MURDER ON THE OSCAR WILDE a train mystery by TR(new serial!)

[Tragic Rabbit]

http://www.awesomedude.com/stories/MOTOW/m...wilde_title.htm

On the California Zephyr there is a car that is, informally and perhaps uncharitably, known as the Oscar Wilde. A Pullman, a sleeper, it is known (among those in the know) as the place to go for mysterious assignations and tete a tete.

When a privacy-loving PI boards in Burlington, he's looking for escape from his profession, a temporary reprieve from snooping and detection, but he will not, on this run, get his wish.

When a body is found, a murder uncovered, he is forced to ply his trade, to solve the case and save a grieving man, but he must work fast and find the killer quick, before the train pulls into the Reno station.

Multiple characters, webs of deceit, too many motives and alibi lies, all conspire to make the solution of this case nothing short of miraculous. If six people can legitimately want you dead, should anyone really care that you were murdered?

Gentleman friends, long time companions, old school chums and conniving women make up the cast of this 1950 period noir piece by TR, Murder on the Oscar Wilde. Chapters will follow weekly or sooner, as we race to the conclusion (and solution) of this Murder on the Oscar Wilde.

From Murder on the Oscar Wilde :

I have always enjoyed train travel. The leisurely progression; the rhythmic reverberation that soon fades from your awareness; the stately service performed against all odds in confined spaces; the endless panorama Americana outside the glass; the deference of porters, waiters and other staff, mostly well-spoken Negroes, offered up in a kind of ironic theater, paean to a past long gone and perhaps mythic, when white men must have felt born to such compliance and respect.

...

But that, of course, was precisely what I was dodging here in my roomette?s tiny bed, with my amorous, but fortuitously fictional, escape. With only the small reading light on above my head, and in my comfortable cotton pajamas, I turned the pages, curious about, but not too terribly engaged in, my lovelorn heroine?s florid miseries. I prefer to keep my distance when I?m not being paid to be a snoop. I am not, by nature, a man who pries into the affairs of others. Quite frankly, this makes my chosen profession as much a mystery to me as anything I have been called upon to solve. I was therefore relishing my privacy, my cloistered room, small as it was, and my book of purple prose, when, drowsy, I finally fell into sleep.

The knocking at my door, a rapid hard hammering so unlike the porter?s usual diffident tapping, startled me awake.

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