The Layton Court Mystery by Anthony Berkeley

Mr. Victor Stanworth, the host of the little party now in progress at Layton Court, was, according to the reports of his friends, who were many and various, a thoroughly excellent sort of person. What his enemies thought about him -- that is, provided that he had any -- is not recorded. On the face of it, at any rate, however, the existence of the latter may be doubted. Genial old gentlemen of sixty or so, somewhat more than comfortably well off, who keep an excellent cellar and equally excellent cigars and entertain with a large-hearted good humour amounting almost to openhandedness, are not the sort of people to have enemies. And all that Mr. Victor Stanworth was; that, and, perhaps, a trifle more.

If he had one noticeable failing -- so slight that it could hardly be called a fault -- it was perhaps the rather too obvious interest he displayed in the sort of people whose pictures get into the illustrated weeklies. Not that Mr. Stanworth was a snob, or anything approaching it; he would as soon exchange a joke with a dustman as a duke, though it is possible that he would prefer a millionaire to either. But he had not attempted to conceal his satisfaction when his younger brother, now dead these ten years or more, had succeeded in marrying (against all expectation and the more than plainly expressed wishes of the lady's family) Lady Cynthia Anglemere, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Grassingham. Indeed, he had gone so far as to express his approval in the eminently satisfactory form of settling a thousand a year on the lady in question for so long as she continued to bear the name of Stanworth. It is noticeable, however, that a condition of the settlement was the provision that she should continue the use of her title also. Gossip, of course, hinted that this interest sprung from the fact that the origins of the Stanworth family were themselves not all that they might be; but whether there was any truth in this or not, it was beyond question that, whatever these origins might be, they were by now so decently interred in such a thick shroud of golden obscurity that nobody had had either the wish or the patience to uncover them.