Books: September Murders

THIS DEATH WAS MURDER—March Evermay—Macmillan ($2). Widow Haskell had three daughters, two sons, money. Then she married a gentle, frugal architect-artist, Erich Humphrey. After her death, Erich was murdered. An absorbing play of brother-sister-mother motives (not to mention lawyer and caretaker problems).

SAD CYPRESS — Agatha Christie— Dodd, Mead ($2). Hercule Poirot bends his egg-shaped head to freeing Elinor Carlisle, accused of murdering the lodge-keeper’s fetching daughter with a fishpaste sandwich. Good smooth Poirot.

THE HEADLESS LADY—Clayton Rawson—Putnam ($2). Merlini, magician, can’t let circuses or murders alone. Visiting the Hannum Bros. show, he starts to prove the owner’s fatal car smashup a homicide. Then State troopers find a decapitated brunette in his own car. Lots of Big-Top jargon.

GOLD COMES IN BRICKS—A. A. Fair—Morrow ($2). Alta Ashbury wrote $10,000 checks to “Cash.” Ultimately her rich papa got Bertha Cool and Donald Lam to look into a matter of blackmail seasoned with murder. Donald, a little, disbarred lawyer whom women adore, even outsmarts Hashita, his jujitsu teacher.

THE STATION WAGON MURDER—Milton Propper—Harper ($2). Extortion is loose among Philadelphia’s summering socialites and the body of Mrs. Eleanor Munson is found stabbed, in a station wagon. Trollop or no, Mrs. M. had a history that took Detective Tommy Rankin hotfoot to the scene of an adulterous Maryland tryst.

THE GOOSE IS COOKED—Emmett Hogarth—Simon & Schuster ($2). Extravaganza in an electrical engineer’s laboratory: the first corpse is only charred around the wrists; the second “looks like Al Jolson singing ‘Mammy.’ ” The solution is by Marty Cohen, a law-school cop who knows no watts but is a hard, bright New Yorker going places.