The Wintringham Mystery (1926/27) by Anthony Berkeley

Nearly a century ago, the Daily Mirror serialized a detective novel by Anthony Berkeley, The Wintringham Mystery (1926/27) as by "A.B. Cox," which was published as a competition that challenged the reader to find an answer to the three basic questions of the detective story – namely who, why and how. The correct solution, "or the entry that is most nearly correct," could earn a first prize of £250. A nice chunk of pocket money in the 1920s! 

A year later, Berkeley revised the original text and The Wintringham Mystery was republished in novel form under the title Cicely Disappears (1927) that was credited to the obviously pseudonymous "A. Monmouth Platts." But, after its publication, the book plunged front cover first into obscurity. Only murmurs that surrounded the story for almost a century is that Archie and Agatha Christie and her husband were runners-up in the competition ("The Crime That Christie Couldn't Crack"). Now, ninety-five years later, HarperCollins has reissued the book as part of their Collins Crime Club series. This new edition restored the original title, but kept the revised text from Cicely Disappears and comes with an insightful introduction by critic, editor and genre historian, Tony Medawar. So let's see how Berkeley's most elusive detective novel measures up to his other mysteries from the period.

Stephen Munro stepped out of the trenches of the First World War decorated with a Distinguished Service Order and a Military Cross into a nice little inheritance from his late uncle. Figuring he deserved "to have half a dozen years of life and let the future go to pot," Stephen became a carefree, frolicking gentleman of leisure, but now the money has dried up and has been trying to find a job for months – noticing "a distinct slump in the market for promising young men." Fortunately, Lady Susan Carey, at Wintringham Hall, sorely needed a footman now that the old lady has decided to do a bit more entertaining. Stephen is expected to start performing his duties on the day a house party is expected to arrive.

A transition that's awkward enough without some familiar face being part of the house party to make the situation embarrassing. There's an old flame of Stephen, Pauline Mainwaring, who arrives at Wintringham Hall with her fiance, Sir Julian Hammerstein. A well-known stockbroker and one of the wealthiest man in London. Freddie Venables is Lady Susan's nephew and an acquaintance of Stephen who refuses to treat him as a mere servant, which is liable to make "the house feel awkward and the servants' hall resentful." Particularly the butler, Martin, proves to be a thorn in Stephen's side. But they're not the only people present who can make things awkward or difficult.

Lady Susan never forgave her niece, Millicent Carey, for not having being born a boy, because "the glories of Wintringham Hall must be allied to some other name" as there were no male Careys in the direct line. She has a greater affection for Cicely Vernon than "Cicely than for any member of the younger generation" and has "the girl to stay with her on every possible opportunity." The other participants of the house party includes Lady Susan's companion, Miss Rivers. A young and distant cousin of Millicent and Lady Susan, Miss Annette Agnew, who's very direct and modern. Miss Agnew doesn't care very much about another guest, Miss  "Baby" Cullompton, who cultivated a personality matching her nickname. Colonel Uffculme is a long-time friend of Lady Susan and full with stories about his time in India ("when I was in Bengal in '93... or was it '94?"). John Starcross recently garnered fame as an explorer by crossing "some of the hitherto unpenetrated hinterland of South America" and no country house party was no complete without him. Henry Kentisbeare is a gentleman of leisure who lives on the resources of his friends. So a house full with all the potential for trouble.

The trouble begins when Freddie finds a book on witchcraft in the library, describing spells to make people vanish into thin air, suggesting they have "a pop at the disappearing stunt" in preference to playing bridge. Not everyone is as enthusiastic about the idea, but Freddie eventually gets his way and Cicely volunteers to be victim for his vanishing-act which they staged in the drawing room – while Cicely is surrounded with every exit closely guarded. Chapter VI: The Séance has a handy plan of the drawing room marking where everyone sat or stood during the séance. Cicely disappears without a trace from the guarded, pitch-black room amid screams, rapping sounds and the smell of chloroform. Stephen and Pauline turn amateur detective to find Cicely and figuring out how she could have vanished as if by magic.

So, while the detective story that follows is well written and amusing enough, the weight of the plot does not justify the length of the story. The Wintringham Mystery is a short story stretched out to book length. A very well done piece of stretching, but not even Berkeley could disguise that most of the story was padding. Quality padding. But padding nonetheless. Anthony Abbot played a similar game in his short story "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932) to much better effect, because it wasn't padded out to a novel-length detective story. That being said, it was interesting to see Berkeley having fun with subverting the reader's expectations and playing around with tropes. Such as (ROT13) vtabevat gur cerfrapr bs n frperg cnffntr nf n fbyhgvba sbe gur ybpxrq ebbz fvghngvba naq gur furanavtnaf jvgu gur qrngu-genc. You can already see the mind at work that would produce The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), Jumping Jenny (1933) and his brilliant contribution to The Floating Admiral (1931) a few years later.

But, as it stands, The Wintringham Mystery stands as a fairly entertaining, but thinly-plotted and padded out, curiosity with occasional glimmers, or should that be premonitions, of things to come. However, while not a classic of its kind, I'm still glad I got to read this nearly forgotten, early detective novel by one of the Golden Age greats. I think admirers of Berkeley will be the ones who will appreciate this book the most.

Six Against the Yard (1936) by The Detection Club

The members of that august body known as The Detection Club, a Who's Who of British Golden Age mystery writers, produced a number of experimental collaborations that, nearly a century later, are still practically unique in the genre's history – which too often get dismissed as mere trifles or curiosities. Sure, the Detection Club collaborations never produced a genuine genre classic, but their experiments are not entirely without merit or interest. 

