The Hospital Murder Case

A string of deaths in the same bed at a hospital may mean murder! A nurse volunteers to spend the night in the bed to investigate…

[MURDER WITHOUT WEAPONS, by Means Davis is] an alternative classic that I wish I’d known about when I was writing the [Gun in Cheek] books; I could have done an entire chapter on it and THE HOSPITAL MURDERS, which I’ve also since read. – Bill Pronzini

Means Davis was the pen name of Augusta Tucker Townsend (1904-1999), a best-selling author who brought national attention to the Johns Hopkins Medical School with the novel Miss Susie Slagle’s. A daughter of the Deep South, the former Augusta Tucker moved to Baltimore during the Depression to be part of a literary circle that included Gerald Johnson, Ogden Nash, R. P. Harriss and H. L. Mencken. Besides novels and short stories, Mrs. Townsend also wrote a guide, It Happened at Hopkins: A Teaching Hospital, and more than 300 newspaper and magazine feature articles, book reviews and opinion-editorials.