The Fifth Tumbler

In the tradition of Holmes and Poirot comes another erstwhile professor turned detective create by Clyde B. Clason. Here is a long, full-bodied, and modern mystery story, cleverly plotted, with excellent characters and genuine suspense. The final curtain will come as a surprise to all. All about the murder of the porcine Mr. Swink and the mystifying events that followed-and introducing Theocritus Lucius Westborough, genial and mild-mannered little history professor, with the instincts of a ferret and the brain of a Holmes. Swink's murder, in his room at the Hotel Equable, involved a varied group of people: a night clerk, an evil-tongued gossip, two traveling salesmen, a "hotel widow," a man who was anything but what he said he was, a commercial artist and his wife, and a hotel dick with a penchant for ripping up mattresses. With the police completely baffled, Theocritus gets together this cast of characters and stages a play whose main "props" consist of a hairpin, a cigarette lighter, a drunk's visit to the wrong room, a child's chemical set, a moving picture-Three Men and a Cobra-Detective Lieutenant Mack's aunt Harriet from Niles, Michigan, and a girl who married at noon and was killed at three o'clock in an automobile accident with another man.