What I Tell You Three Times Is False by Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt

I'll try to keep this short: I covered this book the first time I read it, in 2008, and I've recently written at length about the first two books in this series, One Of Us Is Wrong and I Know a Trick Worth Two of That. 

In the mid-80s, Donald E. Westlake, a bestseller of humorous mysteries under his own name and a respected writer of dark thrillers as Richard Stark and an occasional screenwriter and a writer doing other mystery-adjacent books of varying levels of seriousness, like Kahawa and High Adventure, decided he wanted to see if he could be yet another successful writer. (His Wikipedia page has a long list of his pseudonyms - admittedly, a lot of them are because he came up in the soft-porn world of the late '50s and early '60s, where fake names ran like water, but Westlake had more pseudonyms in his mature career than any other three writers.)

So he invented "Samuel Holt" - the credited author and first-person narrator of what turned into a four-book series. Holt was a former cop turned TV detective, made rich enough not to have to work by five years as Jack Packard and completely typecast so that he can't get any other acting work afterward. Holt stumbles into various mysteries, and, of course, solves them. The series was supposed to be completely separate from Westlake, but, of course, his publisher's salesforce used the Westlake connection to get bookstores to buy the books, which ended up souring Westlake on the whole project.

This time around, I'm noticing that Westlake set up each book to be a somewhat different sub-genre in the larger mystery/thriller area. The first book was an thriller of international intrigue, the second a hardboiled mystery, and this third one is a locked-room cozy. Westlake was always an inventive and quirky writer, but I wonder if he really thought he'd be able to keep that up, and keep finding new sub-genres, if he'd kept it going.

What I Tell You Three Times Is False sees Holt travel to a remote Latin American island, to film a short film for the American Cancer Society, alongside other typecast actors playing Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, and Miss Marple. They arrive as a major storm is blowing up, and the roughly dozen people on the island - hosts/producers, the director, a few staffers, the actors and their significant others - are thrown into a panic when the deaths start.

The four "detectives" try to solve the case, more or less - one of them more than the others at first, and, no, it's not our hero - and it does all lead up to a scene with the surviving characters in a drawing room, as the dramatically-revealed evidence j'accuses the guilty party.

I'm not normally a reader of locked-room mysteries or cozies; they've always seemed artificial to me - or maybe I prefer different flavors of artificiality, I should say, since I do like funny-Westlake, which has nothing natural about it at all. This seems to be a solid example of the form, mostly played straight, by a deeply professional and always-entertaining writer - but it's also buried in a mostly-forgotten, very secondary series under an assumed name. So I think it's mostly for fanatic Westlake fans at this point, or maybe people who really like locked-room stories.