Reilly, Helen - All Concerned Notified (1939)

All Concerned Notified (1939) is an uneven book. The first two-thirds (Chapters 1-16) set forth an absorbing account of the investigation of a woman's murder in New York City. There are good police procedural details of how the police trace the victim's identity and movements.

Intermixed with this, are the suspects, who live in a decaying mansion in New York City's Greenwich Village. The spooky mansion is one of the architectural gems that are found in Golden Age mystery fiction. Reilly takes us on a tour of the mansion, going from the grounds and lowest floor, up to the distant attic. Such bottom-to-top architectural trips are also found in other Reilly novels, such as Murder in the Mews and Follow Me.

This section of the book climaxes, with a discovery that explains some of the key mysteries of the book - although not whodunit. These explanations are logical and to the point.

It is a good thing, because after this, the book collapses. The last third is a complex account of the characters' history, and who did what during the crime. The characters' back-story seems like a re-hash of the premise in Rinehart's The Circular Staircase (1907).

And the solution involves no less than three unconnected groups of people wandering around, doing all the sinister, mysterious things at night we have seen throughout the novel. Other subplots emerge out of nowhere here, too, further gumming up the book's logical unity. Making things worse: there are no clues that let us identify the killer - so the mystery is not "fair play". (Bad Reasoning Department: Inspector McKee concludes that one woman is innocent, because she "wouldn't have killed her own maid." This is one of the more absurd pieces of ratiocination in the Golden Age.)

The first two-thirds of the novel have merit, and are highly readable, given some good plot ideas, police work, the architectural setting, and Reilly's skill with description. But the solution of the mystery is a real mess.

Mike Grost