Patreon Post: The Catalyst Club (1936) by George Dyer

To round out September’s Patreon posts I am taking a look at an author new-to-me, George Dyer. In particular I am reviewing the first of his three mysteries which centre on the Catalyst Club. This club is filled with various professionals who have decided to flex their amateur sleuthing muscles and unravel cases going on in and around San Francisco where they live. Dyer’s novel is not the first to feature such a club as Frank Froëst and George Dilnot, Carolyn Wells and Anthony Berkeley wrote either full length works or short stories with this trope. The other two titles in Dyer’s series are The Long Death (1937) and The People Ask Death (1940). Dyer wrote four other crime novels including The Five Fragments (1932), which was made into a film two years later under the name Fog Over Frisco, starring Bette Davis.