The Floating Admiral (1931) is a round-robin mystery novel written by no less than thirteen  different authors with each one, like a potluck luncheon, bringing something new and unexpected to the story. An experiment that should have ended in an unmitigated disaster had it not been for Anthony Berkeley's last chapter, "Cleaning Up the Mess," which made it appear as if they had planned the whole thing from the beginning. No mean feat! Ask a Policeman (1933) is not only one of those exceedingly rare crossovers, but a very unique type of crossover in which the collaborating writers exchanged their series-detective characters. So you have Berkeley taking on Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey and Sayers getting to work with Berkeley's Roger Sheringham. And they're all investigating the same murder! Something that was never done before or since. Not in our genre, anyway.

Not as experimental, but no less fascinating, is The Anatomy of Murder (1936). A collection of five true crime essays, penned by the likes of Berkeley, Sayers and E.R. Punshon, who shine their light on some infamous murderers and murder cases – such as Henri Landru and the Julia Wallace murder case. So you basically get a handful of mystery novelists who play armchair investigative journalists with real-life murder cases. Funnily enough, the Detection Club published a collection of short stories in which the roles are reversed with a former policeman nipping at their heels! 

Martin Edwards said Six Against the Yard (1936) is an ingenious and perhaps unique "variation on the conventional detective fiction anthology" with a half-a-dozen stories in which club members present their "potentially foolproof murders," but each chapter is followed by an analysis from ex-Superintendent Cornish of Scotland Yard. And it's his task to expose "the flaws in the criminal scheme" presented to him. A true battle-of-wits pitting theory against practice! Yes, I'll be keeping score throughout the review. 

Margery Allingham is the first in line to take a crack at devising the perfect murder with "It Didn't Work Out," a theatrical mystery of sorts, in which she kind of casts herself in the role of murderer, but not as Margery Allingham, the mystery writer – assuming the identity of a stage actress, "Polly Oliver." The story plays out over several decades during which Polly has to look on hopelessly as a close stage pal, Louie Lester, who married Frank Springer. A "four-flushing gasbag" with "such an inferiority complex" that "his whole life was spent trying to boost himself up to himself." And "the more weak and hopeless and inefficient he saw himself the wilder and more irritating his lies became." Over the years, decades even, he tore down his wife career and spirit. Until, many years later, they become lodgers of the now elderly and retired Polly who started her own boarding house. Polly decides enough is enough with Frank's charming personality and circumstances presenting her with an opportunity to stage a fatal accident.

Ex-Superintendent Cornish admits that Allingham's murder is "diabolically ingenious" and under favorable circumstances can be completely successful, but he can't be sure whether, or not, the murder truly represents a perfect crime. Because there are some avenues for the police to pursue. However, Cornish only gives a possible outcome of a more thorough police investigation, which depends the mentally unbalanced murderer confessing, but the altruistic motive and method would make securing a conviction a Herculean task. Cornish points out that a successful murder could emboldening Polly "to stage another apparent accident" when another situation arises that convinces her murder is "a reasonable and laudable act." But that's mere conjecture. So Allingham takes the first point for the Detection Club. TDC vs. Cornish: 1-0.

The very cheeky Father Ronald Knox presented with "The Fallen Idol" the most striking, unusual and non-inverted story of the bunch with a Ruritanian murder plot in Latin America. Somewhat reminiscent of Roger East's Twenty-Five Sanitary Inspectors (1935). Enrique Gamba, the Inspirer of the Magnolian Commonwealth, who emerged victorious from a coup and rules over the country with his right-hand man, General Almeda, but unpatriotic messages and threats are circulating the capitol city – promising to burn down Gamba's house with him in it. All of these threats were signed by "The Avenger." There's a fire at the house and Gamba is killed, shot through the head, before his body is flung out of an open window. Colonel Weinberg, the Chief of Police, has the unenviable task to find out who, how and why, which is a hazardous undertaking in a country like Magnolia. Fortunately, ex-Superintendent Cornish is in the luxurious position to not having to take the tinderbox politics of the country into consideration as he explains his case against the murderer and what probably happened after Knox ended the story. A very convincing account that evened the score. TDC vs. Cornish: 1-1.

So the previous story took place in an imaginary, cloud cuckoo-cuckoo land in South America, but Berkeley's "The Policeman Only Taps Once" imported a hardboiled confidence trickster from the United States to Jolly Old England. Eddie Tuffon managed to keep his record spotless, but the place was getting too hot and decided to go to England to give the marriage swindle the good old college try. A huge mistake! Eddie managed to get himself tied to an enormous, square-faced woman with numerous chins, Myrtle, who constantly bosses him around. Nor is she as rich as he had hoped. Myrtle constantly reminded him that her income is hardly enough "to keep an able-bodied husband in idleness" to the point where he "pretty near slugged her once or twice." Eddie comes to the conclusion that she has to go, but, even in an inverted mystery, there's always room for one of Berkeley's trademark twists. Unfortunately, Cornish points out in his analyses of the story, entitled "...And Then Come the Handcuffs," that Berkeley was "more successful in his clever and amusing parody of the new manner in American fiction than in his 'perfect murder''"– "ingeniously as he has worked it out." The twist in the story could very well end up being the one that tied the hangman's knot. Although he does admit that his case purely rests on a heap of circumstantial evidence, but, if there is enough of it, "circumstantial evidence is just as deadly as direct testimony." TDC vs. Cornish: 1-2. 

Russell Thorndike is a new name to me who warrants further investigation, because "The Strange Death of Major Scallion" is easily my favorite from this collection. Such a well written and imaginative story in which the narrator tells the reader about his intention to kill his cousin, of sorts, the titular Major Scallion. A "fat, full-blooded, loud-voiced, bearded and young" man full of conceit, self-satisfaction and tall tales who likely never served a day. Major Scallion has a hold over the narrator which he handily uses to make a claim on his purse and hospitality. Nothing more, nor less, than blackmail. Slowly, the narrator's disgust turned into a cold, terrible hatred and began "a close study of murder as an art" to concoct the perfect method to avoid scaffold. Interestingly, the murder that inspires the narrator comes from an account of Thorndike's anti-hero series-character, Doctor Syn, who's an 18th century parson and smuggler. He even name drops his off-page opponent ("that other enemy to murder, Mr. Cornish"). Eventually settling on a seemingly ingenious method involving Major Scallion's excessive smoking habit, homemade nicotine poison and "a sinister family of house beetles." Regrettably, for our narrator, the method is full of holes and you don't need Cornish to spot the fatal flaw that will deliver him into the capable hands of the public hangman. TDC vs. Cornish: 1-3.

