Illustrated book

The book started off ordinarily enough - the isolated house, the body in the library, the famous detective - but Velma , the American visitor did not conform to the conventions of the genre. She had shot and killed the village policeman whilst high on morphine and was sleeping with both the curate and one of the footmen. I doggedly followed the clues and finally worked out what was going on. My books were organised by genre and then alphabetically by author. At some point, Velma had managed to make her way from Chandler to Christie and was leaving chaos in her wake. And, next door, even on the last page, Marlowe was still looking for the missing woman.