A serial killer has been stalking co-eds at a Southern California university. Dubbed Black Overcoat by the police due to his distinctive garb, he has so far claimed five victims, employing a different type of weapon with each kill. Most recently he was in a seedy coffee shop sitting near Garnet Dillon, a beautiful young woman who works as secretary to the dean of the medical school. Garnet collapses at her table and dies soon thereafter, while Black Overcoat makes off with her pocketbook. Despite the initial mystery surrounding her cause of death, it looks like Garnet was the killer’s sixth victim.  

Or was she? As Homicide Detective Richard Tuck investigates, he discovers that Garnet had more than one secret. Perhaps her death stemmed from more personal connections. And so he begins to question her small circle of friends from the medical school who all claimed to have loved her. Is one of them her killer, and can Tuck solve the case before another victim is found?

It’s about time that Book Club tackled an academic mystery, what with three teachers and a librarian within our ranks! And with Murder Among Friends, the 1942 debut of writer Lange Lewis, we have gone to the head of the class. Actually, this happens to be our next Book Club selection but one, but as a subscriber to Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics, I recently received Lewis’ The Birthday Murder in the mail and after doing some research, I learned that Friends was the first of five mysteries that Lewis wrote featuring Los Angeles Detective Richard Tuck. And since this book and the other three titles have been made available by Wildside Press, I decided to at least read the first book before I tackle The Birthday Murder in mid-December (which, er, happens to be my birthday!).

To make matters extra sweet, Judy de Lange Lewis was a local girl: born in Oakland in 1915, she moved with her family briefly to New York and then returned to California and settled for the rest of her life in the Los Angeles area. She didn’t begin to write novels until 1942, and her mystery-writing career lasted only ten years and comprised six novels and a novella. (One title does not feature Tuck, and the novella was co-written by the thrice-married-thrice-divorced Lewis and her second husband.) The word on the street is that The Birthday Murder is Lewis’ best work. If this is so, I cannot wait to tackle it because with Murder Among Friends, Lewis emerges as a compelling writer, equally strong with plot, prose, and characterization. Bonus points to her for the academic setting, and I note that future books explore the worlds of theatre and film. You can imagine how well I’m going to get along with Lange Lewis! 

In Murder Among Friends, the point of view switches between Tuck and a young woman named Kate Farr, who has come back to her alma mater to find a secretarial job and be near an old flame. (Lewis herself worked for a time as a department secretary at the University of Southern California.) From the moment Kate appears, walking down University Avenue toward her new job like “a small, neat ghost” haunted by her own experiences as a student, Lewis recreates the environment of college life in the early 40’s and a medical school in particular:

“From her undergraduate days (Kate) remembered someone saying that you could tell medical students from dental students, who also wore white coats, because the medical students usually had circles under their eyes. These young men ran true to form. They looked up at her out of weary young eyes, each pair wearing a different type of circle. Purple, blue, and brown circles. Finals were over. The February-June semester had begun.”

Kate has snagged a job with kindly old Dean Calder, who runs the medical college, because Garnet Dillon has up and disappeared, leaving a brief, unsatisfactory resignation letter on her desk. Calder and the graduate students who knew her best, including Kate’s boyfriend, John Greenwood, are upset that she left with no explanation. Everyone, you see, was a little in love with Garnet. And then, in a rather shocking manner, her body turns up. And while Garnet’s death appears to have been from natural causes, the Dean is dissatisfied and contacts Detective Tuck, the son of an old friend, who sets aside the case of Black Overcoat and comes to the Dean’s aid. 

Naturally Garnet’s death turns out to be anything but natural, and since circumstances suggest that a person with medical knowledge may have been responsible, Tuck begins to investigate Garnet’s circle of friends. Lewis’ skill with characterization is exemplary throughout, from the major suspects to smaller characters like Mr. Griswold, the head of the campus morgue, with “wet blue eyes that looked as if they had melted at some time in the past, and only partly congealed again.”

Even the members of Tuck’s Homicide team, who follow him throughout the book series, are clearly deliniated. There’s Gufferty (“as spendthrift of bodily effort as Tuck was chary of spending it”), Froody (“small, fat and drowsy, and . . .constantly imposed upon”), and a female detective named Brigit Estees (“a hundred and fifty pounds of healthy womanhood”), who will, in Lewis’ final mystery, take the lead on the case. 

As the case proceeds, so do the twists, each one casting suspicion in a new direction and ramping up the suspense, particularly as Kate, who has decided to look for her own answers, becomes the target of at least one person’s unhealthy interest. The book races along as we follow these parallel lines of investigation until Detective Tuck and Kate Farr, each in their own way, uncover the truth. Perhaps the solution is not expertly clued in the Golden Age fashion, but it is complex and heartrending, and nd I imagine it was somewhat provocative in 1942. 

Score a winner for Book Club! Murder Among Friends is a mystery that sticks around with you for a while after you have finished it. I, for one, will be ordering the other titles from Wildside Press and look forward to the continuing adventures of Richard Tuck.