Kay Cleaver Strahan (1888-1941) was an American author who lived in Portland, Oregon. In 1918 she began contributing short stories to popular magazines. She was also a mystery novelist; her bibliography includes: Peggy Mary (1915), Something That Begins with “T” (1918), The Desert Moon Mystery (1927), Footprints (1929), Death Traps (1930), Three Kinds of Love (1931), October House (1932), The Meriwether Mystery (1932), The Hobgoblin Murder (1934), and The Desert Lake Mystery (1936). Her book Footprints won the Scotland Yard Prize for the best Mystery and Detective Story of the Year; the contest was held by The Crime Club, an imprint of Doubleday, and the winner received the prize of $2500 ($44,360 in 2023 dollars).
Her last mystery The Desert Lake Mystery (The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1936; Methuen, 1937) is an unusual book. Overlong and meandering with a surprisingly contemporary feel, it is a story about multiple murders and disappearances in a small tourist camp on a lake in southern Nevada. It is told almost completely via dialog relayed by the county sheriff. The reader doesn’t learn what anyone thinks or does except through their spoken words, which may or may not be truthful. A minimal backstory frames the setting and the characters. The reader is plunged almost directly into the action, which made me focus very hard, trying to understand what was happening and why.
The tourist camp is owned by the mayor of Memaloose, Adam Oakman. He is financially well off when most people were not. Nearly everyone owed him money or worked for him or was indebted to him in some way, giving him a great deal of power and he used it. He brings a number of people to the camp for a vacation. The sheriff is visiting one afternoon when Rosemary Young runs out of her cabin, saying she had shot her brother Twill, but there was no body when the sheriff entered her cabin. Rosemary insisted that Twill had died but could not explain his disappearance. A search of the area did not locate him.
That was the start of the mystery. Eventually investigator Lynn MacDonald of San Francisco was called in.
As a mystery this book is not particularly good. While the premise was promising, the author seems to have written herself into a plot corner. The ending is rushed and the solution is not reasonable. On the other hand, as an exercise in characterization, it is a resounding success. The banter and the bickering between the sheriff and the mayor displays their characters as clearly as any description could have. The mayor with his obsession about ants and his irrational demands on the people around him and his surprised reaction when they protest is more than a little entertaining. Several of the other characters are as distinctive but the young women of the group were too similar for me to easily tell them apart.
From everything I have read, this is not Strahan’s best book and certainly it is not the place to start examining her work. It desperately needs an editor with a sharp blue pencil. Fans of fair play mysteries should skip this one; the ending will give them a headache. Recommended for its outstanding deployment of dialogue, its overall plot, and its unusual narrative style.