Keep Cool, Mr. Jones, by Timothy Fuller (Dell, 1952), with a front cover painted by Robert Stanley.
Author Fuller was still a student at Harvard University when he published his first mystery novel, Harvard Has a Homicide (1936). It introduced Edmund “Jupiter” Jones, described as a cocky, “eccentric grad student in the fine arts at Harvard who wins a valet in a craps game.” There was more than a modicum of Ellery Queen in Jones, and at least one latter-day reviewer has criticized the character for treating his Black servant, Sylvester, “in a ‘status quo’ racist way.” Yet Fuller proved to be a “sly and witty writer,” and his whodunits were deemed sinuous and entertaining enough that he was invited to produce another three over the next seven years—Reunion with Murder (1941), Three Thirds of a Ghost (1941), and This Is Murder, Mr. Jones (1943)—all following his gentleman sleuth as he graduated college then remained at Harvard as an assistant professor of fine arts.
Seven more years passed after the release of This Is Murder, Mr. Jones, with readers presuming the series had ended, before Fuller finally delivered his fifth and final puzzler with the same lead, Keep Cool, Mr. Jones. As the blog Beneath the Stains of Time explains, this “compact, breezy story” imagines “an older Jones living in the suburban Boston village of Saxon with a wife and three young children. Jupiter had hung up his deerstalker nearly six years ago, however, ‘much as the banker must bank or the preacher preach,’ Jupiter ‘had been grotesquely conditioned to deduce amateurishly.’” Two incidents get his investigative juices flowing again: the trapping of four people in a walk-in freezer, which he surmises was a failed murder attempt; and the subsequent slaying of Saxon’s chief of police. Might those events be connected in some manner?
