Blessings be upon Felony and Mayhem Press (http://www.felonyandmayhem.com), which is currently engaged in reprinting all sixteen of the detective novels of Elizabeth Daly. (They are now up to seven.) Daly (1878-1967) ought to be even better known than she is. She came along at the tail-end of the so-called golden-age of detective fiction which emphasized puzzle plots and brilliant detectives, and she was one of the finest practitioners of that style.

She was of a privileged background. Her father, Joseph, was a judge of the New York County Supreme Court, and her uncle, Augustin Daly, was a prominent theater owner and producer. She received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr and an M.A. from Columbia University. She was a reader in English at the former from 1904 to 1906.

Although she did some other writing before embarking upon her career as a mystery writer, she reached her prime as an author when in her sixties and early seventies. Her seventeen novels (all save one a detective story) were published between 1940 and 1951.

All of Daly’s detective novels feature Henry Gamadge, a wealthy expert in manuscripts and rare books who does detective work as a sideline. He is highly cultivated though not handsome—he has blunt features and a scholarly stoop. He is a very good man, but he does not preach or parade his virtue. He eventually takes a younger, utterly charming wife, Clara. This couple represents WASP life at its most attractive.

In our maniacally egalitarian age, some may therefore assume that there is a snobbish tone to these tales. There is not. Gamadge is entirely likable (unlike S. S. Van Dine’s insufferably snobbish detective Philo Vance), and Daly depicts characters from different social classes convincingly and without condescension.

The series definitely has a tone, though—a civilized one.  The tales are told in an understated, elegant manner that eschews anything vulgar or meretricious. But the murders are not tame, and the plots are anything but boring. Sometimes they seem to veer into the supernatural, as with the novels of “impossible crime” master John Dickson Carr: there is a supposed time traveler in Murders in Volume 2 (1941) and an apparent ghost in Evidence of Things Seen (1943).

In the aforementioned Murders in Volume 2, a beautiful woman appears in a household with the second volume from the collected works of Lord Byron.  In that very same house a hundred years earlier, a beautiful woman disappeared with that very same volume. Is it the same woman? If so, where has she been?  If not, what is the point of the hoax?

In the un-supernatural The Book of the Dead (1944), Gamadge solves a murder that at first no one realizes has occurred.  A bookish man platonically befriends a simple, good-hearted younger woman. She comes into possession of his copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and this leads Gamadge to realize that murder has been done and, eventually, by whom.

These are not (thank goodness) “cozy”  murder mysteries, and they play fair with the reader. When Gamadge explains how he solves his cases, the clues he discusses have all previously been presented to the reader. The writing is very good. Here is an example of her style: “He fell asleep … sinking consciously and deliciously into kind darkness.” Her books are also sparingly seasoned with dry wit.

In fine, Elizabeth Daly was a writer of great assurance who created a series of intelligent, intriguing entertainments.