These six cases are the only ones Eberhart wrote about Susan Dare, a mystery writer, who is first challenged to do detective work and then eases into it as a second calling. In the first, “Introducing Susan Dare,” the old black servant insists he saw a red ring on the hand that fired the shot that killed the house guest. But the newspaperman, Jim Byrne, the one who urges Susan Dare to solve the mystery before the police can arrest her friend and hostess Christabel Frame, has discovered that the old servant calls flowering wisteria “red.” And Christabel wears an amethyst ring, while the ring always worn by the man Susan suspects is green. Meanwhile some memory, not quite distinctly recalled but perceived none the less as important, will not come clear in her mind.
Jim Byrne persuades Susan to spend an evening in the home of the Wrays because Caroline Wray is terrified something bad is going to happen there, and the creepy atmosphere soon has Susan thinking so, too. Marie Wray, who was adopted into the family but shares the fortune her adoptive father left her, along with Caroline, old Wray’s real daughter, cousin Jessica, and a male heir. Susan figures out that Marie was killed earlier than everyone thought—everyone but the murderer of course—and the monkey. The story is titled “Spider.”
The “Easter Devil” is a statuette from Easter Island that is the center of the dread Felicia Denistry feels. Dread, an atmosphere of some impending catastrophe, Susan placed in danger and occasionally requiring rescue by Jim Byrne and his friend Lieutenant Mohrn—these all recur in the stories. Susan is sent by the two men to the Denisty house and figures out the importance of the bridge Felicia must across to get to her French lessons, and that leads her to the identity of the murderer, though she is nearly murdered herself before the story is over.
Murder at a community theater dress rehearsal of Private Lives is the subject of Susan Dare’s next investigation; she shows up with Jim Byrne just after it has happened, and is detained along with everyone in the company by a constable until the sheriff can arrive to take charge. By that time Susan has determined how vital makeup is to the mystery, and specifically “The Claret Stick.”
“There is something wrong about the house. Something terribly wrong.” These sentences appear in “The Man Who Was Missing,” but they might equally well be found in any of the other five stories. In this penultimate story, the unnerving location is a boarding house where a French ballet dancer tells Susan her lover has disappeared from. Susan soon locates signs of murder, but the plot gets more and more complicated.
The final story is “The Calico Dog,” an imaginative idea where two men claim to be the heir snatched from the house by a nursemaid when he was four, and they are both living in the mother’s house because she is convinced one is her son, but she doesn’t know which. The ending is extremely complex, and it’s set in a hotel where a ball is going on and a fortune teller’s tent, complete with hangings and a labyrinthine entrance, is set up next door.
Eberhart’s style is clear and evocative, but the emotional temperature is often turned up too high, and Susan Dare seems too reliant on Jim Byrne; though he does really save her at one point, mostly she calls him in when she just gets nervous or wants a sounding board for her suspicions, which are always spot on. Eberhart began writing at the end of the twenties, while Christie had already been writing from the beginning of the decade, but she seems closer to Mary Roberts Rinehart than to Christie or Sayers. Dare will not voice her suspicions until there is some concrete proof that she might be right. This reticence and her timorousness characterize her, though the latter often seems to be a feeling of surrounding danger that is justified by some signs she has already picked up on. The book is in Ellery Queen’s list of the most important mystery short story collections up until the mid-twentieth century.
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