The London Blitz Murders by Max Allan Collins

theatrical soup was a pleasant enough way to generate some earnings. During the Blitz period—at least when the bombs weren’t dropping—the theater was a respite of escape for many Londoners like Agatha, whose letters to her husband, overseas in the Middle East, were filled with reports of new plays, even down to comparing her own opinions with extracts from critics.
    And now the first night of her controversially titled new play was only a few days away. At the moment she was seated in the stalls of the St. James Theatre, rather near the front, with the director—Irene Helier—on one side of her, and Irene’s husband, Bertram Morris, the producer, on the other.
    A spiral notebook (containing the script and various other materials) open and in her lap, Irene was a strikingly beautiful woman of forty, with dark blue eyes and a pale perfect complexion, formerly an actress herself, whose minimal makeup, short dark hair, and mannish tan blouse and darker brown pants provided a military demeanor clearly designed to keepher femininity at bay while she took command of this little theatrical army.
    Her husband, Bertram, was a short, bald, rather round man who had made a star of Irene twenty years ago and a director of her this year. A dapper dresser, Bertram was attired in a dark brown suit with yellow shirt and golden tie; his attire was always so handsome, Agatha felt, one could almost mistake him for handsome.
    Almost.
    After all, his features were those of a leading man, albeit condemned to that round face. He was a frog who had been kissed back into a prince, only to have the transformation stall, halfway.
    The theater’s lights were up, and the bare stage was well illuminated, as well. The naked shabbiness of the undressed stage made a marked contrast with the dignified elegance of the theater itself—dark wood paneling and rounded pillars and arched proscenium around which carved angels flew.
    On the other hand, Agatha knew, theater was illusion, and under the seats of this elegant showcase could no doubt be found the hard-crusted corpses of abandoned chewing gum.
    Speaking of which, the actress currently on stage, script in hand, was removing hers, delicately, a little embarrassed about it, as a stagehand scurried out to provide a napkin for the gum’s disposal. The stagehand rushed off, like a member of the Unexploded Bomb detail looking for a bucket of water into which to drop an explosive device.
    “So sorry,” the actress said, in an alto that had a nice quality, to Agatha’s ears. Chewing gum or not, the young woman possessed a voice with a dignified, even upper-class lilt; of course, she was an actress. Take Bertie, for example—he sounded asif he might have attended Oxford, whereas his father was a Whitechapel butcher, and the school the producer had graduated from was Hard Knocks.
    The actress was not young—thirty-odd, Agatha should say—but she was quite attractive, a bright-eyed brunette with a heart-shaped face, Kewpie-doll red-rouged lips and a curvy shape that asserted itself despite a restrained wardrobe: dark gray suit jacket over off-white blouse, lighter gray skirt, brown “tanned” legs ( that liquid stockings stuff , Agatha thought).
    Standing next to her, making the five-foot-five woman look exceedingly small, was actor Francis L. Sullivan, who (like the young woman) had folded-open script in hand. The rather beefy actor stood a good six feet two, double-chinned and hooded-eyed, not unpleasant-looking, but no leading man.
    Larry Sullivan had been the original Poirot in Alibi and had repeated the role in the recent Peril at End House . ( Why on earth , Agatha wondered, did producers insist on casting these ponderous overweight figures as her tiny Belgian detective? Charles Laughton’s size in Black Coffee had been exceeded only by his overacting .) Sullivan was not appearing in the current production—Poirot was not a character in this one—and had been called in as a dialogue coach at