For some years, I’d heard wonderful things about The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories. I was told it was an excellent collection of short mystery fiction containing some real gems of the genre, including Ronald Knox’s “Solved By Inspection.” So when I saw it in a used bookstore, you can bet I scooped it right up. But was it worth the hype?
Patricia Craig is the editor and a well-known “freelance critic and reviewer,” and she brings a lot of knowledge of the genre to this anthology. While I disagree with some of her introductory essay (dismissive of Agatha Christie!), she does a fine job of summing up the different works and where they fit into the genre. There are classic whodunits, comic crime stories, straight crime stories, and everything else. Because there are so many stories, and some of them really didn’t appeal to me, the reviews will be a bit rapid-fire. But I will say that, overall, this is a solid collection. Strict traditionalists won’t like every story here, but I’d say that any fan of detective stories will find this book worth their time.
Note that I’ve already reviewed Freeman Wills Crofts’s “The Mystery of the Sleeping-Car Express” here and Agatha Christie’s “The Witness for the Prosecution” here.
“The Stir Outside the Café Royal” by Clarence Rook is a historical interest story. It recounts how “the head of the detective force in New York” arranges for the capture of the criminal mastermind who killed her fiance. The central ploy is similar to a later, more well-known story by G. K. Chesterton.
This was the first time I’d read “Silver Blaze” by Conan Doyle, and it mostly lived up to its reputation. Sherlock Holmes is in fine form as he reveals the truth beyond a stolen horse and his murdered trainer. While the explanation for where the horse has been hidden is pretty simple, the truth of the murder is brilliant. The famous “incident” is just one of many clues that show what happened, and shows that Doyle could write a fairly-clued story when he put his mind to it.
R. Austin Freeman steps up with “The Mysterious Visitor.” One of Dr. Thorndyke’s Watsons comes to him for advice on a small matter: One of his patients, a depressed man, has suddenly disappeared while on vacation. Dr. Thorndyke’s investigation leads him to the vacation house where the man was staying where he finds evidence of a second person in the house…and a body in the bathing-hut. It’s a pleasure to watch Dr. Thorndyke methodically examine the evidence and show exactly what happened in that lonely hut.
Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt stars in “The Case of Laker, Absconded.” Laker is a bank clerk who has indeed absconded with a large sum of money. Hewitt traces his movements and finds evidence of a more serious criminal plot. Not bad, but it goes about how you would think; the Freeman story is better.
Father Brown is in fine form in G. K. Chesterton’s “The Oracle of the Dog.” Without visiting the crime scene, he’s able to explain how a man could be stabbed to death in a summer-house no one was seen to approach through careful listening to an account of the crime and through properly interpreting the behavior of the victim’s dog. I’m not fond of how some of the evidence against the other suspects gets so easily dismissed before the summation, but the mystery is good and the writing excellent. And again, I love the deductions Father Brown makes just from the description of the murder site.
E. C. Bentley’s “The Genuine Tabard” was a bit of a disappointment for me. Philip Trent is introduced to a tabard (a type of coat) with an alleged rich history. But Trent quickly suspects that his hosts have been scammed. It’s well-written, and I like the nature of the scam, but there’s no chance for the reader to spot any of the clues.
Next up, we have a meaty H.C. Bailey story: “The Dead Leaves.” The discovery of a decaying and anonymous woman rouses Dr. Reggie Fortune’s ire, and the dead leaves found in her purse put him on the track of a professor whose first wife died mysteriously. This is a good story overall, with a clever and unexpected ending. I admit that I still haven’t found a really “wow” Bailey story yet though.
We now move onto my first John Rhode: “The Purple Line.” A local police officer is called to the scene of a bizarre suicide: a woman who drowned herself in a water-butt (a container for storing rain water). There is no evidence of murder, and the husband has an alibi, and all seems clear…until the investigating officer has a revelation about a horizontal line on the husband’s barograph. This isn’t a hardcore alibi-buster, but a solid piece of work that makes me inclined to seek out more of Rhode.
Next up is the story I bought the collection for in the first place: “Solved By Inspection” by Ronald Knox. This is the only short story starring his insurance investigator Miles Bredon, and he has a baffling scenario laid out before him. An eccentric, cult-loving millionaire is found dead in his locked gymnasium…of starvation. Even more oddly, the victim is surrounded by food and drink which hasn’t been touched. Suicide would void the insurance policy, but all the evidence points towards a man who got too caught up in his latest religious belief…but Bredon proves murder.
This is an absolutely brilliant story. Knox isn’t lying when he says that “Bredon did claim to have really solved a problem by inspection.” Every false solution you might think of when presented with the scenario (the food being poisoned, say) is eliminated by the evidence, before the actual solution is exposed. And it’s a pretty disturbing method! But it’s fairly set up. My favorite piece of evidence is a seemingly-offhand bit of dark humor that actually proves to be another clue explaining why the murder happened the way it did.
