It’s like they were actively trying to confuse us.

I CALLED Jen with my working theory. I told her that I thought that when Heyer sold the serial rights to Death in the Stocks – which is both thrilling and quite romantic, given all the pairing off that goes on – to the Australian Women’s Weekly, she’d decided to use the title On Such a Night. Then either she or her publishers went with Death in the Stocks instead – retitled Merely Murder, in the US – but in her accounting she continued to refer to it by its original name. The Weekly, meanwhile, had decided not to serialize the book, after all, but to print it as an abridged full-length novel, so they had to purchase the rights again, this time to print it in its entirety, and therefore under its new title. But they still had the serial rights to it as On Such a Night, so when they broadcast it on the radio, they used the original title instead of the updated version—perhaps for legal reasons; perhaps because radio standards and practice wouldn’t allow the word “death” to be bandied about in an 11:45 am timeslot; or perhaps it was even a ploy to trick people into listening to it, thinking it was a new Heyer story they had yet to read – like when Envious Casca was recently reissued under the title A Christmas Party for no discernible reason.*

At that point, Jen was flabbergasted, but also resigned. It seemed an elegant enough theory that fit all the facts, except for the title change, which Jen couldn’t quite buy. “I don’t think Georgette would have allowed a title change,” she said.

“She did in the American version,” I contended. “Not to mention how The Corinthian became Beau Wyndham over there, as well.”

“True.”

A DAY later, Jen called me. She’d gone into full literary detective mode, and trawled back through the Heyer Archive – both the cache of letters held by the University of Tulsa and the papers given over to her by Heyer’s son Richard – to see if she could help confirm my hypothesis.

Instead, she blew it out of the water.

“I think it’s They Found Him Dead,” she said excitedly.

“Really? But, the Women’s Weekly never published it as a serial. Why would they have broadcast it on the radio?”

A faint buzz grew at the back of my brain, about that particular book and the UK’s Woman’s Journal, which I remembered from Jen’s Heyer biography. As I recalled, it had not been serialized there, but was supposed to be, and there had been some hard feelings as a result.

“Well, listen to this letter Heyer wrote to her agent in January of 1936,” said Jen.

Here is that letter – which is partially quoted in Jen’s Heyer biography – printed in full:

15th January 1937

Dear Norah

I’ll sign the contract & send it back to you as soon as Ronald has seen it. It looks to me a very fair sort of an agreement, & I suspect your hand has been at work on some of the clauses. I will also send you back the proofs so that you will get them on Monday.