There's Death in the Cup

London: Evans Brothers. Very Good- in Very Good- dj. 1952. First Edition. Hardcover. [light shelfwear, spine slightly turned; jacket is edgeworn, with a few tiny edge-nicks, a bit of paper loss at a couple of extremities, light soiling]. One of this author's numerous mysteries featuring Chief Inspector William Austen of Scotland Yard, first introduced in 1939, at which point Ms. Hocking already had a couple of dozen books under her belt, about evenly split between crime novels and straight novels (the latter under the pseudonym "Mona Messer"). This one is somewhat unusual in that it's narrated by one of the characters in the story, the godmother of a woman whose "useless unfaithful husband" is murdered Reilly's "Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers" is somewhat dismissive of Hocking -- "She always produces a quiet, amiable mystery, of a type now classic" -- but she clearly has some kind of following, as her books are generally quite scarce (except, oddly, in cheap French and Spanish translations). .