"This Was a Case Where There Were Too Many Suspects and Too Little Motive"

"The Party Began . . . with Murder."
By Octavus Roy Cohen (1891-1959).
Illustrations by Gwen Fremlin (HERE).

First appearance: This Week Magazine, October 5, 1952.

Short short story (5 pages; 4 illos).
Online at Archive.org starting (HERE), continuing (HERE) and (HERE), and finishing (HERE).

     "There was plenty of excitement in the house, not unnatural, considering that murder had been done. The tension ranged from simple disbelief to complete hysteria."

Concerning one of humanity's least admirable emotions, Robert Heinlein once observed: "Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition; they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other." And so it is with the malefactor in today's story. As Ophelia would remark in a different context: "O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!"

Professional insight: "Most of what we had on him was circumstantial, but then most murder evidence is. A murderer doesn’t usually invite spectators to witness his crime."

Comment: This story could be considered a distillation of the classic country house mystery, minus that subgenre's normal paraphernalia.

Principal characters:
~ Sharon Webster, age 22:
  "Completely dead."
~ Narrator (unnamed):
  "Marty and I waited, patiently. That’s what professional cops do — let the suspect keep the center of the stage."
~ Lieutenant Marty Walsh:
  "I had worked with Marty a good many times. He had a way of pulling rabbits out of hats, but it seemed to me that this time he must be stumped. There was too much to go on, rather than too little."
~ George L. Webster:
  "He looked as though he'd been hit by a club."

~ Ann Foster:
  ". . . was tall, dark, graceful and competent-looking. At that moment, however, she looked as though she needed someone to hold her up."
~ Paul Duncan:
  "I didn’t know these people and knew very little about the case, but from what I had gathered, it seemed to me that Duncan would have less motive than any person present for killing the girl."

~ Ronald Norton:
  "So I ask you: Presuming the truth of what he says, what possible motive would I have for killing Sharon?"

Resources:
- We first encountered Octavus Roy Cohen way back in 2013 (HERE), with his novel Midnight (1922), and yet again (HERE). One of Cohen's novels, The Crimson Alibi (1919), was adapted as a play, a description of which is (HERE). Indeed, quite a few detective fiction works have been turned into stage plays and, if they're lucky, movies; see our compilation (HERE).

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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