Exit Before Midnight: A Collection of Murder Tales

by Patrick Quentin, Curtis Evans (introduction)

A Collection of Murder Tales from Patrick Quentin…

The Jack of Diamonds: Starner had something on each of them. So Vanderloon sent them all an invitation that included the handwritten phrase “to meet and to murder Mr. Joseph Starner.” The object is to kill him and make it look like an accident. But, of course, the best laid plans often go awry.

Exit Before Midnight: It’s New Year’s Eve, and the stockholders of Leland & Rowley are about to sign over an agreement to merge with the Pan-American Dye Combine. On her way to the meeting, secretary Carole Thorne finds a typed “… if the merger is carried, I have decided to murder several of you…” She thinks it’s a practical joke—until their attorney becomes the first victim!

Another Man’s Poison: When Dr. Knudsen collapses dead during an operation, it looks like someone had poisoned his coffee. And only one person could have done it. With his back against the wall, it’s up to young intern Oliver Lord to prove his innocence.

The Gypsy Warned Him: Gunner’s Mate Lew Warren is on an 8-hour leave and decides to hit the first bar he sees. There he meets a little man who tells him about a gypsy, “the best fortune teller in New York,” and even offers to pay the gypsy himself to tell Warren’s fortune. How could he know that he had just fallen into a subtle trap that would end in murder?

Genres: Mystery

357 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 15, 2023

About the author

Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge were pen names under which Hugh Callingham Wheeler (19 March 1912 – 26 July 1987), Richard Wilson Webb (August 1901 – December 1966), Martha Mott Kelley (30 April 1906–2005) and Mary Louise White Aswell (3 June 1902 – 24 December 1984) wrote detective fiction. In some foreign countries their books have been published under the variant Quentin Patrick. Most of the stories were written by Webb and Wheeler in collaboration, or by Wheeler alone. Their most famous creation is the amateur sleuth Peter Duluth. In 1963, the story collection The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.

AKA:
Πάτρικ Κουέντιν (Greek)

Reviews

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Collection of Golden-age murder tales, with the best in my opinion being Exit before Midnight. A group of people are trapped on New Year's Eve on the upper stories of a high-rise building. They are there for a business meeting, a takeover of a company, that will be finalized at midnight. But someone starts killing off the board members before midnight... In some ways this gave me Die Hard vibes with the problems of being trapped in a skyscraper with a murderer, but Die Hard is actually based on a book written years later called Nothing Lasts Forever.
There is also a tale of a doctor murdered in a hospital just before he is to perform surgery, and a tale of a sailor on shore leave who gets caught up in web of lies and deceit.
Oddly, the collection ends with three short essays about famous historical true crime cases. The first is a theory about the Lizzie Borden case which I thought was particularly ingenious. The other two are about Francis Maybrick, who was convicted in England of poisoning her husband - even though the medical evidence did not support this. She was sentenced to death, but after much public outcry her sentence was commuted and she served a long prison sentence before eventually moving to America (She had been an American who married a British man) and dying in obscurity. I give this collection 3 and 1/2 stars, but Goodreads doesn't do 1/2 stars so I have to say 3 stars. I read this on my Kindle over a period of time whenever I was waiting somewhere.