Boucher, a Catholic writer with catholic interests and enthusiasms, wrote short mysteries delving into “religion, opera, football, politics, movies, true crime, record collecting, and an abundance of good food and wine along with clues and puzzles and deductions.”—Francis M. Nevins, Jr., from his Introduction
Most Boucher stories feature brilliant amateur detectives; these are tales of ratiocination in which a splendid quirky intellectual assembles clues and solves mysteries, almost always in time to stop further violence, often without leaving the native habitat to visit the scene of the crime.
The first part of this book—“An Ennead of Nobles”—contains nine stories exhibiting the deductive powers of Nick Noble: Lieutenant MacDonald explained about Nick Noble as they drove. “Nobody knows where he lives or what he lives on. All we know is that we can find him at a little joint on North Main, drinking cheap sherry by the water glass. Sherry’s all that life has left him—that, and the ability to make the toughest problem come crystal clear.”
The second section—“Conundrums for the Cloister”—shows the vast reasoning power and deep human understanding of Sister Ursula, whose early ill health forced her from a police career into a nunnery. “Quiet, simple, human, with the unobtrusive but intense inner glow of the devotional life,” she is the nun variant of G. K. Chesterton’s immortal Father Brown.
“Jeux de Meurtre,” the third section, contains nonseries stories, some narrated by the cops and amateurs who solve the puzzle, some even by the murderers themselves.
