“The fact is that Kate is bigger than anything she owns. It’s a subtle point, but if you strain you’ll begin to get it. She’s bigger than her furs, or her car, or her pretty house on Nicholas Street, or anything else she holds title to. She herself is the big thing. She’s an accepted artist who’s doing good and will do better, and she can say, ‘I’m big, and therefore I have these things,’ not, ‘I have these things, and therefore I’m big.’ It’s only little people without any real meat to them who have to say, ‘Don’t look at me, look at what I own.’”

I’ve enjoyed Stanley Ellin’s novels recently, but I wasn’t really prepared for The Key to Nicholas Street (set in 1951). Dorothy Sayers called Gaudy Night “a love story with detective interruptions,” and Nicholas Street is a sort of domestic drama with detective interruptions. It’s also kind of a Rashomon story, where we observe events from various points of view.

The story is set in a fictional, wealthy neighborhood in one of those communities where professionals commute to New York City. We see it first through the (pretty superficial) eyes of the housemaid, who sees everything in movie and magazine terms. She’s the one who discovers the body of the neighbor – a successful, beautiful commercial artist – at the bottom of the cellar steps in her home.

Then we get the perspective of her employer, an autocratic matron who’s been disappointed by the business failures of the rich man she married. She is a judgmental woman, obsessed with social status. She strongly disapproved of the late neighbor, and makes a plausible murder suspect.

But everybody’s a plausible suspect. There’s the matron’s husband, a man without much character, who’s having an affair. Her daughter, who’s dating a man her mother doesn’t approve of, a man who has been involved with the victim and might have been jealous. Also the son, going through an awkward adolescence.

I thought at one point that this was the kind of book that justifies adultery, but it’s more complicated than that. In the end, we find a surprising hero and a strong affirmation of moral truths.

I have to say I figured out whodunnit, but only for authorial structural reasons, not because I deduced it from the clues.

The Key to Nicholas Street wasn’t exactly my kind of book, but it was pretty good.