Earl Derr Biggers opens a thrilling mystery with a scene in which the flickering light of fifty candles reveals the victim stabbed in the heart on the floor.
The moral of the story in "Fifty Candles", is that you must be pretty careful about accepting sudden invitations from people who have no cause to like you and some cause to dislike you, even if you're just off a boat from China and the girl you've fallen for is also going to be present. Because, before you have even so much as a caviar canape, you're quite likely to find yourself groping through a fog in search of whoever slew your host n the dining-room. That's what happened to the hero of "Fifty Candles," and the story gets even better than we might have been led to expect.
