What type of mystery reader are YOU?

Murder Yet to Come

by Isabel Briggs Myers

Frederick A. Stokes, 1930, Chosho Publishing, 2024

reviewed by Seana Graham

I love reading mysteries, but don’t review them often because I find it hard to talk about the story without giving away clues. And don’t worry–I’m not planning to do that here either. But I thought I would talk a bit about how I came upon this book and why you might be intrigued to read it too.

First let me say that if you like mysteries from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (approximately the twenties and thirties of the last century), you will probably enjoy this one. I can visualize the black and white movie  that might have been made from it. It mostly takes place in an atmospheric old mansion, which plays its own part in the tale. The story begins as four men, all connected in some way to the central “detective”  Jerningham, arrive at this house just in time to hear a woman’s scream. I will leave the rest of the tale to discover for yourself. It is a light, enjoyable read and perfect for a certain kind of mood if you enjoy this kind of book as much as I do.

But here’s the intriguing background: the author, Isabel Briggs Myers, is actually one half of the team that came up with the famous Myers Briggs Type Indicator. I discovered this from an interview with Merve Emre at the Five Books website (which I’ll post in the links below—it’s a fascinating read in its own right). Among several surprising things I learned is that the other part of the team, Katherine Briggs, was her mother. Myers was Isabel’s married name.

Although most of the other books Emre selects are non-fiction, she chose this one because it’s one of the reasons she wrote her own book on the Myers-Briggs test, The Personality Brokers, in the first place—she was fascinated to learn that Isabel also wrote mystery novels. What intrigued her particularly was the departure from the conventional setup.

The sidekick is the person who narrates the detective’s adventures. That dyad always seemed to me to work fabulously as a narrative device, but what was so interesting to me, reading Isabel Briggs Myers’s detective fiction, was that they featured trios or quartets of detectives. That seemed like too many cooks in the kitchen until I realized that for her, the detective story was an occasion to model the rational organization of labor according to the language of type that she inherited from her mother. One detective is able to perceive things that others can’t; the other is able to communicate tactfully with different witnesses; the third is able to make really effective decisions.

As she puts it, a precursor of television series like CSI or Law and Order.

To quote Emre again:

But Murder Yet To Come is also a genuinely good murder mystery. It’s well-written, it’s entertaining, rapidly-moving, and propulsive. In 1928, it won the largest award ever for a murder mystery, beating out a young Ellery Queen. There’s also just the pleasure of recovering a book that has basically been lost but that was once a huge bestseller in its time—it went through seven or eight printings, and made Isabel a tremendous amount of money which she lost in the Depression.

(For punctilious readers, I’ll note that Ellery Queen was the pseudonym for a duo of writers. But in fairness, they were both young. For a bit more about how Ellery Queen figured into all this, check the link below.)

Part of the prize was the offer of publication of a second novel, which Myers duly wrote–Give Me Death. It’s said to feature the same group of detectives. Apparently, it didn’t get very good reviews, and Isabel Briggs Myers didn’t write mysteries again.

But guess who’s going to read it anyway?

Seana Graham is the book review editor at Escape Into Life. She has also reviewed for the biography website Simply Charly. She attempts to keep up with her various blogs, including Confessions of Ignorance, where she tries to learn a little bit more about the many things she does not know. She has published stories in a variety of literary journals. The recent anthology Annihilation Radiation  from Storgy Press, includes one of them. Santa Cruz Noir, a title from Akashic Press, features a story of hers about the city in which she currently resides. 

Get Murder Yet to Come (publisher Chosho Publishing uses Amazon as distributor)

You can get Give Me Death in the same way. It looks like it may be a print on demand sort of arrangement.

J.F. Norris has a good review of Murder Yet to Come on his blog Pretty Sinister and follows it up with an interesting piece on the contest Myers won. Apparently, she didn’t beat Ellery Queen after all. Instead, it was more of a tie! Find them here and here.

And here’s the Five Books interview with Merve Erme on the five best books on personality type