Murder at the Met?

Newspaper readers across the U.S. last week were invited to follow a mystery serial that was improbable even by whodunit standards. The story, called The Ptomaine Canary, tells how a strapping Met soprano with ambitions as a detective-story writer tries to speed her literary success by drugging such established literary rivals as Erie Stanley Gardner, John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler: she lures them into accepting dope-soaked birdseed held out to them by her trained canary, Galli-Curci. The soprano gets in trouble when one of her less celebrated victims unexpectedly dies. Despite its over-cute plot and slapdash style, the tale could count on plenty of readers, since its author was a Met soprano herself, strapping Wagnerian Star Helen Traubel.

Soprano Traubel had written her 5,500-word, six-installment mystery in dressing rooms and train compartments while on tour last fall. Unlike her heroine, Soprano Traubel had to drug nobody to get her story before the public. The Associated Press heard about it, snapped it up for distribution to the 200-odd papers which regularly use its serial-story service.

With The Ptomaine Canary scheduled to appear in papers as far apart as Amsterdam and Tokyo, Writer Traubel was dickering with Simon & Schuster for publishing rights to a second mystery, to be called (when written) Murder at the Met. Who was going to be done in this time, the author declined to say.

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