Annihilation

Annihilation by Isabel Ostrander

Retired New York police roundsman Timothy McCarty, out walking off his frustration with newfangled "scientific" detective methods, stumbles upon a dying man near his old waterfront precinct. The stranger, well-dressed but wearing cheap new shoes, expires with a look of horror before he can speak. A metal tag on his key-ring traces him to Number Four, New Queen's Mall—an exclusive, gated block of mansions—where he is identified as Alfred Hughes, valet to the wealthy connoisseur Henry Orbit. McCarty, aided by his loyal fire-fighter friend Dennis Riordan and his old superior, Inspector Druet, is drawn back into detective work despite having resigned from the force. An autopsy reveals Hughes was poisoned with Calabar bean extract. McCarty and Riordan investigate the secluded Mall and its handful of insular millionaire households: the urbane, artistic Orbit and his Chinese servants Ching Lee and Fu Moy; the blustering Eustace Goddard and his frail, artistically gifted son Horace; the vain Sloane father and priggish son; the reclusive, aristocratic Parsons family; and widowed Mrs. Bellamy, whose butler Snape was Hughes's gambling companion. Clues accumulate: Hughes had wooed a married nurse, Truda Lindholm, whose Swedish husband Otto—employed as a nurse in the Sloane household—had threatened him days before his death. The Lindholms vanish suspiciously once questioned, seeming to confirm Otto as the killer, though McCarty distrusts so obvious a solution. Before the case can be resolved, young Horace Goddard disappears from his home in broad daylight, apparently spirited out through a gate the watchman had carelessly left open. Frantic, the Goddards summon McCarty rather than risk publicity through official channels. Investigation uncovers that Horace had earlier been seized and searched by a rough stranger in the Mall's back courts—an incident his father had suppressed. Riordan's sharp eye for detail leads the pair to a boarded-up, long-vacant house, which they break into and find has secretly sheltered a fugitive: George Radley, an escaped convict once wrongly convicted alongside a servant, Porter, for a poisoning that killed an innocent bystander—an eerie echo of Hughes's own death. Porter, now reformed and employed by the reclusive Parsons household, confesses to hiding and provisioning his old friend Radley, who vanished from the house days earlier, his fate unknown. As McCarty and Druet piece together the overlapping threads of poison, blackmail, old convictions, and locked-gate secrecy among the Mall's genteel families, a fresh alarm interrupts them: Ching Lee rushes out in a panic, crying that the Bellamy baby's pretty French nurse, Lucette, has also "breathed the breath of death." McCarty and Riordan race into Orbit's conservatory to find the girl lying motionless on a marble bench, with Orbit himself standing over her holding the Bellamy infant—leaving the mystery of Hughes's murder, Horace's disappearance, and now Lucette's collapse ominously unresolved and entangled within the same walled, secretive street.

By Isabel Ostrander · First published 1924 · Genre: Detective Fiction, Mystery, Crime Fiction · 23 chapters · 104,480 words

First lines

A seven-fifty derby, new only that afternoon and destined already to be reblocked! Ex-roundsman Timothy McCarty, whose complete transition to civilian attire was still so recent as to be a source of satisfaction to himself and of despair to his tailor and haberdasher, shrugged his broad shoulders and trudged sturdily along in the teeming downpour. A walk he had come out for, to clear his head of all that psycho-junk he'd been reading, and a walk he would have, but he could think of a place the devil could take this rain to, where it would be better appreciated!

What this Textopian page supports

Annihilation is listed on Textopian as a novel by Isabel Ostrander, dated 1924 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

mystery · detective-fiction · police-procedural · murder-investigation · 1920s · crime-novel · golden-age-mystery · ex-detective-protagonist · waterfront-setting · investigation-thriller · moral-ambiguity · deception

Contents

More by Isabel Ostrander