Miraculous Mysteries: British Library Crime Classics – Locked Rooms and Impossible Murders

The British Library crime classics series, up to 50 books at the time of writing, has been getting better and better. The team have been digging our more obscure titles, and republishing classics that should be better known.

From what I heard at ‘Bodies From The Library’, the brilliant golden age crime conference this last weekend at the British Library, (which you can read up about here at Cross Examining Crime and Puzzle Doctor) there are some more exciting and forgotten titles on the way.

Editor, writer and GAD encyclopedia Martin Edwards spoke during the conference on his process in deciding what titles to pick for publication. His remit he said, and I paraphrase, was to pick a real variety of stories, from a broad range of sources, and even if the execution wasn’t perfectly realised, that each tale held something of an original and exciting approach to the mystery story. And this is definitely the feeling with Miraculous Mysteries, Edwards’ selection of locked room shorts, which I was thankful to receive a review copy of from the British Library team.

As there are some very thorough and insightful reviews of this new title already out there (great one here from TomCat), I have decided to give you my top 5 (okay, maybe 6 or 7) stories from the 16 on offer, and will give you one thing (okay, maybe two things) that I liked about each story. So without further ado here are my top ten, in order of appearance:

1 – ‘The Thing Invisible’ – William Hope Hodgson
This short takes as it’s supernatural occurrence, the mystery of a haunted dagger, mounted above the alter of a family chapel, that flies from the wall running through any poor soul who dares enter the chapel after sun down. The best part of this story was the scene in which the detective waits over night in the chapel to hopefully witness the event for himself. This waiting scene is so well written, and is absolutely chilling and heart-racing. 

2 – The Case of the Tragedies of the Greek Room – Sax Rohmer
Sax Rohmer was the pen name of the creator of the ridiculous (but for some reason overwhelmingly popular) Dr. Fu Manchu series. It’s popularity is probably down to Rohmer’s story telling ability, which is evident in this short, which sees Moris Klaw, a ‘psychic detective’ who solves mysteries by placing himself at the scene of the crime until he receives and ‘odic photograph’, a mental impression of the last thing eyes of the victim witnessed before death. The ‘Greek Room’ of the title refers to one greek display room in a small museum, which has experienced haunting events, when one of the guards is killed inside the locked museum on night watch. The solution to the locked room and the appearance of a spectre in white, are both absolutely audacious but work simply for the fact that Rohmer committed to them totally. This was also one of only two mysteries that I didn’t guess the solution to.

3 – ‘The Miracle of Moon Crescent’ – G.K.Chesterton
What can I say about this story, it’s just brilliant. There is so much I could say about this, but instead I’ll just say go and read it, and if you haven’t already, go and read the rest of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, which I’ll write about one of these days. The one thing I’ll pick from this story is a clue. This is one of my favourite clues for how it unlocks the solution to the disappearance of a man from a watched room, who is then found 100 of meters away hung from a tree. The clue: why would someone fire a gun, with a blank round, into the side of a brick building?

4 – ‘The Diary of Death’ – Marten Cumberland
The best thing about this story is the brilliant central idea, and I think Cumberland missed a trick here in not making this into a novel as it would have worked for sure. A famous actress, becoming a recluse at the end of her life, in her last days writes a ludicrous and unfounded diary, slamming all the people whom she felt had wronged her. Now she is dead and gone. But when people start to be killed off one by one, each with a torn page of the diary pertaining to them found on their body, it seems as if her ghost is back to take revenge on her enemies. One victim dies in a locked room, and the solution is super neat, and a favourite of mine from this collection. This was the only other solution I didn’t guess. At least not in full. I was half way there, but a simple idea sneaked up behind me, making it all the more satisfying.

5 – ‘Death at 8:30’ – Christopher St. John Sprigg
This is my first foray into Sprigg’s work which has convinced me that I want to read Death of An Airman, his other re-release in the British Library Crime Classics series. This is probably one of the most hilariously water tight locked room set-ups I have come across: 3 layers of doors, 3 layers of guards, an underground vault, two people either side with revolvers, and the target in a bullet proof glass booth with a gun in hand… and he still dies at 8:30 exactly! The solution is fairly simple and revealed about half way through, but it’s how Sprigg uses the solution to get the untouchable killer to confess which is brilliant, and makes for an great closing scene.

