The Four-Pools Mystery

Jean Webster, better known for Daddy-Long-Legs, turned to detective fiction in this 1908 novel set on a prosperous horse-breeding plantation in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Arnold Crosby, a young New York lawyer, narrates his visit to Four-Pools, where his hot-tempered great-uncle, Colonel Gaylord, quarrels constantly with Radnor, the son who runs the farm and stands to inherit it. Servants blame a ghost for a run of thefts, from stolen chickens to bonds taken from the Colonel’s safe, and when the old man is found dead, suspicion settles on Radnor. Crosby’s newspaper friend, the reporter Terry Patten, arrives with a sharper theory, and the search leads toward the limestone cave that feeds the estate’s pools. The puzzle draws on Southern local color, family grievance, and the unsettled aftermath of slavery and the Civil War.