of the witnesses and suspects. Not a fair play mystery, Mayhew operates quite a bit by instinct and hopes to trap the culprit through a re-enactment of the crime.
This title was Hitchens’ debut as well as Mayhew’s. Bits of it made me think it was written some years before 1938. Perhaps she spent a lot of time working and revising this first book. Worth reading as the first book of a successful 30-year writing career with a satisfactory mystery and some good 1930s details.