87 books like Eight Faces at Three

Golden Age mystery aficionados know Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s humorous Cape Cod mysteries, but they may not be familiar with the even more hilarious—in my opinion, anyway—mysteries she wrote as Alice Tilton.

A friend lent me Tillton’s The Left Leg. As soon as I’d read its last page, I was on the hunt for the rest of them.

Beginning with a Bash is the first in Tilton’s series starring Leonidas Witherall, a boys’ school headmaster, radio detective story writer, and dead ringer for William Shakespeare.

These mysteries read more like capers, with Witherall ricocheting around Boston as he stumbles over corpses, eludes gangsters, dons disguises, and deals with impudent children and persistent dogs. Guaranteed to make you laugh out loud.

Constance and Gwenyth Little—sometimes listed under the portmanteau Conyth Little—wrote 21 screwball mysteries in the 1930s and 1940s, starting with The Grey Mist Murders.

I’m recommending their second book, The Black-Headed Pins, because I think it’s where the Little sisters really begin to show their storytelling chops. Constance Little generally thought up the plots and clues, and Gwenyth fleshed out the books, both of them reportedly writing in bed each morning.

The Littles’ mysteries aren’t a series, but they have several items in common. They feature smarty-pants heroines, snappy dialogue worthy of a Frank Capra movie, and romantic disaster—until it all turns out right. The Black-Headed Pins ticks all these boxes.

It takes place over Christmas and involves a moving corpse, a family curse, and a miserly hostess that makes Scrooge look positively benevolent.

Yes, that Gypsy Rose Lee. Lee not only wrote The G-String Murders, she followed it up the next year with Mother Finds a Body.

In The G-String Murders, Lee writes from the first person, telling a remarkably homey murder tale (although not as sanitized as Lady of Burlesque, the movie starring Barbara Stanwyck based on the novel).

The mystery here is okay as mysteries go, but for me the real draw is the non-stop wise-cracking and the almost domestic portrayal of burlesque life. In the novel, Lee and her boyfriend Biff trade comic observations and share cheap diner meals while they determine who killed two people with, you guessed it, g-strings.

Besides Nick and Nora, it’s not easy to find compelling sleuthing couples. Jane and Dagobert Brown are an exception. She Shall Have Murder introduces the duo.

Dagobert is a charming genius with an inability to settle down to a job, or, indeed, even a meaningful hobby for more than a few months. The novel is told from Jane’s point of view. She’s our Watson and is alternately frustrated and entranced by Dagobert. She’s also a crime novelist.

In She Shall Have Murder, Jane and Dagobert aren’t yet married. Dagobert is disentangling from his estranged wife, and Jane hasn’t yet established herself as a writer. With Dagobert’s encouragement, Jane drafts a mystery novel that takes place in the law office where she works. To their shock, the elderly client Jane has pegged as the book’s murder victim actually dies.

The coroner rules it an accidental death, but Dagobert is sure… show more.

Lynching is central to the late 19th century and thus the theme that I explore in my recommendations, but Shepherd.com covers this tragic subject elsewhere. Instead, for my last book, I offer Adler’s study that explains the persistently high and even increasing rates of violence and homicide in Chicago during an era when varied modern social controls—urban reform, the discipline of the factory floor, expanding education and the bureaucratic state—swept over that city as they did over America, too. According to older theories about social turbulence and murder, these should have declined. Instead, the opposite was true, though the forms that violence took did change. Perhaps it was Adler’s intention to leave frighteningly unanswered what it is about people generally, and Americans specifically, that the dark impulses they have run so deeply that they are impervious to social control.

Using photo and newspaper archives from the Chicago Tribune, the authors of He Had It Coming tell the stories of four Chicago female murderers from the 1920s.

The documentation (both primary and secondary sources) and, especially, the newspaper's original high-quality historical photographs inspired me to dig deeply into similar archives when researching and writing my book.

Despite being published in 1975, Hal Higdon’s book about the Leopold and Loeb case remains the definitive account, at least to me.

If you’re looking for a factual, in-depth look at the crime, investigation, and sentencing hearing, look no further. Higdon was able to interview and correspond with dozens of people who were close to the case and who personally knew the killers and victim. He weaved those recollections into the narrative along with newspaper reports and quotes from the court documents in addition to the rest of his vast research, which gives his book a wonderful richness and depth. 

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb set out to commit the perfect crime and ended up in newspapers as the perpetrators of “the crime of the century.” They kidnapped and murdered a teenage boy in Chicago in 1924, but both Leopold and Loeb were still considered boys themselves at the time. Clarence Darrow defended them at trial, arguing that they were guilty but that the situation had extenuating circumstances. Baatz’s book explores how two college students from good families ended up in prison for murder. Leopold’s family even came from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near where I currently live, so even though the case is almost 100 years old, it’s not as distant as it might seem.

I have a thing for Pinkertons. They’re so often portrayed as villains, but this one is a hero: Kate Warne, the (real-life) first female Pinkerton detective. Kate’s story is fascinating and tense, full of surprising twists—some real and some fictional. At times Girl in Disguise reads more like a spy novel than a detective story, especially when it comes to a certain real-life assassination attempt I’d never heard about, and which literally dropped my jaw. Readers interested in fascinating women largely forgotten by history will devour this one.

LaPier and Beck’s book is the perfect backstory to Van Alst’s.

Chicago, built on the lands of the Three Fires Council, has a long history as an Indigenous metropolis, from activism around the famous 1893 World’s Fair to the building of urban Indian organizations. The authors show how Indigenous people are everywhere in the archives.