This US mystery is a bit of a change for me, as most of the Golden Age mysteries I read are British. It was fun to have a change of scenery. If I was judging The Widening Stain purely as a mystery, I wouldn't think too much of it. There are two separate murders, and the theft of a rare and valuable manuscript, and there is an amateur detective who solves the whole thing, but I just didn’t think that aspect of the story worked well. What did work well was the story overall. It was fun. It amused me. And it was an enjoyable light read.

The story is set in a fictional university, said to be based on Cornell University where the author studied and then spent most of his working life. After a bit of setup and meeting the main characters, we get the first murder. This one is passed off as a tragic accident: a young and attractive French professor is found dead on the floor in a specialist wing of the library. It is thought that she fell from a sliding ladder in an upper gallery while attempting to reach something. Our heroine, Gilda Gorman, Chief Cataloguer at the library, is not convinced it was really an accident, and starts to investigate further. A second death soon follows. This one is definitely murder, as the victim was strangled and his body was found inside a locked vault where the library keeps its rarest books. The most valuable of these, a manuscript of a miracle play from the twelfth century, is missing. While the police have a go at investigating this time, it is Gilda who figures it all out and unmasks the killer.

While Gilda does put in some effort to think logically about the murders, she mostly just follows her normal life, both at work at the library and at various social functions in the evenings. Gilda is in her thirties, is attractive and intelligent, and is a popular guest at dinners hosted by faculty members. Even though she worries about being a spinster in the opening pages, she seems to have most of the unmarried faculty members paying court to her. For undisclosed reasons, she only considers a small circle of suspects as the likely perpetrators. Justifiably it turns out, as the murderer is one of this closed circle. My problem with the mystery side of the novel is that Gilda doesn't work out the solution by carefully considering clues or by making clever deductions. She just has a revelation come to her while she’s attending a concert one evening (with one of her admirers in tow). And it’s based more on a psychological reasoning of the murderer’s state of mind than on any real clues. So, it’s not the type of fair-play mystery where the reader can have a good stab at working it out for themselves.

But the story was fun. I liked Gilda’s firm competence at her work, and her skilful way of handling the temperamental faculty members who seem to bicker away with each other constantly but turn docile under her handling. And I liked some of her offsiders, especially the good-natured head librarian who seemed to have a mind above practical matters, and the attractive English professor who seems to spend most of his time wooing her by making up limericks. The author seems to have had fun mocking academic life and the obscure research subjects that various characters in this book become lyrical over. Overall, The Widening Stain is light, and it’s just an enjoyable read. It was probably worth reading just for its description of the noise made by a motor car (whank! whank! whank!) – it made me happy that a modern publisher looked over this description and decided they wouldn't try to modernise this at all.