Dorothy L. Sayers returns to the theater setting with "Blood Sacrifice" as a young playwright, John Scales, finally gets his big break when a well-known actor-manager, Garrick Drury, decides to put on his play, Bitter Laurel – which was intended to be cynical and shocking play. Drury slowly reshaped the play into something "revoltingly different" that appealed to the masses and not without success. Scales even wrote the new scenes and lines himself, because "his own lines would be less intolerable than the united efforts of cast and producer to write them for themselves." This killed him on the inside as his name is now associated with sob-stuff and ruined his reputation with his artistic friends, which made him think of murder. However, the inevitable death of Garrick Drury wasn't a premeditated murder or even an act in the heat of the moment. Drury was send flying through a shop window by a skidding car and cut an artery in his arm, which required a blood transfusion to safe his life. So while the doctor and ambulance men try to safe his life and test everyone to find the right blood group, Scales notices the test plate get mixed up. Drury likely got a deadly blood transfusion, or did he? Not even Scales is entirely sure what he saw, but he kept his mouth shut.

Ex-Superintendent Cornish admits he "could not hope to prove, either to a jury's satisfaction or to my own, that John Scales was guilty of the crime of murder," but points out that "neither could any other detective." Not even that distinguished amateur, Lord Peter Wimsey, because Sayers had "failed to establish the fact of murder." There's a case to be made that Scales is morally guilty, but nothing that can be brought home unless the police can prove that he knew the test plates were mixed up and said nothing. Something that's next to impossible. So, in spite of Cornish's objections, Sayers scored a much needed point for her team. TDC vs. Cornish: 2-3. 

Freeman Wills Crofts has the opportunity to end this battle-of-wits in a draw with his contribution, entitled "The Parcel," which is as simple as it's technical tricky and comes with a diagram of the murder weapon. The premise of the story is practically identical to Thorndike's "The Strange Death of Major Scallion" in which rehabilitated, one-time criminal, Stewart Haslar, returns to England with a wife and a modest fortune that he made when he sold his Australian chain of fruit stores. Only person who knows his real identity and past, Henry Blunt, returns to impose on Haslar's generosity. After nearly two years, Haslar comes to the conclusion Blunt has to go and devices, what he thinks, is a bombproof plan by sending his blackmailer a homemade explosive over the mail. A plan hinging entirely on the assumption that there's no traceable link between Blunt and Haslar, but, as Cornish pointed out, Blunt is unlikely to have covered his tracks as thoroughly as Haslar, which is one of the many paths the police can investigate in this murder – slowly building a complete case to present to the judge and jury. And "there is little doubt what the verdict will be." TDC vs Cornish: 2-4.

The 2013 reprint edition of Six Against the Yard closes with an afterword, or rather an introduction, to a 1929 true crime essay by Agatha Christie, but the only reason it was included was to emblazon her name on the cover. Why not include her own perfect murder story, “Wireless” (1926), with an analysis from a modern police inspector, or forensic detective, to show how the police could have brought the killer to justice. That would have given them a legitimate reason to plaster her name on the cover. Now it borders on false advertisement. Anyway, the introduction to the essay ended with this bummer of a line, "sadly, Superintendent Cornish, who died on 6th February 1959 at the age of 85, is unavailable for comment..." A salute to you, Superintendent Cornish! You were no Lestrade!

So, all in all, the Detection Club lost rather badly here with four of the six ending up in the docks, but the end score could have easily been flipped around had Berkeley and Knox showed off their plotting skills instead of their storytelling abilities. Nonetheless, I enjoyed these stories tremendously and particularly Cornish picking them apart that showed the police has one critical advantage over the amateur criminal: a ton of experience. Highly recommended! Particularly to mystery readers with a fondness for the inverted detective story.

The Second Shot (1930) by Anthony Berkeley

Anthony Berkeley's The Second Shot (1930) is the sixth title in the Roger Sheringham series and was first published at the dawn of the Golden Decade when the traditional, plot-oriented detective story burst into energetic adolescence, but Berkeley was already looking decades ahead with The Second Shot – asking the question "what is the future of the detective story?" Berkeley prophesied in his dedication that "the puzzle element" will become "a puzzle of character" rather than "a puzzle of time, place, motive, and opportunity."

A type of detective story exploring "what remarkable combination of circumstances did bring X" to "the decision that nothing short of murder would meet the case," which is sadly the direction the genre went with by the time the 1960s rolled around.

So you might be worried to learn Berkeley endeavored to write "the story of a murder" rather than "the story of the detection of a murder" with The Second Shot, but Berkeley was more than a visionary. He was a talented plotter who understood that even the most detailed character portrait needs a frame to be truly complete. This is done here by not disclosing the murderer's identity and telling "the reader-detective" to "use his own wits a little more," because not all of his thinking is done for him here and showcases that valuable mystery writer's asset – namely the ability to lie through your teeth by strictly speaking the truth. You have to remember Berkeley was playing with these ideas when the pure, Golden Age detective story still had to produce most of its monumental classics. But did it work? Let's find out!

The Second Shot opens with a grabbed-from-the-headlines prologue reporting on "a shocking accident" that occurred at the residence of the scientific farmer and celebrated mystery novelist, John Hillyard. A small house party had staged an outdoors murder mystery at Minton Deeps Farm, but the pseudo-victim was found at the end of the day with a very real gunshot wound. And the police have their reasons to believe this was not an unfortunate accident with a carelessly-handled rifle.