The only marr on the story is the genuine racism on display. The hard “r” is dropped and the suspects are judged by their skin color before we get any proof they’re killers. It’s an honest shame to have a story blemished by stuff like this.
“The Henpecked Murder” by Roy Vickers tells the tale of a browbeaten husband who tries to conceal the accidental murder of his pseudo-mistress. The first half of the story is a borderline dark comedy as our hapless murderer tries to bury the body and leave a false trail while his wife cheerfully zooms off elsewhere. Eventually, after seemingly succeeding in covering up the crime, the Department of Dead Ends gets involved and brings the case home to the killer. The vital clue that sinks him is well-worked in, but the killer is too pathetic a figure for me to really feel invested in seeing him brought down.
G. D. H. and M. Cole are next with “Superintendent Wilson’s Holiday.” As the title says, Superintendent Wilson is on a “walking tour” to recover from “a succession of grueling cases,” but vacations do not exist for great detectives. Three days in, Wilson and his Watson, Dr. Michael Prendergast, come across an empty camp in disarray. What follows is a dizzying series of deductions about the men staying at the camp, which involves the discovery of two bodies--one staged as a suicide even though it seems to make no sense--and a semi-suprising killer. I found it hard to follow, but it is a very good example of the type of careful, painstaking, and logical detection we’ve seen multiple times in this collection.
Anthony Berekley’s “The Avenging Chance” might be a familiar story to mystery fans. A blustery man finds a parcel of chocolates for him at his club, but he’s offended at being asked to review them. An acquaintance takes them home to his wife, and soon she is dead from cyanide injected into the chocolates. The police have no chance of tracking down the random killer, and Roger Sheringham agrees…until a chance (and unwanted) conversation puts him on the right track. While I find the cluing a little weak--Sheringham gets a lot of the clinching evidence offscreen--the main psychological clue that puts him on the right track is genuinely clever.
Dorothy L. Sayers’s “Murder at Pentecost,” in spite of its name, has nothing to do with the Book of Acts, but is instead about a murder at Pentecost College that wine salesman Montague Egg investigates. Who killed the unpopular Master? The solution is clever, though it took me a second read to see that.
I didn’t like Ngaio Marsh’s “Death on the Air” when I first read it years ago, but I liked it better this time. A tyrannical patriarch is found dead on Christmas Eve, electrocuted by his radio. Inspector Alleyn shows how the death was arranged (clever and clearly explained), but the whodunit comes about through careful elimination of the suspects rather than brilliant detection. And the romance was just as disappointing as I remembered.
Cyril Hare’s “Miss Burnside’s Dilemma” is my first by this author. But there’s no real mystery, just an account by the titular Miss Burnside about the legal trickery that has separated a companion from well-deserved money. Not a bad story, but it just ends.
We have another first with Gladys Mitchell’s “Daisy Bell.” Mrs. Bradley is driving through the English countryside when she sees a young woman biking down the road…and later finds her crashed, near-death. I admit I found this one a little hard to follow, but it’s well-written, even if the mystery is a little simple.
Margery Allingham is next with “Three is a Lucky Number.” Our focus is on Roland Frederick Torbay, who is currently on wife number three, his previous two having expired in unfortunate accidents (for them, for he profited well). Obviously wife number three will prove to be more of a nuisance. Not a mystery (although there is foreshadowing), but good.
After having such a good time with my last exposure to Nicholas Blake, I had high hopes for “The Assassin’s Club.” The assassins in question are mystery writers, a possible shout-out to the Detection Club. During a meeting, the lights go out, and the most-unliked member catches a fish-slice (essentially a specialized spatula) to the back of the neck. Nigel Strangeways quickly points the finger at the culprit. While “A Problem in White” was a clever, carefully-clued whodunit, this one is much simpler. The observation Strangeways makes is good, but the reader is never told about this until the summation.
We proceed onto one of the gems of this collection: Carter Dickson/John Dickson Carr’s “The House in Goblin Wood.” Twenty years ago, Vicky Adams vanished from the titular house in spite of the locked doors and windows. She reappeared seven days later, but she claimed to have no idea where she’d been. But rumors soon spread that she’d been “spirited away by the pixies.” Now, her cousin and her cousin’s fiance bring Sir Henry Merrivale down for a picnic at the same house, hoping that he’ll pop Vicky’s bubble. But she vanishes again…
This is one of my favorite short stories of all time. The central problem is fascinating, the story is wonderfully eerie, and the deductions are on-point. There are a couple of minor issues: the first disappearance is resolved off-handedly (and where was she for a week?), and the main solution is flawed on a technical level. But you know what? I don’t care. Carr so carefully sets the stage, creates such a wonderful and baffling atmosphere, fairly cluing every element, that those issues don’t matter. And the final line makes it all worth it.
