This husband-wife team were reporters in New Orleans, Louisiana until they wrote The Invisible Host, about a mysterious person who summons eight people to an Art Deco penthouse apartment, prevents them from leaving and tells them via radio message that they will be killed off one by one. This was published in 1930, nine years before Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and although it’s not a perfect match by any means, there’s enough plot elements in common to make people wonder if Christie could have known about it. The Invisible Host did not get published in England at the time, and there’s no evidence for Christie seeing either the play version or the 1934 movie adaptation (entitled The Ninth Guest). That being said, I think people underestimate how much an author can pick up by osmosis, especially if they have friends who write or review in the same genre. Perhaps some more cinema-inclined member of the Detection Club had seen Ninth Guest, and made snarky comments about it, and Christie had thought, like any hardcore Star Wars fan sitting down to Episodes I, II, III, VII, VIII, or IX: “That’s an interesting notion but not what I would have done with it!”

The Invisible Host is not a masterpiece of suspense and psychology, like And Then There Were None, but in some ways it’s a more likable book: pretty good fun in its pulpy way,

with people constantly yelling at each other and running into elaborate death traps, and it ends on a more upbeat note than And Then There Were None, the novel. The Invisible Host plays somewhat fair, in the sense that there are clues planted that point to the killer, and if you pay attention to the characters’ interests and personalities, there’s only a few suspects who are mentally wired to try anything this dramatic, and the actual killer is one of them. The mechanics of how the killer does it all gets complicated, but it’s the kind of book where you just roll with it. The New Orleans setting mostly comes out in the writers’ blase attitude towards urban corruption. Crooked Business Guy is an appalling human being, yes, but Crooked Politician comes off as almost likable compared to Crooked Business Guy and Pompous Old Professor Guy, and Crooked Politician’s Lawyer is a brave but brittle woman who repeatedly shows kindness to a younger, more emotional woman within the pool of victims/suspects.

Bristow and Manning went onto write three more mysteries before they moved to Hollywood, where Manning became a scriptwriter and Bristow focused on historical, female-centered novels like Jubilee Trail. None of their other mysteries are in The Invisible Host‘s league, but they’re not bad….

Two and Two Make Twenty-Two: set among a limited pool of suspects trapped on an island resort off the coast of Mississippi, during a massive storm, this one is closer to The Invisible Host in tone than their other two novels. A colorful group of characters clash and pry at each other’s secrets, which include drug smuggling, investigating drug smuggling, mysterious secret benefactors, and murder. I pegged the identities of the drug smuggler and the mysterious secret benefactor, and one of the abilities of the gadget cane (it’s not a spoiler to say there’s a gadget cane, because the blamed thing screams GADGET CANE from the moment it is introduced). I didn’t guess the killer, however, and there was one other plot twist I didn’t see coming, and didn’t entirely buy, because it involved someone pretending to be something that they didn’t particularly love being, over a very long time scale. The main sleuth is a delightfully bossy Southern matriarch, grandmother to one of the young romantic leads.

The Gutenberg Murders: some pages from a Gutenberg Bible have been bought by a library backed by a private foundation, only to turn up missing, and then people close to the library/foundation start turning up burned to death. The handwaving involved in getting Intrepid Reporter Wade deputized so he can run around with the NOPD interviewing suspects seemed a little contrived to me, and Wade didn’t seem to accomplish anything with that position that he couldn’t have done just by being your ordinary nosy reporter who’s friends with the District Attorney. The mystery itself is decent, with an Edgar Allen Poe feel brought on by the murder method (especially once we learn more about the mechanics of it), the atmosphere of old books, the vindictive “last will and testament” in the backstory, and the sinister undercurrents within the clique of suspects. The murderer is a little unsatisfactory: has motive, means and opportunity, and to me was the least sympathetic of the surviving suspects, but somehow this character didn’t seem to me to have the mental wiring to do something quite that dramatic. We also have not one but two cases of people withholding information on the case until they get things straight in their own minds, only for the murderer to get them before they can tell what they know.

The Mardi Gras Murders: same set of characters as the previous, but with more emphasis on Wade’s comic relief photographer Wiggins, and the hardnosed copper Murphy, who’s kind of thuggish by modern standards but also has an honest hatred of NOLA’s corruption in high places. This one has a great concept: a series of dramatic murders that take place within a proto-goth-themed Mardi Gras parade “krewe,” over the course of Shrove Monday and Fat Tuesday, with the resolution coming in the early hours of Ash Wednesday. But Wiggins is super-annoying, and Murphy’s sledge-hammer approach wears out its welcome, and two out of three of the murder victims are actually way more interesting than any of the people accused of killing them. The suspects themselves are a loose-knit group of generically unsympathetic people, with very little of the personal drama that livens up The Gutenberg Murders. The actual murderer isn’t implausible, per se, but it feels like Bristow and Manning got to the aftermath of the third murder, picked a name out of the hat to decide whodunnit, and then went back and tweaked a few details to make it come out all right. This is the only one of the novels that people of color appear in, so far as I could tell. They are presented as ordinary working class people who talk a little slangy (nothing as difficult as the phonetically rendered Cajun dialect in The Gutenberg Murders) and are understandably wary of the police.

None of these are super-essential, but if you read one of them, make it The Invisible Host, and if you like that, try Two and Two Make Twenty-Two, and maybe The Gutenberg Murders. The Mardi Gras Murders is in my opinion only interesting for people really interested in the milieu it describes.