''Death at the Club'' is a 1937 detective novel by the British writer

Cecil Street Cecil John Charles Street (3 May 1884 – 8 December 1964), who was known to his colleagues, family and friends as John Street, began his military career as an artillery officer in the British Army. During the course of World War I, he became a ...

, writing under the

pen name A pen name, also called a ''nom de plume'' or a literary double, is a pseudonym (or, in some cases, a variant form of a real name) adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of their works in place of their real name. A pen na ...

of Miles Burton. It is the fifteenth in a series of books featuring the amateur detective Desmond Merrion and

Inspector Inspector, also police inspector or inspector of police, is a police rank. The rank or position varies in seniority depending on the organization that uses it. Australia In Australian police forces, the rank of inspector is generally the ne ...

Arnold of

Scotland Yard Scotland Yard (officially New Scotland Yard) is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, the territorial police force responsible for policing Greater London's 32 boroughs, but not the City of London, the square mile that forms London's ...

. It was published in the United States by Doubleday the same year under the alternative title ''The Clue of the Fourteen Keys''.Reilly p.1259 It takes the form of both a locked room mystery and a closed circle of suspects, both popular branches of the genre during the decade. In the '' Times Literary Supplement'' Elizabeth L. Sturch noted "Mr. Miles Burton can always be relied on for a good, serious, straightforward detective story with no shilly-shallying and no side-issues to divert the reader’s attention from the all-important task of discovering the murderer". Isaac Anderson in the '' New York Times'' felt "the author has contrived a pleasing combination of routine police procedure with clever deduction".

Synopsis

The Assistant Commissioner of the

Metropolitan Police The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), formerly and still commonly known as the Metropolitan Police (and informally as the Met Police, the Met, Scotland Yard, or the Yard), is the territorial police force responsible for law enforcement and ...

is a member of London's exclusive Witchcraft Club and while there he encounters the corpse of the club secretary. He and the other twelve remaining members of the club are all suspects, to the embarrassment of the investigating Inspector Arnold. Only the intervention of his friend Merrion leads to the solving of the case.

References

Bibliography

* Evans, Curtis. ''Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961''. McFarland, 2014. * Herbert, Rosemary. ''Whodunit?: A Who's Who in Crime & Mystery Writing''. Oxford University Press, 2003. * Reilly, John M. ''Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers''. Springer, 2015. 1937 British novels Novels by Cecil Street British mystery novels British detective novels Collins Crime Club books Novels set in London {{1930s-crime-novel-stub