“Miss West” writes crime novels. Not your modern gritty police procedurals, but good old murder yarns: deaths in mysterious circumstances, lists of suspects, trails of clues and final unmaskings of the unlikely guilty parties with their murky motives. She likes to set the stories in far-flung locations so as to fill them with lashings of local colour, totally unhampered by any first-hand knowledge of such places. Five of her best graced a sale of second-hand books. Each book, of course, featurs a victim and a villain.

The heiress is murdered either by Merton the missionary or by Starke the family solicitor, but not in Rio de Janiero.

Strangers in the Night, in which a taxi driver is murdered, is set in either Manhattan or Casablanca.

The sea captain comes to a sticky end in Daggers Drawn, but not at the hands of Starke. Nor is he killed by Peters the publican.

A Gentleman Calls describes dark doings in Hong Kong – or is it Rio? – I forget which. Anyway, it features the evil dancer Dawkins. The unfortunate victim in Hong Kong is a TV presenter.

Before the Clock Strikes Three is set neither in Monte Carlo nor in Casablanca. Peters does his foul deed in one of those two places, but Merton doesn’t.

Neither the heiress nor the restauranteur is mentioned in Poetic Justice. Nor is Merton, come to that.

If I tell you that Daggers Drawn is not set in Rio, you can tell me who falls victim to Benson the butler, and where…