The Key West citizen. [volume] (Key West, Fla.) 1879-current, 1951-11-30

tBest Detective Stories of 1851
edited by David c. Cooke, fiction
published by E. P. Dutton & Co.
New York City, $50 pages.)
This book is one editors Selec.
ton of the choice detective stor'
les appearing in American maya
zines in 1851.
John Dickson Carr, the author
of the first yarn, "A Gentleman
from Paris" adds a touch. of the
literary and the historical by
dragging both Edgar Allen Poe
and the nephew of the Marquis
de Lafayette from their respec-
lively honored graves, to embel-
hsh his story. The tale involves
creepy old ladies in a musty
brownstone front, last wills, and
a lot of breeding hate and jeal-
ousy.
Some recent Poe scholars, OF
course, might object to the male
fellow in the saloon under Gar
Fick's Theatre in New York who
is MIR. Cars version of Poe. 1t
seems. now that the truth has
emerged from the gossip, Poe
was neither drunk nor dope
fiend, but man with disease
of the stomach which sometimes
rolled him under the table or
into the gutter But then the
traditional poetic license to twist
a fact to turn rhyme may also
apply to the short story writer
who wants to turn tale.
The last story in the book is
a little number by Ellery Queen,
Murder Without Clues" 1t in
wolves three widows. Penelope
was fat and money meant moth
ing to her, Lyra was lean and
money meant everything to her.
Sarah, the third, was a cathed-
ral-like lady of great force of
character. and was forced to
throw in her chips by means of
poison The famed E,iery finds
out how the poison came into
the stomach of said Sarah.
On the pages between. the ed
itor has selected a variety of
stories including Nearly Perfect"
By A. A. Milne. We cannot vouch
for the authenticity of this brief
tales claim to being the shortest
mystery ever written, but it has
enc of the most unexpected and
appropriate endings.
Sidney Small's "The Chinese
Dagger adds a touch of the eter-
nal mystery of the orient to the
volume by taking the reader to
Hong Kong on a hot summers
evening. Dope smuggling, Chin
ese feuds. rough fighting and an
opium smoking cook prowl be-
hind the scenes of a very urban
cocktail party given by Sam Gill
espie, agent of an asiatic import
company.
At still another place in the
book a walking corpse stalks
across the pages. II seems a GER
tain body brought into a city
morgue did most unconvention-
al thing for a corpse. After GER
tain of. its vital organs had been
removed by a reliable medical
attendant, the body of the dead
man proceeded to walk out of
the morgue. What's more, he car
ried the glass jars containing his
removed organs away with him,
and on top of that murdered a
defenseless woman. The corpse
had no social security record, no
income tax record, and no finger
print record--only nine new wat
errsoaked ten dollar bills. Mr..
George Washington Neff, director
of the Division of Interplanetary
Defense for the United Nations,
said he was a man from another
planet
THE opdYcke Lexicon OF Word
Selection by John Baker Opdycke,
non-fiction, published by Fuzzy
and Wagnalls, New York City,
492 pages.)
Lexicon by the way, means
sort of wordy dictionary.
Author 0pdycke begins his book
with quotation from Oliver
Wendell Holmes which calls Ian
guage sacred and forbids VERDI
eide, or the violent treatment of
a word with fatal results to its
legitimate meaning. He then pro-
ceeds to devote one TO three fine
printed pages of interesting and
scholarly explanation of how GER
tain selected words were born
and why and how they have
changed over the years.
HusSy, he tells us, was once a
dignified housewife, and wench
meant only a child, daughter, in
FAINT, pupil or virgin And there
was nothing supercilious about
SNUG. 1t meant trim or elegant or
spruce.
Crossword puzzlerS. speakers,
editors and other persons inclin-
ed to split hair on the written
or spoken word will like this lexi-
con. And lot of people not OPP
: Grating in any of these categor-
les might add certain amount
Of color to their average CONVEX