The story then shifts to first-person narration with the manuscript of Cyril "Pinkie" Pinkerton, who comes across as, what I believe the British call, a bit of a posh twat.

Pinkerton had often thought of writing a detective story from the point-of-view of the murderer, "showing his hopes and terrors as the process of detection progresses," but now had an opportunity to put "academic theory" into "grim practice" – because he's primary suspect in a murder case. Pinkerton is a childhood friend of Mrs. Ethel Hillyard and was invited under a neutral flag to a house party given under false colors and an ulterior motive.

Mrs. Hillyard acts as the self-appointed guardian of the young daughter of a late friend of hers, Elsa Verity, who's "innocent in the ways of the world" and has fallen under the spell of a popular, well-known man-about-town and all-around cad. Eric Scott-Davies is a womanizer, mired in scandals, who's rapidly squandering the family fortunes. So, Mrs. Hillyard not being born yesterday, pretended to go along with Elsa's fancies and made her believe the party had been solely arranged for their benefit. But in reality, she mixed together a social party guaranteed to explode and consume Eric. Eric's name has been coupled with Sylvia de Ravel in the gossip columns and only her husband, Paul, gives the impression of being unaware of the affair, but Sylvia's not the kind of woman "who can be picked up, toyed with for a time, and then dropped," which is why Ethel invited them both. She also asked Eric's cousin, Armorel, to balance out the numbers, but she has her own reasons to prefer her unruly cousin dead rather than alive. Pinkerton is simply there to distract Elsa from Eric.

A potentially hazardous social gathering and, through Pinkerton's narrative, the reader sees the wheels of murder slowly grinding into motion, but the human element also begins to intrude as not everyone is what they appeared to be on first glance – in particular our narrator, Pinkerton, who becomes more likable as the story progresses. Berkeley delivered on his promise to craft a puzzle of characters and what makes them tick. But not to the deep, murky depths of the contemporary crime novel. Because the story still has a plot.

Once the mock-detective investigated the scene of the staged murder, the party returned to the farm and on their way back two shots, five minutes apart, where heard. When Eric failed to return, two of them went looking for him in the woods and found his lifeless body a short distance away from the scene of the staged murder. Since our narrator becomes the prime suspect, he dispatches a telegram to Roger Sheringham telling him he's stuck in "a perilous position" and urgently needs his help.

My confrere, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, complained in his 2016 review of The Second Shot that A Challenge to the Reader around the halfway mark, "the reader should now, at this stage in the story, be fully aware whose finger pulled the fatal trigger," rendered Sheringham subsequent investigation useless to the reader. But this is not entirely true. Firstly, Sheringham always brings a story to life with his energetic detective work and fanciful theories, which had its effect on the other (main) characters who become more human-like in his presence. And, noticeable, a comedic element slipped into the story (e.g. Armorel at the inquest). Secondly, Sheringham is the best of the so-called fallible detectives and his multiple, false-solution, particularly the last one, were needed to make the ending work – which is where Berkeley showed his brilliance. Although one aspect of the solution hasn't aged very well over the past ninety years.

The central idea behind the solution had already been experimented with in the 1920s, but The Second Shot would probably still have surprised readers in 1930. Readers who read Golden Age mysteries in 2020 are more genre-savvy than those in 1930 and this allows us to spot Berkeley telegraphing the final twist very early on in the story. Something that couldn't be more obvious, if he was semaphoring the murderer's name in your living-room. So, plot-technically, the story is a clever piece of work, but where the solution acquired a timeless quality is how it subverted its own premise.

Berkeley told in the dedication that "the days of the old crime puzzle pure and simple" where, if not numbered, at any rate in "the hands of the auditors" with "psychological ties" slowly replacing the hard puzzle pieces. This he said when the plot-driven detective story was only just beginning to bloom, but Berkeley wanted to write a character-driven tale of murder and basically an anti-detective story with Sheringham miserably failing at deducing the truth. Only to turn around and show the crime was executed with all the grandeur of a Golden Age detective story. Something you would expect from a writer like Ngaio Marsh! Yes, Berkeley was playing with the conventions of a type of crime fiction that would not fully emerge until two or three decades later! What a guy!

Some aspects of The Second Shot don't work as well in 2020 as they did in 1930, but the story, as a whole, is an excellent showcase of Berkeley's originality and talent as a plotter, which shined even when he was shining the spotlight on the characters – complimented with a superb use of the multiple twists and false solutions. So definitely recommended (sorry, JJ!).

Strong Medicine

"There is a great deal of wickedness in village life. I hope you dear young people will never realize how very wicked the world is."
- Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's "The Blood-Stained Pavement," collected in The Thirteen Problems, 1933)

The ingenious and sardonic Anthony Berkeley was one of the founding members of the London-based Detection Club, who foresaw and participated in the popularization of the psychological crime novel, which he did under the byline of "Francis Iles," but he's primarily remembered today as one of the more original and innovative minds from the genre's classical period.

Berkeley's ingenuity sprang from a cunning mind that was willing to experiment with the form of the detective story and embrace new ideas. This is very evident in the characteristics of one of his series characters, the energetic Roger Sheringham, who's one of the most likable amateurs to ever don the figurative deerstalker, but as prone to fingering the wrong culprit as the reader – which also makes him one of the most relatable detectives in the genre. Sheringham snugly fits the mold of "the fallible detective," which was cast by E.C. Bentley in Trent's Last Case (1913), but Sheringham was unparalleled when it came to being wrong (e.g. The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) and Jumping Jenny, 1933).

Just like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and G.K. Chesterton, Berkeley has a number of tricks, plots and storytelling ideas to his credit that were adapted and turned up in the works of other writers: a false solution from Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (1927) fuelled the plots of some well-known detective novels by John Dickson Carr, Nicholas Blake and Edmund Crispin. The basic plot-structure of The Silk Stocking Murders (1928) became the basis for Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders (1936) and Panic Party (1934) seems to have been the model for And Then There Were None (1939) and William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954).