6 – The Haunted Policeman – Dorothy L. Sayers
After two atrocious stories in a row, it was endlessly refreshing to come to this Sayers short, and showed how good a writer she really was. The thing I liked about this one was the originality of the set-up. A policeman on his night round hears shouting and cries for help coming from a long row of houses down a narrow side street. A ruffled looking man runs to the door before the policeman looking through the letter box to see what’s wrong. Beckoning the policeman over, he looks through to see a man lying in the corridor with a knife through the back of his neck, fresh blood on the black and white tiled floor. The policeman bangs on the door of Number 13 to no effect when he notices that the shabby looking man has run away. He pursues him up the street, but doesn’t catch him, and decides to run back to the crime scene. But when he gets there, house number 13 has gone, only even numbers show on the doors, and after knocking on every door on the street none of the houses look like the one he saw through the letter box, even though the other residents heard the cries for help, and saw him and the mysterious man running down the road.

7 – ‘Beware of the Trains’ – Edmund Crispin 
As a massive Crispin fan I was really happy to find a story of his in this collection, and to see that more of his work is going out to the masses. I do think there are better locked room shorts from Crispin, The Name on the Window for example being a miniature masterpiece. However on reading this again for the first time in a while I think I under estimated it, and the level of joy and exuberance coming from Crispin here shows that he was at his prime when writing this. The story concerns the disappearance of a train driver between two watched and surrounded stations, and my top thing from this short are these few hilarious lines which show off Crispin’s wit and revelation of character at it’s top form. The passage concerns station master Maycock angry that he hasn’t been told about a police presence at his station:

‘Mr. Maycock, clearly dazed by this melodramatic intelligence, took refuge from his confusion behind a hastily contrived breastwork of out-raged dignity. ‘And why,’ he demanded in awful tones, ‘was I not hinformed of this ‘ere?’
   You ‘ave bin informed,’ snapped the second porter, who was very old indeed, and who appeared to be temperamentally subject to that vehement, unfocussed rage which one associates with men who are trying to give up smoking…
…’And it wouldn’t ave occurred to you, would it’–here Mr Maycock bent slightly at the knees, as though the weight of his sarcasm was altogether too much for his large frame to support comfortably–’to ‘ave a dekko in my room and see if I was ‘ere?’ 

However, there are one or two duds in the collection (in fact only two) and so, as an addition to this list I want to give the award for, in my opinion, the worst story in the collection to….

‘Too Clever By Half’ – G.D.H and Margaret Cole.
For me, this story is so atrocious that I couldn’t go without mentioning it. It seems that even Martin Edwards didn’t think of them very highly, saying in his introduction that they saw detective fiction as a ‘trivial’ side line to their more ‘worthier’ political work.

I went from anger to laughter with how bad this was, as it seemed to fall into every bad writing and poor detective trope I could think of. The bad writing is too much too number, literally saying things like ‘…I could not rid my mind of the feeling that there was something wrong than a mere suicide’, but in terms of the story, lets take this for instance: The great detective is sure that a suicide note is in fact a note taken out of a letter, with the top and bottom cut off, when the doctor says it could possibly be read that way he states:

“Of course it can,” I insisted. “Once that occurs to you, you see it can’t mean anything else.”

It can’t mean anything else. Wow! This is the classic bad trope of a detective telling the reader what is true, without any evidence, that we are expected to believe. This is the kind of thing that Berkeley so sharply satirised and criticised in the Poison Chocolates Case, which I wrote about in my last post. Here’s another quote for good measure:

‘But I doubt if I should have convinced Inspector Cox of their [my deductions] correctness at that stage if it hadn’t been for that opportune discovery of mine about the colour of the ink.’ 
‘Yes that was the goods,’ said someone. ‘Just like a bit out of a detective story–only there they’d have analysed the ink, and put down a lot of unintelligible stuff about it having the wrong chemical composition.’ 
Ben Tancred laughed. ‘We managed without that,’ he said. 

The covering of the fact that again the ink could have had multiple meanings and reasons for being a different colour, by saying that in a detective story it would have been ‘a lot of unintelligible stuff’ is just so lax it’s hilarious. And what’s even funnier about this, is that it is the exact point that is satirised in The Poison Chocolates Case, even down to ink pots as an example. In saying all this, it is possible that the Cole’s were not trying to create a puzzle for you to solve with the detective, but if that were the case I think it would have had a very different feel. Have a read and let me know what you think.

Well, over all an enjoyable collection with only two real duds that I could speak of. This isn’t a revolutionary set of locked room mysteries, but what Edwards has managed to do with this collection is to give you the experience of each story being so different and consistently interesting, pulling out obscure and forgotten titles along the way, and therefore the collection is great to read as a whole.

I hope there is a second one! (And I hope that one has at least once Carr story in it!)