Here’s a mystery that Carolyn Hart picked as one of her five favorite mysteries of all time.

A young American woman who’s lost her memory comes to on board an Australian train and discovers she could be a murderer in this 1944 novel by the queens of the wacky cozy. Not only does the young woman have a bump on her head and no memory, she also has no idea how she came to be on a train crossing the Nulabor Plain of Australia with a group of boisterous, argumentative Aussies who appear to be her relatives. Nor does she recall ever having met the young doctor who says he’s her fiancé. Which is a little awkward, since there’s another man on the train who says she’d agreed to marry him, and a love letter in her pocketbook from yet another beau. She also discovers that she may be a cold-blooded killer. Even worse, she may have really bad taste in clothes, given the outfit she’s wearing. When some of her fellow passengers are killed, an Australian cop thinks she would make a great suspect and the only reason she isn’t arrested is that the train keeps passing into other jurisdictions. The passengers also have to keep changing trains, since each Australian state uses a different railroad gauge. And then there’s the matter of the barking lizard in her compartment. The lizard belongs to Uncle Joe, an amateur painter who awakes every morning to discover that someone has defaced his latest masterpiece. It all adds up to some delightful mischief—call it Cornell Woolrich on laughing gas—which is what you would expect from the pens of the two Australian-born Little sisters.

Reviews

“If you love train mysteries as much as I do, hop on the Trans-Australia Railway in Great Black Kanba, a fast and funny 1944 novel by the talented team of Constance and Gwenyth Little. The back cover has a creative line: ‘call it Cornell Woolrich on laughing gas.’”
—Jon L. Breen, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

“I have decided to add Kanba to my favorite mysteries of all time list!... a zany ride I’ll definitely take again and again.”
—Diane Plumley in the Murder Ink newsletter

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