Nine - And Death Makes Ten by Carter Dickson

It is 1940 and the ocean liner Edwardic is leaving New York for "a British port".  It is carrying half a million pounds of high explosives and has four Lockheed bombers on her top deck. It is also carrying nine passengers. The ship is taking the shorter, more dangerous route to England rather the safer southern route so each of these nine passengers must have a very important reason for traveling on this ship.

One of these passengers is Max Matthews who is going to England to get a job as a reporter. He is the brother of the captain of the ship, Commander Francis Matthews, who did not know that Max was coming on this dangerous trip. It is through Max's eyes that we view what is going on on the ship. At the dinner the first night only six passengers appeared in the dining room. Miss Valerie Chatworth and the Honorable Jerome Kenworthy sent word that they were too seasick to eat. This was only accounted for eight, and Max assumed that Edward Lathrop, the passenger who said that there were nine had made a mistake. Indeed, the passenger list which he received only had eight names. The most striking person on board was Mrs. Estelle Zia Bey, a woman of remarkable presence, and remarkable clothes. Lathrop said that she was on her way to get a divorce from her second husband.

On the second night of the voyage, Max encountered Estelle Zia Bey in the lounge, and she was very drunk. Max suggested  that they go on deck for some air. When they got there, Estelle said that she was going to her cabin to get a wrap. Max waited for quite a while, and when she did not return he went to her cabin which was across from his. He found that Zia had been murdered; her throat had been cut. On her clothes were very distinct fingerprints in blood. It seems that Mr. Lathrop and the ship's purser were knowledgeable  in analyzing fingerprints so all of the passengers and crew were fingerprinted. The results were that the fingerprints belonged to nobody on the ship.

So I am going to leave you there on a ship loaded with explosives in waters which could hide German submarines. One of the passengers has been murdered by a person who is not on the ship. Where is the mysterious passenger number nine? Could one of these passengers be a German spy? This book is a great read. You can almost hear the throb of the engines and the occasional screams of the passengers.

This book was written by Carter Dickson which is a pen name of the great golden age author John Dickson Carr. The book has two other titles Murder in the Submarine Zone and Murder in the Atlantic.  In a short introduction, the author dedicates the book to his fellow passengers on the Georgic  which crossed the Atlantic in 1939 by the same route as the Edwardic took in the book. The blackout conditions and life jacket  drill were as described in the novel, however there were no munitions and no murders.