These influential works are accompanied by some excellent, first-rate detective stories such as The Piccadilly Murder (1929), Jumping Jenny, Trial and Error (1934) and the subject of this blog-post – a splendidly written, cleverly plotted and well characterized tale of a poisoning case in a small village that would have made Christie proud.

Not to Be Taken (1938) is a standalone novel and is narrated by Douglas Sewell, a fruit farmer and a countryside gentleman, who notes halfway through the story that, if his account "is to be considered as a detective story," he's telling it quite wrongly. As he had only just reached "the point at which a detective story usually begins," but reconstructing the recent past and bringing "the dead to life again in all the trivial details of everyday life" is necessary for assigning the roles for the engaging, fully fledged cast of characters who are about to play a part in a small-scale drama. Berkeley was not only a shrewd plotter, he also knew how to write a story around those plots populated with fairly convincing characters.

The narrative spun by Sewell begins with his next door neighbors, the Waterhouses, where the first signs of a domestic tragedy begin to manifest themselves.

John Waterhouse is a retired electrical engineer with a distinguished career behind him as "a kind of roving contractor," who was known, particularly in the East, as the man to call "when any native ruler with plenty of money" and "yearning for bright lights" was contemplating to wire his jungle capital – which resulted in several adventurous episodes and a respectable bank account. He settled down in the small village of Anneypenny, Dorset, to please his wife, Angela, but the restless workhorse soon picked up a hobby: masonry and construction. 

Construction is a useful pastime that provides the villagers with work and extra money, but Waterhouse has never been a penny-pincher, which made him a popular figure in Anneypenny. However, when the story opens, "the embodiment of robust health" has fallen ill and has been plagued with severe bouts of indigestion. The cause of the illness is placed on a developing gastric ulcer and his doctor advised him to cut down on his smoking, follow a diet and take his medicine. But that was to no avail: he "died a painful and a messy death" after a sick bed of five excruciating days.

The US title of Not to Be Taken

His doctor and a close friend of Sewell, Glen Brougham, was somewhat surprised, but signed a death certificate stating epidemic diarrhoea as the cause of death and Waterhouse would have been buried as one of those many examples, littering graveyards everywhere, of an unfortunate soul who passed away before his time – if it weren't for the interference of his brother. 

Cyril Waterhouse is very skeptical towards the official cause of death and Sewell wonders whether he had picked up grains from the local rumor-mill, before deciding to descend on the village, but a post-mortem examination supports his suspicions.

A quantity of arsenic is discovered in the body of John Waterhouse and this casts a wide net of suspicion. Cyril strongly suspects his sister-in-law, Angela, who's the sole beneficiary under her husband's will and can look forward to a fat paycheck from his life insurance – which is as good a motive for murder as her extra-marital affair. It’s also suggested Glen Brougham might have made a mistake in preparing the prescription, which would make it manslaughter and might cost him his career as a physician. The Waterhouses employed a German woman, Miss Mitzi Bergmann, who acted as a companion-secretary to Angela and was often ragged by John about the Nazi system, but on the eve of the inquest she flees from the country.

These are just a handful of the possible combination arising from the character-driven prelude of the first half and an examination of the hard facts during the inquest in the second half, which also involves Sewell himself, his wife, Frances, and the doctor’s sister, Rona. Before the final chapter, Berkeley threw down the gauntlet and wrote an Ellery Queen-style "Challenge to Reader," which asks several questions pertaining to who and how John Waterhouse was poisoned – as well as asking the reader if he thinks if the story contained, what he called, a "Dominant Clue." Berkeley delivers on the promise given by the premise and the tantalizing challenge, because the explanation is very clever and satisfying. I completely missed the central and dominant clue, but was pleasantly surprised to see the murderer give the kind of response I always wanted to see a murderer give to an old-fashioned deduction. However, I do not think this one really deserved to get away with it.

The final sentence closed the book on a note that was so unusual, unconventional and open-ended that it can only be described as stereotypical Berkeley. It was good and strong enough for Nicholas Blake to use it as an ending for his admitted masterpiece, Head of a Traveller (1949). So there's another piece of work seemingly inspired by Berkeley.

So, all in all, Not to Be Taken is another example of why Berkeley remains such a popular writer among connoisseurs of vintage crime-and mystery stories: he simply was one of the best.

Post Mortem

"The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic."

- Aristide Valentin (G.K. Chesterton's The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911)

Ever since its inception, The London-based Detection Club produced some interesting and experimental volumes of collaborative detective fiction, which consists mainly of round-robin novels (e.g. The Floating Admiral, 1932), but The Anatomy of Murder (1936) took a break from fictional crimes with plots constructed like an obstacle course. 

The Anatomy of Murder is a collection of true crime articles and cast the contributors in the role of armchair criminologists. It's a short who's who of the early Detection Club: Dorothy L. Sayers, E.R. Punshon, Helen Simpson, Margaret Cole and Anthony Berkeley – appearing here under his penname of "Francis Iles."

They're tasked with re-examining five infamous cases from the late 1800s and early twentieth century, but these literary exhumations consist mainly of going over the facts and consider their implications. So don't expect any mind-blowing, alternative explanations being spun from the giving facts. It's a dry and factual collection, but interesting from a historical perspective and a particular item of interest for avid consumers of true crime stories.

Note that I'll be keeping the case descriptions as short and summary as possible, because murderers operating outside of the printed page are generally unconcerned with creating a clear, straightforward and clue-filled plot – unlike their fictional counterparts. 

Helen Simpson wrote the first chapter, "Death of Henry Kinder," which could also have been titled "Crime in Australia" and is a textbook example of "an unsatisfactory crime" from "the point of view of a reader of detection stories."

