“Murder By The Book” edited by Martin Edwards (2021)

“Joseph Newton settled himself comfortably in his corner of a first-class compartment on the Cornish Riviera express.”

It might be a new year, dear readers, but there’s still plenty of murders to be solved. This time, Martin Edwards has gathered together some of the short stories from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction that all centre around murders involving novels, authors, publishers, booksellers, and librarians. What’s there for a murder mystery novel lover to take umbrage with?

Many of the stories here have been long out of print and were penned by some of the now more obscure names of the era. Nicholas Blake, Julian Symons and Roy Vickers might no longer be household names, but others like A. A. Milne and Ngaio Marsh still have modern recognition, indeed I’ve read them myself. Also here we find Edmund Crispin and Christianna Brand, who is these days more famous for the Nurse Matilda books, which formed the basis of the Nanny McPhee films, than her crime writing. As with most collections, the quality varies, but here I don’t think any of them drop below a three-star rating. Rather than tackle them all, I’ll just mention some of my favourites.

In “A Lesson in Crime” by GDH and M Cole, we meet a weary author who now mostly employs terrible ghost writers to ensure he keeps up the lifestyle he is accustomed too, but discovers too late that there’s a fatal error in doing so when he meets a strange man on a train who isn’t too happy with the diminishing quality of his output. Edmund Crispin produces the very verbosely-titled, “We Know You’re Busy Writing, But We Thought You Wouldn’t Mind If We Just Dropped In For A Minute”, wherein a desperate author is trying to finish his work but is continuously distracted by phone calls, visitors and his cleaning lady, since no one seems to appreciate that he has to keep office hours too. It’s a really funny one and, while I’m not suggesting I’d go as far as the hero does in dealing with the problem, it’s certainly something I can relate to. In Nicholas Blake’s “A Slice of Bad Luck”, he parodies the Detection Club itself and sees a murder occur before the very eyes of assorted crime writers, with a clever resolution. Holmes and Watson even show up, with S. C. Roberts’s story “The Strange Case of the Megatherium Thefts”, wherein Holmes returns to the page to solve a theft at a private club’s library. And as for Brand’s “Dear Mr Editor…”, to say anything more about it would be too much. Just read it.

If anything, these stories just prove how many murder writers there were back in the Golden Age (although the stories themselves come from a much wider range than just then) and how prolific some of them were. There are thousands of stories out there for us to rediscover, and this is a fine collection on a theme most of us already have a passion for. The lengths, styles, narration, characters and language all vary, but they all do wonders with the genre, with many of them not giving us an answer until the very last sentence. Some are a masterclass in how to do a story like this in mere pages. Others have dated less well, but often that’s a case of language than substance. It’s still a great anthology, and we are indebted to the British Library for continuing to dig up these forgotten gems.

Looking for something else? Try my novels, The Atomic Blood-Stained Bus (the story of a cannibal and an ex-god) and The Third Wheel (a comedic alien invasion tale), test yourself with a quiz from my book Questioning Your Sanity, or visit my website and I’ll cultivate you a whole quiz on whatever subjects you like. If you just want more reviews, guide yourself around my blog with the navigation bar and find hundreds of reviews at your fingertips.

“The Saltmarsh Murders” by Gladys Mitchell (1932)

“There are all sorts of disadvantages in telling a story in the first person, especially a tale of murder.”

After reading a parody of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, it seemed fitting to dip back into a genuine one. I’ve long been ignorant of Gladys Mitchell, which seems odd given she was so prolific. Perhaps her profile is simply lower, or maybe even not all of her books are currently available. I can only make excuses for my ignorance. Nonetheless, I’m here now with the surprising The Saltmarsh Murders.

Noel Wells, the curate in the small village of Saltmarsh, sets about telling us the story of the murders that he got caught up in. He prefers to spend his time dancing with the vicar’s niece, but the peace is shattered when the unmarried housemaid is found to be pregnant, and the vicar’s shrewish, vindictive wife throws her out. A few days after the baby is born, the housemaid is strangled and the baby disappears, with no one ever having set eyes on it. Questions are raised – who had the motive and the opportunity? Why was the girl so secretive? And was there even a baby at all?

Noel calls on Mrs Bradley, an amateur detective and psychologist who happens to be staying in the village, to investigate the murder and together they find themselves dragged into Saltmarsh’s seedy underbelly as the story grows to incorporate a false letter, a kidnapped vicar, smuggling, the village lunatic, a missing corpse and an excavation of the local quarries. With Mrs Bradley convinced that the wrong man has been convicted, it is a race against time to find the true culprit and save an innocent man from death.

For much of the reading, I was worried I’d have to come here afterwards and give a negative review. The opening chapters were slow, somewhat repetitive and I kept losing track of who was who. It took a while to get to the actual murder, giving us some strange plots earlier on that quickly get discarded and prove not to be so important. I’d also made guesses on a number of plot points and was rapidly proven right on them all. However, when Mitchell finally reveals who the murderer was, the rug was pulled out from under me and I wasn’t anything like close. It’s a curiously satisfying solution.

The style of its time, with language and attitudes one would expect of the 1930s, so there are some terms that seem questionable to modern readers, but in many other respects there are some curiously modern topics involved, including pre-marital sex, incest, racial tension, and pornography. It was undoubtedly quite a shocking read at the time, and indeed, parts of it are still so today. Many other elements remain typical of books of the sort – small village, missing people, a secret passage and a country vicar.

I’d probably read Mitchell again, although I don’t necessarily see Mrs Bradley as one of fiction’s “most memorable personalities”, but I’m in no particular hurry.