Death Wears a White Gardenia

 Death Wears a White Gardenia (1938) by Zelda Popkin

The first book in Popkins' series featuring department store detective Mary Carner. It is also one of the first mysteries to feature a department store detective at all. We open with professional thief Joseph "English Joe" Swayzey loading up a suitcase with fine French lingerie and stashing the suitcase in a hidden storeroom corner where he hopes to pick it up the next morning. The next day is Blankfort & Company's big anniversary sale and there will be customers galore. He's sure that in the big sale rush he'll be able to trot out of the store with a case full of goodies with no one the wiser. Except...

When he heads to his little hidey-hole in the storeroom he finds more than he bargained for. The store's credit manager, Andrew McAndrew, has been strangled to death and stuffed in the tight little corner. Before Swayzey can make a quick exit, a storeroom employee grabs him and store detectives Chris Whittaker and Mary Carner are on the spot. They both recognize and old "friend" and are sure Swayzey was up to something--but they don't really think he would have murdered McAndrew, even if the manager had caught him red-handed. Besides--it's evident that McAndrew has been dead for hours and why would the thief come back to the store?

Whittaker sends Carner up to McAndrew's office to secure it and look for any obvious clues. She finds a woman's handkerchief and some torn papers with partial messages. Other clues are found in McAndrew's hand--he apparently caught his nail on the killer's clothing and there are blue silk threads. He's also clutching a crushed white gardenia. Things still look bad for Swayzey--the man has a weakness for perfume and flowers and was caught wearing a white gardenia. But a flower lady outside the story was selling the pricey flowers and Swayzey wasn't the only one with a gardenia in his button hole. 

And Swayzey isn't the only possible suspect. There's McAndrew's wife who knew he had an affair going on with his secretary, Evelyn Lennon, but was in no mood to let her have him. There's Evelyn who is carrying Swayzey's child and may have been given the brush-off. Mrs. McAndrew insists that her husband was going to ditch Evelyn. There are the men who have been sending expensive gifts to their mistresses and whom McAndrew may have been blackmailing (how else to explain the extra cash in his bank account?). And there is a bit of larceny going on in the store itself that he may have discovered and been silenced before he could expose it...

This one is a bit of a toss-up for me. I really like the set-up and the fact that this is one of the earliest department store mysteries. It opens well--getting right to the action and there's not a lot of time wasted in the early part of the investigation. I even enjoyed learning the ins and outs of the lingerie thief's methods. But it lags in the middle. We get bogged down with Blankfort's management interfering with the investigation (could they really have prevented the police from sealing up McAndrew's office??) and I lost interest for a good bit. It picks back up in the final chapters and the ending is neatly done. So, in the end a middle-of-the-road read. ★★★

First line: At fifteen minutes before five o'clock on the evening of March fourteenth, Joseph 
Swayzey entered the department store of Jeremiah Blankfort and Company on Fifth Avenue, New York.

Last line: "Let's go back and catch some crooks before we get fired."
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Deaths = one strangled