Henry Kinder was a chief teller in the City Bank of Sydney and appeared respectable, but was very fond of hard liquor and his drinking habits had began to affect his health in the months preceding his death. On October 2nd, 1865, the news of Kinder's suicide startled many of his respectable friends in the city and a jury brought in a verdict death "by the discharge of a pistol with his own hand," but by that time the rumor mill had started – with subsequent events revealing Kinder may have been polished off with a dose of poison by his wife's lover. Henry Louis Bernard was put on trial and Simpson's report, peppered with diary entrants, letters and pieces of court transcripts, shows how the chain of events clanked "to a madman’s fandango," which lead to a very unsatisfactory conclusion.

Well, unsatisfactory if this had been a piece of fiction, but, as a criminal case from history, it demonstrated that even if the perceptive story book detectives had existed their singular talents be rendered pretty much useless in cases lacking their own clarity of mind. You can read an extensive description of the case here. 

Margaret Cole's penned the second chapter and deals with "The Case of Adelaide Bartlett," which is better known as the "Pimlico Mystery" and shares some similarities with the previous case: in both cases a spouse is fatally poisoned after a previous incident relegated them to a sick bed. In the case of Henry Kinder, it was an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, but in the 1886 death of Thomas Edwin Bartlett it was mercurial poisoning – which he claimed was self-ingested. However, it was not the poison that would end up killing him.

A month later, Bartlett passed away and a post-mortem examination revealed a fatal quantity of chloroform in his stomach. The inquest yielded a verdict of willful murder and Adeleide Bartlett was indicted, but acquitted under "immense cheering" in the courtroom. As Cole noted, it was one of the most interesting trials of its day, because it was not "a tale of horror or brutality." None of the people, however odd or foolish, were monsters and tried "to be as nice as impossible under rather difficult circumstances." It was an interesting study in characters and motives that were somewhat ahead of their time.

However, it must be noted as well that one of the main reason for acquittal was failing in providing an answer how the poison could've been administrated without a struggle, since chloroform burns, but Cole makes a valid suggestion based on the characteristics of the people involved – and had the jury considered this possibility "she would have never gone free." A very odd case to say the least.

Interestingly, Cole's account includes a list of nineteenth century medicines and remedies given to Thomas Bartlett after his mercurial poisoning, which did not sound very appetizing.

For the third chapter, E.R. Punshon gives "An Impression of the Landru Case," which deals with the "incredible reincarnation of the Bluebeard of the nursery tales." Henri Désiré Landru was one of the neatest and charming serial killers who ever stalked the European continent. Known as "The Bluebeard of Gambais," Landru operated "during that four-year feast of horror and of terror we remember as the war" and responsible for the complete disappearance of eleven people in such a manner "that nothing can be declared with certainty" – concluding that "no jury" would've brought in "a verdict of guilty" had "each case stood alone." It's an accumulation of those eleven disappearances in close proximity of Landru, a methodical kept notebook and a storage room with a "strange collection" of items "once the property of a woman who once had known Landru and now was known to none" that became his undoing.

Punshon sketches an interesting, but unsettling, picture of charming confidence man with the predatory nature of "Jack the Ripper," but with more self-control and enjoyed to play the game until the very end – which in Landru's instance was up to the moment he was lead to the guillotines. You almost have to admire the guts and brawn of such an imperturbable character, but I’m sure France could've used such talents elsewhere at that specific point in time.

Dorothy L. Sayers goes over one of the England's most infamous "unsolved" murder cases in it's criminal history, "The Murder of Julia Wallace," which has captured the imagination of several post-WWII crime-writers – including a couple of Golden Agers. The books it has inspired include George Goodchild and C.E. Bechhofer's The Jury Disagree (1934), Winifred Duke's Skin for Skin (1935), John Rhode's The Telephone Call (1948) and P.D. James' The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982).

You can understand why mystery writers tend to be intrigued, because if William Wallace was guilty of bludgeoning his wife to death "he was the classic contriver and alibi-monger that adorns the pages of a thousand mystery novels," but if he was innocent "then the real murderer was still more typically of the classic villain of fiction." Where do you begin to describe a case that includes all of the classic ingredients of a detective story: a blood-stained mackintosh, a mysterious phone call from a non-existent person calling himself "R.M. Qualtrough" and an apparent contrived alibi. Then there are the conflicting witness statements: such as a constable who assumed he saw Wallace crying in the streets, but the clients he met after this apparent encounter with the policeman reported he was his usual self.

It was a dark, murky and muddled case, but despite every scrap of evidence against Wallace being circumstantial, which included an exonerating testimony from the local milk delivery boy, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. However, Court of Criminal appeal quashed the verdict in what was at the time an unprecedented move, which left open that intriguing question: who killed Julia Wallace? This was easily my favorite chapter from the book.

Finally, Anthony Berkeley, writing as "Francis Iles," delivers the longest-written chapter from the book as he rides his hobbyhorse, called criminal psychology, across a hundred pages describing the sordid mess known as "The Rattenbury Case." I did not find the case as interesting as Berkeley, but I can understand why people interesting psychological crimes can rattle on about it for page-after-page: a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Rattenbury, living together with her much older husband and her very young lover in a villa, which leads to battering-death with a mallet. Probably not the best chapter to end the book on, but I'm sure there are readers out there, especially readers of psychological thrillers, who'll be as intrigued by chapter as I was by Wallace chapter.

Well, there you have it: five cases re-examined by members of the Detection Club. The cases have something of interest to offer, one way or another, but I think the main draw is that the articles/chapters were written by famous mystery writers from the Golden Age – rather than for the cases themselves. I think it would've been better if they re-examined unsolved cases and provided a possible solution, which was, after all, their job.

However, it was a good, historically interesting diversion from the fictional murders the authors usually reveled in, but I'll be returning to those fictional murders for the next review.

Round the Twist

"Wherever trouble turns up, there am I at the bottom of it."

