Jumping Jenny (1933)
My review:
Nowhere is Roger Sheringham’s fallibility seen to better effect than in this lively and witty tale that rivals Waugh for fertility of humour. Mrs. Stratton, a splendidly egomaniacal, megalomaniacal and exhibitionist bitch, is murdered before the reader’s very eyes. Roger, suspecting from the absence of a chair that the ostensible suicide is in fact murder, covers up the evidence and draws erroneous conclusions, not the least brilliant of which is that by which he exonerates the character the reader knows to be the murderer, a stroke of ingenuity rivalled only by the solution in which Sheringham is the culprit! Throughout, the reader is in the happy position of knowing more than the detective, and so being able to laugh at him—until the end, when he kicks himself good and hard.