Murder in the Tomb (1937) by Lucian Austin Osgood

Over the years, I picked up a curious collection of so-called genre curiosities, alternative classics and a couple of neglected gems along the trail of obscure, largely forgotten and out-of-print detective novels, but sometimes you find one hiding in plain sight – sporting a surprisingly up-to-date print status. Subject of today's review has been back in print for the past ten years and nobody has reviewed or even mentioned it. Not even an acknowledgment of its existence.Back in 2016, Coachwhip reprinted Lucian Austin Osgood's Murder in the Tomb (1937) and going by the plot description on the back, you can't be blamed for assuming the book is a historical mystery with a Golden Age setting ("...by a newcomer in the field... set in the city of Minneapolis during the summer of 1932"). Murder in the Tomb was originally published in 1937 and Osgood, an American professor of English, had bigger ambitions than his one piece of now forgotten detective fiction suggests.Murder in the Tomb was…