- Lord Peter Wimsey (Murder Must Advertise, 1933) 

A year before the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), foreshadowing Agatha Christie's lifelong penchant for twisting the reader's expectations into a surprise solution, another mystery writer had appeared on the scene with a similar tendency – his name was Anthony Berkeley Cox.

Anthony Berkeley was one of the founding members of the London-based Detection Club, who predicted and pioneered the development of the psychological crime novel as "Francis Iles." Under his own name, Berkeley published more than a dozen detective novels and short stories as influential as those by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and G.K. Chesterton.

Every time I crack open one of his books I find ideas that fueled the imagination of some of his better-known contemporaries. I recommend reading Berkeley's The Silk Stocking Murders (1928) and Christie's The ABC Murders (1936), back-to-back, to get a picture of his contribution to the genre – and keep Berkeley's book title and initials in mind while reading Christie's story, especially if you love spotting Easter Eggs. Arguably the best way to acknowledge (and credit) that you're running with an idea that was handed to you. In spite of these accolades, Berkeley faded from popular view and only reclaimed parts of his reputation when House of Stratus began to republish them a decade ago.   

Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (1927) is the third in a series about the titular detective, who possesses the kind of enthusiasm for detective work that's normally reserved for devoted collectors, but at the same time his snobbish demeanor can make him about as unlikable as Philo Vance. On second page Sheringham spouts to his cousin Anthony, "I was trying to write down to the standard of intelligence of the ordinary Courier reader. I appear to have succeeded," in reference to a comment on an article he wrote. This is done deliberately so that you have no qualms about laughing at Sheringham when he nibs himself in the bud at the end. So before the Golden Age had even build up enough steam to plough through the 1930-and 40s, Berkeley had already deconstructed and parodied the genre with the introduction of a fallible, but keen, amateur sleuth – who sometimes only had a wrong solution to contribute (e.g. The Poisoned Chocolates Case, 1929). But he did without demolishing it.

At the opening of this book, we find Roger Sheringham and Anthony Walton canceling their holiday when the Daily Courier ask their correspondent to travel down to Ludmouth Bay in Hamsphire – where the reputable Inspector Moresby was seen meandering at the scene of a suspicious death. Elise Vane was found at the bottom of a cliff, but the presence of Moresby may indicate this was not a case of accident or suicide.

A.B.C.: "Totally just tied a damsel to a railroad track"

With Moresby and Sheringham on the case, the reader discovers one motif of the detective story that Berkeley was more or less faithful to: an unlikable victim with more than enough suspects and motives to fill a small bay. There's an unhappy husband and his employee who's in love with him and her cousin, Margaret Cross, who had to endure for a large inheritance and becomes Anthony's love interest, and there's a second death to consider. These snippets of information are bounced between Sheringham and Moresby, who seem to work together while clutching their cards close to their chest, like the friendly-type of "Rival Detectives" I mentioned in the comment section of my previous review. And if you're familiar with Berkeley, you probably know who'll enjoy the final chuckle, however, Sheringham's solution is very clever and one that didn't occur to me until after the second murder... but only because it's was one of those ideas that I have seen other mystery writers play around with. 

SPOILER (select to read): The false solution from Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery was the fuel for the plots of John Dickson Carr's lauded The Hollow Man (1935), Nicholas Blake's Thou Shell of Death (1936) and Edmund Crispin's Swan Song (1947). Interestingly, Blake and Crispin also adopted an unusual method for poisoning in their stories to dispose of a second victim.

But having guessed (pardon my French) Sheringham's answer makes Moresby solution all the more fun. The twist in the final chapter turns the book in a sort of anti-detective story ribbing both Sheringham and readers who went along with him, but there was more than enough detective material that I couldn't care less about the final twist. As a matter of fact, I began to love it after Moresby's closing statement to Sheringham (and the reader): "do you know what's the matter with you, sir," he said kindly, "you've been reading too many of those detective stories." Should I plead the fifth or ask for an exact definition of too many detective stories and scrabble my way out of it? 

One point that irked me a bit about Moresby's explanation (SPOILERS, select to read): why did Moresby say he did not have anything to go to court with when there was a clear motive, opportunity and evidence (i.e. botton clasped in the dead hand of Mrs. Vane)?

Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery is not the best of Berkeley's detective novels, but still an enjoyable and enthusiastic piece of work with perhaps his first grand performance with the multiple solution devices – and a better attempt at the "human detective" than The Layton Court Mystery (1925).

If you want to read Anthony Berkeley at his best, I recommend Jumping Jenny (1933), Trial and Error (1937) and the round-robin novel The Floating Admiral (1931), which left Berkeley with the task to explain everything the other members of The Detection Club had chucked into the plot. It takes a special kind of talent to make it look as if they planned that outcome from the beginning. 

Swapping Sleuths

"However, there is, as you have shown, a friendly readiness amongst the members of the Detection Club to help the weaker brethren, so I have written to one or two of our friends to ask them to tell me what, in the opinion of their sleuths, the solution is."

- Milward Kennedy.

There are moments when I wish there was a grain of truth in the popular surmise that human beings are endowed with an immortal soul. I have a practical reason for this longing: to have a bargaining chip when summoning Old Scratch to negotiate a business deal. Because getting an opportunity to travel through a tear in the time-space continuum to meet a bunch of detective writers from the previous century, while cheaply buying first editions and solicitation autographs, is totally worth the hazards of eternal damnation. But the joke would undoubtedly be on me, as I would freeze-up like a shy schoolgirl who's just been approached by her first crush.   

Me: * shoves a copy of The Hollow Man and a pen in John Dickson Carr's face *

JDC: Do you want me to sign this for you?

Me: * nods *

JDC: What's your name?

Me: J-John...

JDC: Ah, a fellow John. Nice to meet you, John! What's your surname?

Me: D-D-Dickson…

JDC: Huh?

Me: D-Dickson Carr!

JDC: Your name is also John Dickson Carr?

