THE GRAVEYARD NEVER CLOSES

by Frederick C. Davis '28, The Crime Club.1941. 292 p- $2.00.

CYRUS HATCH, ON LEAVE from his Professorship of Sociology at Knickerbocker College, and his ex-pugilist body-guard, Danny Delevan, leave the hectic metropolitan scenes of their earlier activities in CoffinsFor Three, He Wouldn't Stay Dead, and Poor,Poor Yorick, to take over the management of a country newspaper. But the expected respite from their criminological hobby fails to materialize, and they find that their detecting talents have no chance to grow rusty in the normally quiet village of Pennswick. Starting with a phony holdup on page three, the excitement mounts steadily through a robbery, a hit-and-run accident, a murder, and fingerprints that seem too good to be true until, as a climax, with the good professor himself suspected by the local police as being the murderer, a microscopic speck of paint turns out to hold the secret of a man's death, and the fate of a quarter-million dollar lawsuit. As in his earlier adventures, Professor Hatch continues to pin his faith equally on old-fashioned common sense, and new-fashioned scientific instruments for the detection of crime.