And here's Willoughby Sharp!

William Willoughby Sharp (1900-1956)

Chad Ament of Coachwhip sent me two attachments of interest on Willoughby Sharp:

(1) a photo of the author (looking quite dapper, I must say)

(2) a photo of the front panel and spine of the dust jacket for Murder of the Honest Broker.

I thought people would like to see these, since I have been rattling on at some length about Mr. Sharp.  As far as I know this is the only photo on the net of William Willoughby Sharp II.*

*(of course there are many photos of his artist son, William Willoughby Sharp III)

on the floor of the Stock Exchange
something more than share prices
have dropped

And here on the left is the dust jacket from which the photo came. Yup, another dead body on the jacket this time, only it's located not in Bermuda but on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

"What's more welcome these days [as a corpse in a detective novel]," asked Todd Downing in his 1934 review of Murder of the Honest Broker, "than a nice, well-fed financier?"

Probably a lot of Depression-era mystery readers were thinking the same thing.  Willoughby Sharp, himself retired from stockbroking after a half-dozen years, generously provided detective fiction fans with not one, but two stockbroker corpses.