The Black Goatee is vintage Little, complete  with their trademark, the disappearing corpse. The post-World War II housing shortage has left several people homeless in a smallish New Jersey town, including Aloysius P. Graham—who couldn’t resist selling his own house at an enormous profit—and his headstrong daughter, Virginia. Unknown to his cousins, Aloysius and Virginia have installed themselves in the unused wing of the cousins’ enormous mansion. It seems like the perfect solution until a number of other people crash the party, including a maddening young doctor with a yen for Virginia, a love-struck nurse, and a strange little old man with a black goatee. But when lights start going on and off on their own and the ghost of the mansion’s dead owner begins walking the corridors at night, our squatters realize that even free rent may be too high a price to pay for a roof over their heads. It’s never easy to describe a book by the Little sisters, whose madcap mysteries kept a generation of readers laughing from the 1930s to the 1950s. The plots were outrageous, the characters quite unlike any others in the genre, and the murders, though often gruesome, usually took place off stage. Quite often it seemed like they were poking gentle fun at noir fiction by taking dark plots and rendering them into something that might have been produced by Cornell Woolrich on laughing gas.

Reviews

“'It was a large house, low and long, with white columns rising against a background of red brick at the middle section and ample wings extending along each side. There was an impressive white door with a brass knocker, and a formally banked mass of rhododendrons at each side. An imposing place, and yet it had an indefinable air of incipient neglect.'

“So begins—in classic romantic suspense fashion—The Black Goatee by Constance and Gwenyth Little. And there any resemblance to classic romantic suspense ends. What follows is sheer sparkling lunacy—the best of vintage madcap mystery.

“The housing shortage following WWII forces Virginia Graham and her eccentric pater to surreptitiously move into the vacant wing of an enormous mansion. Unfortunately, Virginia can’t help inviting her friend Sue to join them. Sue invites Dr. Larson, who used to be Virginia’s beau, and so on and so on. Soon the dusty halls of the vacant wing are crowded with secret tenants. Discovery is inevitable, but murder comes as a surprise to Virginia and her pop.

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise to the reader, however. The novels of the Little Sisters are giddy excursions into the lighter side of crime. Crazy plots, flamboyant clues and eccentric characters are the staples of these tales. The wacky wit of The Black Goatee is sure to charm the modern mystery lover.”
—I Love a Mystery

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