Murder by an Aristocrat

Starred review from September 15, 2019
Eberhart, as Nancy Pickard notes in her introduction to this outstanding new release in Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics series, "was the best-selling mystery writer in America in the 1930s." She wrote primarily domestic thrillers, with the exception of one series starring Nurse Sarah Keate. Murder by an Aristocrat, published in 1932, is the fifth in that series, and it's a suspenseful amateur-sleuth tale sure to entrance those eager to ferret out the killer, while, at the same time, offering a surprising amount of sustenance for those seeking psychological nuance. Nurse Keate is summoned to the Thatcher mansion to care for Bayard Thatcher, who claims to have shot himself while cleaning his revolver. Keate quickly determines that Bayard was shot by one of the bickering Thatchers occupying the mansion. But which one? The question grows in importance when Bayard is later killed, and Keate finds herself virtually imprisoned by the family's matriarch, desperate to convince the nurse that the murderer had to be an outsider. Eberhart is often compared to Agatha Christie, and while the similarities are evident, there is one big difference: Eberhart is a much better stylist. As involved as we are in the whodunit aspects of this tale, we are consistently brought up short by such striking turns of phrase as this one: "Murder as an actuality, dragged into the circumference of one's own living, is a violent and cyclonic experience." Sarah Keate may only be "a sleepy, middle-aged nurse," but her words carry the kind of quiet poetry that later generations have found in P. D. James' Adam Dalgleish.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)