FORGOTTEN BOOK: LADY ON A TRAIN

 Lady on a Train by Leslie Charteris (1845)

A movie tie-in, novelizing the 1945 Deanna Durbin vehicle Lady on a Train.  Charteris himself wrote the story for the film, Edmund Beloin and Robert O'Brien did the screenplay, and Charteris mingled the two to produce the novelization.

Shades of Agatha Christie's 4.50 from Paddington (filmed as What Mrs. McGillicudy Saw), with a bit of Rear Window thrown in.  Nikki Collins, a young woman trekking her way from San Francisco to New York in hopes of getting a job in a big city newspaper, and working her up to be a crime reporter.  (She's fascinated with crime, see, and has read all the books on criminology and true crime, as well as many crime fiction novels and magazines.)  Fifteen minutes from her final destination the train briefly stopped at a substation.  through the window of her compartment, Nikki into a window of a nearby building and saw a man being bludgeoned to death.  the the train continued on its journey.  No one would believe Nikki and the police refused to give credence to her report.  Then, a few days later, on the front page of one of the city's newspapers, was a story about a funeral being held for an important, wealthy owner of a shipbuilding concern.  The photo accompanying the story was that of the man she saw murdered.  But...the dead man had died on his estate outside New York, far from the area where Nikki saw the murder.  The dead man, Josiah Waring (a man whose portrait looked "as though he had just been offered a poor widow's life savings"), had evidently slipped in his bathroom and hit his head on the bathtub as he fell.

Nikki knows this troy is false.  She is convinced the man she saw killed was Waring.  Like any budding crime reporter, she decides to investigate.  She arrives at the Waring mansion shortly before the will was about to be read.  One of Waring's nephews, Arnold (the black sheep of the family and an inspiring inventor) mistakes her for Margo Martin, a brassy nightclub singer and evidently the "protege" of the dead Josiah, here for the reading of the will.  Also present as Josiah's brother, David (an ineffectual, self-important man, giving to secret drinking and losing large amounts on the ponies); David's wife charlotte 9a mean-spirited harridan who body make consist almost entirely of vitriol). Arnold's cousin Jonathan (a lay-about who pretends to be an amateur tennis player), and Jonathan's mother, Mary (a complete featherbrain).  Also present are the dour housekeeper  Mrs. Parks (who missed her chance to marry Josiah years before and now "stalks through the pages like a figure from Madame Toussard's Wax Museum), the butler aptly named Butler, Josiah's secretary, Waring (who is hiding many things, including his massive debt), and Garberson, the family lawyer.  Showing up at the last minute was the chanteuse Margo, who exposes Nikki's unintentional deception.  Lurking behind the scenes is a lantern-jawed figure who mysteriously confers with Waring, and is surreptitiously following Nikki.

A collection of oddball relatives, a brooding architectural nightmare of a mansion (likened to San Jose's famed Winchester House), a uniquely odd will, a second murder, and a looming threat to (and perhaps, a looming romance for) Nikki Collins, all add up to a fast-moving, light, almost by-the-books 1940s Hollywood mystery.  (Fifty pages before the closing paragraph, we get this:  "{Y]our uncle was murdered, and we've got to suspect all of them.  And it's likely to be the most unlikely suspect."  And sonofagun, three paragraphs later, Nikki zeroes in on the most unlikely suspect.)

Charteris was clearly having fun with this book, the only fiction book he wrote since the early 1930s that did not feature Simon Templar.  Charteris had begun work on the film treatment in October 1943, shortly after his marriage.  It was designed to be a vehicle for Deanna Durbin to move her beyond her regular screen image.  I don't think it worked; reading the book, I found it impossible to imagine another actress beyond Durbin to play Nikki Collins.  

Charteris's original story was adapted in 1990 for the pilot episode of the (very) short-lived CBS television series Over My Dead Body.

The book was published as a digest paperback by Shaw Press as a "Bonded Mystery."  As far as I can tell it has never been reprinted.  "Bonded" and/or "Chartered Mysteries" were poorly distributed paperbacks that mainly reprinted Saint novels, along with original "The Saint Choice..." anthologies (..of Radio Mysteries, ...of Impossible Crime, ...of Hollywood Mysteries, and so on).  The only other books they printed that I am aware of were Paul Cain's hardboiled crime novel, Fast One, and Otis Adlebert Kline's collected of oriental tales about the Dragoman, The Man Who Limped.

For those who are interested, here is the link to the film:

https://archive.org/details/1945-lady-in-train-la-dama-del-tren-charles-david-vose

In addition to Deanna Durbin, it features Ralph Bellamy, Dan Duryea, Edward Everett Horton, George Couoouris, Allen Jenkins, David Bruce, Patricia Morrison, and William Frawley.