Mitternacht (1918)

Master detective Max Landa writes a letter to his old friend Harry, telling him about one of his interesting cases. At the center of this case was a mutual friend of theirs, reporter Dick Tillinghaft. He had visited Max and excitedly told him that the second wife of Attorney General Edmund Trevor had been found dead in his spacious safe. The culprit had stabbed her. Since the police naturally assumed a crime had been committed, Landa immediately began his own investigation. At the scene, inside the safe, they found part of a letter opener as well as a ring bearing the initials “D. G.” Other lettering read “Anacostia 1908.” Their inquiries did, in fact, reveal that there was a lieutenant commander named Donald Gordon at the Anacostia Military Academy. He was engaged to Trevor’s daughter Beatrice, who was said not to have got along with her stepmother. Landa discovered that the dead woman had sent Gordon a letter and summoned him to her at midnight—the very time the police had established as the time of the murder. While the police were hasty in believing they had caught the murderer in Gordon, Max Landa had his doubts. As the master detective goes on to write, he wanted to follow other leads too, and soon came across Trevor’s private secretary, Alfred Clark, who was acting strangely and had been in possession of a considerable sum of money since the time of the crime. But it was Beatrice’s friend, the much-admired young Peggy MacAllister, who set things in motion. The sought-after young woman offered to marry whichever man helped her prove Donald Gordon’s innocence. Dick Tillinghaft was interested in the attractive young woman and threw himself into the case accordingly. In the room where the crime had taken place, he found a watch fob belonging to the mysterious Count Dorian Morny. But, as Landa had to conclude, this lead also proved false. Instead, he discovered that the only person who could have murdered the dead woman was a certain Count Alexander Smyrnow. His motive: he was the father of the murdered woman’s first husband and blamed Mrs. Trevor for his son’s death. This led to a violent confrontation between the two, which Mrs. Trevor did not survive. In the end, the culprit took his own life, and Dick was allowed to lead Peggy to the altar, even though in his pursuit of the killer he had, in theory, been sharply mistaken—not Morny but Smyrnow was the owner of the watch fob.