TIMOTHY FULLER. Keep Cool, Mr. Jones (1950).

The people of Saxon, a newly suburbanized village outside of Boston, can’t decide whether they want to retreat from the modern world or to embrace its many amenities. Just now, an old-timey square dance is under way in Jack Maney’s converted barn. In the barn’s basement, meanwhile, Maney has installed a state-of-the-art deep freeze, as big as a living room. In Fuller’s adroit hands, the freezer becomes a casual metaphor of America in the Age of Anxiety (to borrow W.H. Auden’s phrasing). It also becomes a scene of attempted murder. Jupiter Jones, taking a break from the rigors of homespun recreation, mosies down to the deep freeze and discovers four eminent Saxonites padlocked inside. Immediately, he suspects homicidal intent. Who, he wonders, was the targeted victim? And who would be so cold-blooded as to add three extra victims to his or her kill? Later that night, the town police chief meets with a fatal shotgun blast while investigating the incident. Jones, a gentleman scholar and sometime amateur detective, devotes the next day—the “kind of day one hopes to avoid by moving to the country”—to sorting through the stories and secrets of various town characters. Punctuating his labors are reports of that afternoon’s Red Sox game, and news of Ted Williams’s every at-bat. The resulting tale is a wonderful period piece and a fine novel in its own right, complete with dialogue that proceeds through unforced wit, social insight that combines satire with sympathy, a heavy helping of romance (along with a light salting of sex), a hunt for buried treasure, and a dash of philosophizing on Jones’s part. His comments on the spiritual plight of mid-century Americans are off-the-cuff yet trenchant, and the book’s final word is hard to argue with: “There would always be baseball.”

[ADDENDUM: This novel, unlike some that I’ve reviewed in this space, well and truly deserves to be called a “forgotten book.” Harper Perennial did reissue it back in the 1980s, as part of an excellent line of classic mystery reprints, but that was more than a quarter-century ago. Meanwhile, on the Internet (that magical place that now constitutes our collective memory) the book appears to have left very few traces. The same goes for Fuller and his sleuth, Jupiter Jones. Not even Fuller’s first detective novel, Harvard Has a Homicide (1936), which achieved a fair bit of renown in its own time, seems to have garnered much attention from online commentators. And a search for “Jupiter Jones” mostly turns up references to another fictional detective—one of the teenagers who star in the Three Investigators series, which I recall fondly as my literary way station between Encyclopedia Brown and Agatha Christie.]