Orchids to Murder (ePub)

LEE MAPPIN, the suave, bespectacled private detective, was awakened much too early from a morning-after sleep by a visit from a disgruntled and angry Major Dunphy whose grand-daughter, Mary Stannard, had disappeared an hour before her wedding was scheduled to take place. As Lee takes over, the plot thickens. Three equally implicated suspects appear out of a confusion of evidence and subtle investigations.

A myriad of clues among them two scraps of charred paper, a spray of orchids and an expensive red coupe wrapped around a tree pile up before Lee Mapping can reach his ingenious and surprising solution. This mystery has all the qualities of a first-rate detective thriller and proves to be an expert and exciting product of Hulbert Footner's skill.

Hulbert Footner (1879 1944) was a Canadian writer of non-fiction and detective fiction.

Footner travels by canoe ended but were replaced by constant shifts of his growing family to New York, Charleston, New Orleans, London, then to Japan and China alone, and several year-long visits to Britain, France and Italy with the growing family after Europe immerged from its Great War in 1918.

He collected book royalties in London through the years as his popularity as a writer of detective-adventure stories seemed secure. He acquired a circle of writer-friends abroad, most of whom visited his home, "Charles' Gift," and included authors Frank Swinnerton and H. M. Tomlinson, James Bone, London editor of the Manchester Guardian, David Bone, writer of sea tales and master of White Star liners, Max Beerbohm, who he met at Rapallo, Aldous Huxley, Frank Morley, an editor at Faber & Faber and Arthur Wesley Wheen, a World War I mentally scarred British spy, who was a close friend, and lived a tottering existence on the rim of life with the stress of deep guilt, and was translator of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Back, which was published in 1929.