No, you did it!
The Inner Circle (1946) gets off to a quick start, introducing us to private detective Johnny Strange. He’s looking for a secretary, but as he’s dictating an ad to the local newspaper, a woman walks in and takes the job, and she’s a woman who matches his somewhat chauvinistic requirements in just about every way. Moments later, she’s answered the phone and has a job for him, so off he charges to meet a mysterious client with a mystery job.
The client, clad all in black, takes him to a house and shows him the body of her husband, shot and gone. Please get rid of it, she asks, but Strange isn’t stupid, so when turns to call the cops, she clunks him upside the head and makes her own arrangements. But as she sheds her black clothes, a witness notes what’s happening.
When Strange awakens, the police are just walking in, the wife is nowhere to be seen, and conclusions are being drawn and quartered before Strange can keep up. It doesn’t help that the victim is a radio personality and gossip-monger who didn’t have a wife. But two days later, the coroner’s jury has bought the story, concocted and sworn to by his secretary, that it was self-defense. Strange is free.
Even if Strange doesn’t remember it that way.
He’s curiosity-driven, and, picking up a clue or two at the Fitch mansion, he begins to put the story together. Meanwhile, that aforementioned witness makes contact with the faux-widow, looking for a penny or two, as he didn’t much care for Mr. Fitch, either. But now the faux-widow is getting a little worried.
Eventually, it’s a radio version of the gathering of the suspects as they broadcast, in admirable fidelity, four scenes from recent days, from which Strange claims he can deduce the identity of Fitch’s killer. Is it the high-society girl? How about the other one? The mobster? The singer with the voice of an angel and the attitude of the devil?
And how will Strange prove it?
The head feints come in a hurry in this short little mystery, but unfortunately little effort is made to make any of them believable, and that’s too bad. A little time, some thinking about it, and that school of red herrings could have been baked into a compelling whodunit (and, no, Wikipedia, this is not noir).
As it is, it’s pleasant and fun, but not serious enough to be memorable.
