Great Black Kanba

A young American woman who's lost her memory comes to on board an Australian train and discovers she could be a murderer in this 1944 novel by the queens of the wacky cozy.

Not only does the young woman have a bump on her head and no memory, she also has no idea how she came to be on a train corssing the Nulabor Plain of Australia with a group of boisterous, argumentative Aussies who appear to be her relatives. Nor does she recall ever having met the young doctor who says he's her fiance. Which is a little awkward, since there's another man on the train who says she'd agreed to marry him, and a love letter in her pocketbook from yet another beau.

She also discovers that she may be a cold-blood killer. Even worse, she may have really bad taste in clothes, given the outfit she's wearing. When some of her fellow passengers are killed, an Australian cop thinks she would make a great suspect and the only reason she isn't arrested is that the train keeps passing into other jurisdictions. The passengers also have to keep changing trains, since each Australian state uses a different railroad gauge.

And then there's the matter of the barking lizard in her compartment. The lizard belongs to Uncle Joe, and amateur painter who awakes every morning to discover that someone has defaced his latest masterpiece. It all adds up to some delightful mischief — call it Cornell Woolrich on laughing gas — which is what you would expect from the pens of the two Australian-born Little sisters.

• Author
• Constance Little, Gwenyth Little

• Format
• paperback

• Pages
• 156

• Publisher
• Rue Morgue Press

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 9780915230228

• Genres
• mystery, australia, fiction, crime, humor

• Release date
• 1998