The Seven Secrets

Roused at three in the morning and sent down to Kew, Dr. Ralph Boyd finds his patient Henry Courtenay dead in bed, killed by a small clean cut just under the heart. Nothing had been forced, the doors were fastened, and the servants were asleep upstairs, though a conservatory window turns up unlocked. Boyd, who narrates, also finds a scrap of cream chenille near the body, matching the shawl fringe of Ethelwynn Mivart, the woman he intends to marry and the sister of Courtenay’s young wife. He takes the case to his friend Ambler Jevons, a Mark Lane tea blender who detects for the love of it, and the two work through a household of things unsaid. Le Queux published it in 1903, arranging his physician narrator and gifted amateur along Watson and Holmes lines.