Waldstein’s Folly is in danger of being demolished. A London establishment, a acoustically perfect concert hall, it has housed its three-storey organ as its centrepiece (despite orchestras not usually using organs). As a reporter is being shown around, working on a story to help save the building, the organ sounds out from all around him. But when the tour reaches the organ, Louda, the organist, is found slumped over the instrument – dead.

When it becomes evident that Louda has been electrocuted, enter Chief Inspector MacDonald. Who was the woman who had been in the organ loft with the dead man? Who had access to the building to create the death-trap that took the man’s life? And how does one make a replica organ stop made out of metal? Well, one of these three questions won’t be answered…

So, I was in the Bodleian again last week, abusing my academic past to read obscure mystery novels. I chose this one, as it’s one of the Lorac titles that a) hasn’t been reprinted by the British Library and b) hasn’t been scraped off the internet/copied from the BL reprints to be resold without a whiff of consideration for Lorac’s estate given they are still in copyright in the UK, at least. Sorry, that’s important to me – I have a number of friends who are authors or descendants of authors and piracy is theft, pure and simple.

Oh, the book. Yes, that’s what you’re here for. It’s OK, I suppose…

The bits about the Folly and the classical music scene are interesting. A snapshot of a different time from a point of view of someone who can actually see it – it’s one of the things I read Golden Age crime fiction for. The plot, though, isn’t one of Lorac’s best.

There’s a lot of – well, I suppose misdirection would be the word if it worked. As it doesn’t, it just seems to be page-filler. It’s mostly centred around the unknown woman and it’s got that old trope of the character being incredibly obstructive and basically being allowed to – it’s as if MacDonald knows that she’ll be back in forty pages time with new information. At least twice…

There’s nothing interesting about the murderer, bar the motive. If you can’t spot them from the very small circle of suspects, then maybe you haven’t read many mysteries. The circle is so small, it could have been a Belton Cobb book (although he would have had poisoned the keys of the organ). The ability of the murderer to create the death trap is completely ignored too – how does one fashion a replacement organ stop that looks like an enamelled on but made out of metal?

So a lesser Lorac. Nice scenery, but not a great mystery.