Me: * just points at JDC *

At this point he slowly, but surely, starts backing away from me as my under lip starts to quiver and Lucifer impatiently begins tugging my sleeve, like an eager child who just acquired a new toy and can't wait to get home to start playing with it, and that's how I would've squandered a divine wish that could've granted me world domination or the answers to the question of life, the universe and everything. Unfortunately, this scenario, which is definitely worth an eternity of third-degree sunburns, is just a pipe dream – and the only opportunity I will ever have at soaking up the atmosphere of a meeting of the original Detection Club, is reading their round-robin novels. Well, you have to be grateful for what you get and this week I immerged myself in their second joint-effort, Ask a Policeman (1933), but this time I will leave the introduction to the review to someone else: one of the original collaborators! 

Ms. Gladys Mitchell has the floor:

"I was engaged in only one of the collaborations, which were for the benefit of club funds. Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy L. Sayers exchanged detectives and, of course, Anthony's manipulation of Lord Peter Wimsey caused the massive lady anything but pleasure. Helen Simpson took over Mrs. Bradley in exchange for Sir John Saumarez. We two, I am glad to say, got along famously and it is to her that I owe, as you know, Dame Beatrice's second name, Adela."

This is an excerpt from an Question and Answer session, conducted by B.A. Pike, entitled In praise of Gladys Mitchell, and can be found in its entirely at Jason Hall's The Stone House – a website fully dedicated to the life and work of this unorthodox, alternative Queen of Crime.

The book opens with a brief exchange between the for me unfamiliar Milward Kennedy and the plotting machine known as John Rhode, in which Kennedy asks his colleague to produce a dark and murky plot for a title, Ask a Policeman, that was presented to him by his publisher – and the follow-up is a novella-length chapter recounting the shooting of Lord Comstock, an unpalatable newspaper mogul, at his country retreat. The rag king was an expert in jacking-up the circulations of his papers by viciously attacking the establishment and on the morning preceding his murder, three representatives of institutions under siege by his publications, the government, the police and the church, visited his retreat. This makes it a very sensitive and high-profile case and with the police filling in the role as one of the suspects it's decided up on, from above, to give a few notable amateurs free reign over the investigation.

This novella-length chapter demonstrates that John Rhode is undeserving of his reputation as a dullard and sleep-inducing writer. Even with such authors as Gladys Mitchell and Anthony Berkeley waiting in the wings, ready for the opportunity to seize his pen, he contributed one of the best chapters of this collaborative effort – sketching a mystifying problem with some touches of dry humor that his fellow clubmembers had a lot of fun toying around with.

Helen Simpson is the first one who gets a shot at clearing the mystifying problems that befogs the death of the hated newspaper magnate, but instead of Sir John she has Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley at her disposal – whom she promptly dispatches to the scene of the crime. I think her, and mine, solution was the most evident one as we both fingered the same person based on the significance of the police constable who was run over with a car after the killing. But the best part of this chapter is perhaps the way in which she captured the essence of the character she borrowed and how she touched upon nearly every familiar element from Mitchell's books – from the involvement of a young teenager, a niece who coincidently had a fling with the secretary of Comstock, to the diary notes at the end and a plot thread that is left dangling in the wind. Not bad if you're limited to a mere fifty pages!

Up next is Gladys Mitchell's interpretation of Helen Simpson's Sir John Saumarez, who's an acclaimed stage actor basking in the spotlights of success, however, this is my first acquaintance with the character making it impossible to judge the accuracy of Mitchell's portrayal. The solution he proposed was probably even more blindingly obvious than the previous one, but he gave away a first-rate theatrical dénouement with the best seats in the house reserved for his readers. I have to hunt down one of Simpson's detective novels featuring Sir John for an encore.

Anthony Berkeley is the only one of the quartet of crime writers who managed to upstage the instigators of this book, Milward Kennedy and John Rhode, with his marvelous and amusing rendition of Lord Peter Wimsey and his manservant Bunter. There's a delightful scene in which they discuss the appropriate attire for an appointment with an archbishop who's under suspicion of murder! And to top it all off, he comes up with a solution that points to one of the least likely suspects of the lot as the person who pulled the trigger of the gun with a deadly precision.

Dorothy Sayers' take off on Anthony Berkeley's Mr. Roger Sheringham is equally amusing, but one wishes that as much attention was bestowed on constructing a clever solution from the given clues as on exonerating the archbishop from every suspicion – who she turned into a Machiavellian schemer cleverly maneuvering the paper tycoon into one of his own traps and saving his church from further abuse. The solution is uninspired, forgettable and actually had the flip through the chapter to be reminded who the murderer was supposed to be.

The final chapter is for Milward Kennedy, who is confronted with the daunting task of explaining away the solutions presented by the sleuthing foursome and wrapping up the case – and his approach to this conundrum turns the book into a parody that's very similar to Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) and his critical commentary on Mrs. Bradley, Sir John, Wimsey and Sheringham is hilarious! However, I still haven't decided whether I loved or hated the way in which he explained everything, but it's a perfect illustration of "the blinkin’ cussedness of things in general" at the expensive of the four brilliant amateur sleuthhounds.

In summary, Ask a Policeman is a fascinating experiment, but one that derives its interest mainly from watching a troop of famous detectives taking a stab a the same murder case and how they behave when someone else is in charge of them – while the murder at the summer retreat quickly lost its appeal by a abundance of coincidences and a lack of overall consistency. It's not the howling success that their first round-robin novel, The Floating Admiral (1931), was, but if you're a fan of any of these writers or characters the book is well worth your time – and it's one of those rare crossovers that gave me that pleasurable tingle down my spine! I love and adore crossovers and it gives me an immense pleasure knowing that Mrs. Bradley, Sheringham, Wimsey and even Sir John inhabit the same universe.  

A note of warning: avoid the recent reprint by The Resurrected Press who took gross liberties by altering the text. More details here.