Michael Innes is up next with “The Furies.” Inspector Appleby recounts the death of a local woman who acted insanely before plunging into the depths at the titular rocks. This isn't really a fair-play story, you have no chance to see what Appleby sees, but it’s a fine short tale nonetheless.
I’d read Christianna Brand’s “The Hornets’ Nest” once before in The Spotted Cat, but it proved to be longer and more elaborate than I remembered. Inspector Cockrill is on site when the odious Cyrus Caxton dies hours after his wedding from a dose of cyanide. He’s sure who the killer is six pages in (and Brand thinks the reader should be too!), but to get there he’ll have to work his way through multiple suspects and a variety of false solutions. It’s dizzying just how much Brand throws at you and fascinating how her solutions hinge on small details. But it’s all very well-done. If I wanted to, I could pick at the twelve words that make it all clear to Cockrill, surely there are other interpretations, but that would ruin the fun.
Julian Symons’s “The Murderer” is up next. It tells the story of an old-fashioned man who finds himself spiraling after the death of his wife in a car accident and his discovery of her secret life. I’m sure this is a very solid portrait of a certain type of man, but it more or less goes how you think it will, barring a slight jolt at the ending. Robert Barnard used this same set-up in “The Woman in the Wardrobe,” and did it better.
In spite of its name, Michael Gilbert’s “The Killing of Michael Finnegan” isn’t a whodunit, but a spy story. The titular character is found burned to death in a car, the victim of an IRA group whose activities he was reporting on. His spy protagonists Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens must figure out what he knew and avert the plan. Again, not a mystery, but a good spy tale. I’d read more of these characters if I was into spies.
Michael Underwood’s “Murder at St. Oswald’s” opens with a group of schoolboys plotting the murder of an unpopular master. Obviously, their plans don’t quite work out. Good story overall.
“Great Aunt Allie’s Flypapers” is my first exposure to P. D. James, and it was a good one. The titular Aunt Allie was accused but acquitted of poisoning her husband back in 1902, and her step-grandson is nervous about accepting her legacy, if she got it through murder. Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh digs into the case and finds a surprising murderer. I really enjoyed this one! It’s a well-clued whodunit with some lovely turns of phrase, not much more one can ask for.
Edmund Crispen and Geoffrey Bush collaborate on “Baker Dies” (or “Who Killed Baker?”). A confrontation at a series of philosophy lectures inspires Gervase Fen to recount the story of Baker, a toy manufacturer who is engaged in competition with a man named Erickson, and whose wife and chauffeur are carrying on an affair. One day, Erickson comes for a meeting to discuss a merger, and Baker informs his very Catholic wife (and her lover) that he’s filing for divorce. No surprise that there’s a corpse in the house by morning, but who’s responsible? I suspect that quite a few people will read this and cry “Foul!” and I would have been one of them if I hadn’t spent some time thinking about the story. Rest assured, it’s all very fair.
H. R. F. Keating is next with “A Dangerous Thing.” Cleaner Mrs. Craggs is at the British Library and solves the stabbing of an obscure scholar. Not a super-elaborate mystery, but good overall.
Ruth Rendell presents “Thornapple,” which is very much a crime, not a mystery, story. James Fyfield is an intelligent child with a unique fascination: brewing poisons, solely to see if he can. One day, he finds a thornapple in his garden, with which he extracts datura. Meanwhile, he develops a friendship with an elderly relative . It takes a while for any crime to be committed, but this is still a very good story. I can’t say I want to rush out to buy a Rendell on the strength of this, but I enjoyed it.
Next up is Robert Barnard’s “The Oxford Way of Death,” in which a Fellow at an Oxford college recounts a minor scandal, that being the induction of a Black woman as a Fellow, pushed by their resident gadfly, and how the fellow Fellows dealt with the situation. I didn’t care much for this darkly humorous piece, but it’s effective at what it’s trying to do.
“Bring Back the Cat!” is Reginald Hill’s contribution. Oddly, it doesn’t star his famous police pair of Dalziel and Pascoe, but instead his more obscure private eye the West Indian Joe Sixsmith. Sixsmith’s case isn’t one that looks like it will cover him in glory: he’s hired to track down a woman’s missing cat. What follows is an amusing little mystery that manages to fit in some good social commentary as well. I think the family is a little too awful to be fully convincing, but that’s not a major issue. This isn’t necessarily fully-clued with a grand summation scene, but careful readers will pick up on what’s going on before the end.
The last story is Simon Brett’s “How’s Your Mother?” about Humphrey Partridge, a reserved man who’s only real companion is his mother. Not that anyone’s seen her…This more or less went how I expected. Not bad, but a weak end to the collection.
All in all, this is a very satisfying collection of stories. There are only a handful of stories that I would call duds, as opposed to me just not caring for them, which is quite an accomplishment of a collection of this length. It also got me interested in some of the featured writers. I just got this for the Knox story, but even if that story hadn’t been here, it would have been a worthy purchase. Recommended.
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