A Surprise for Christmas edited by Martin Edwards

A Surprise for Christmas is a delightful collection of twelve festive mystery stories. The stories come from a wide range of years, and they are all very different from each other. This collection was like diving into a box of assorted chocolates, and finding all of my favourites. Absolute bliss!

“The Black Bag Left on the Doorstep” (1893) by Catharine Louisa Pirkis

When £30,000 worth of jewellery is stolen from Craigen Court on Christmas Eve, private detective Loveday Brooke suspects an inside job. Before leaving the thief wrote, ‘To be let unfurnished’, across the safe door in chalk. Could the robbery have anything to do with a black leather bag found abandoned on a doorstep? Loveday thinks so, despite her employer’s cuttingly sarcastic remarks at the suggestion! Of course, she goes undercover to suss out the culprit. My one quibble is that I would have liked to have seen the resolution play out instead of hearing it retold by Loveday to her superior. But, overall, it is a fun one!

“The Hole in the Wall” (1921) by G.K. Chesterton

This story starts with the introduction of two men, one an architect, the other an archaeologist. We know from the off that Chesterton is going to entertain us with his sense of humour.

Lord Bulmer, in his breezy way, thought it natural to introduce them. It must be confessed that he was hazy as well as breezy, and had no very clear connexion in his mind, beyond the sense that an architect and an archaeologist begin with the same series of letters. The world must remain in a reverent doubt as to whether he would, on the same principles, have presented a diplomatist to a dipsomaniac or a ratiocinator to a rat catcher.

As well as being humorous, this is a wonderfully plotted story, set during a Christmas masquerade party at a house with a legend of a ghostly presence that haunts the grounds. Divine!

“Death on the Air” (1937) Ngaio Marsh

This one begins, “On the 25th of December at 7.30 a.m. Mr. Septimus Tonks was found dead beside his wireless set”. 

This is another one with an English country manor setting. Just the thing to read on Christmas Day. It reminded me of another short story I read at some point with a similar premise, but I can’t think of which one it was, so the connection must have been slight. If you have read this one and it reminds you of another story, please let me know. I’d love to solve that little mystery!

“Persons or Things Unknown” (1938) by Carter Dickson

At a Christmas housewarming party, a host tells a story that dates back to 1660 about a neighbour who “saw a man hacked to death with thirteen stab-wounds in his body, from a hand that wasn’t there and a weapon that didn’t exist.” But assures his guests, it’s fine. He has not put any of them in the room it happened in for the night.

Of course, we all liked the house. It had the most modern of lighting and heating arrangements, though the plumbing sent ghostly noises and clanks far down into its interior whenever you turned on a tap. But the smell of the past was in it; and you could not get over the idea that somebody was following you about. 

I loved the interweaving of the historical with the present day in this one. A creepy, atmospheric story, perfect for people who appreciate a Christmas ghost story. 

“Dead Man’s Hand” (1953) by E.R. Punshon

A snowstorm, a bag of diamonds, and a finger shot clean off. From the start, we know Jeremy Wells, gardener, chauffeur, and man of all work has just killed his employer up at the big house. What we don’t know is if he will get away with it. It sure looks like luck is going to be on his side! This one is good to the last line.

“The Christmas Eve Ghost” (1948) by Ernest Dudley

This one has a film noir feel to it, at the start, with a beautiful woman in distress coming to a private detective for help on Christmas Eve. Sophie Forrest runs River View hotel, which is described as “dark and dismal in its own grounds, the mist from the river swirling about its gaunt grimness”. Her husband was found in the river two months ago. He had been shot. And now she and his business partner, have been seeing the ghostly apparition of a Burmese dancer, said to haunt the hotel every year at Christmas time.

“Dick Whittington’s Cat” (1950) by Victor Canning

There is perhaps no setting I enjoy more for a story than one set in the theatre. Especially when it’s a mystery! A couple go to a pantomime, a “cat” falls from their balcony, and the woman loses her diamond bracelet. In part, I did see where this one was going. But it was still a very enjoyable short, short story.

“A Surprise for Christmas” (1956) by Cyril Hare

What starts with a cosy domestic scene of a family having just enjoyed an early Christmas dinner including turkey and plum pudding, ends with a surprise. Spoiler alert. It is not a good surprise! This one is short, yet packs a serious punch.

“On Christmas Day in the Morning” (1950) by Margery Allingham

A postman is found in the middle of a country road, lying across his bicycle. Given his fractured skull, it looks like he’s been hit by a car. The police just happen to have the perfect suspects already in custody. Two drunks who crashed further up the road. The problem is, the timing is all wrong. This one is sad, and all too believable, but brilliantly told.

“Give Me a Ring” (1955) by Anthony Gilbert

If all the other stories in this collection were mediocre, on the merit of this story alone it would still be a must buy. Thankfully, all of the stories in this collection are good, but I think this one is something special.

At a little over 80 pages, it’s more of a novella than a short story, and I have to admit that because of its length I approached this one with less enthusiasm than it deserved. But once I started reading I didn’t give another thought to the page count. Except maybe to thank the author for having the foresight to give the story the space it deserves! If “Give Me a Ring” had “Christmas”, “festive”, or “holiday” in the title, I feel sure it’s the story this collection would have been named after.

Anthony Gilbert is a pseudonym of Lucy Malleson. She also wrote as J. Kilmeny Keith and Anne Meredith, under which she wrote Portrait of a Murderer, which has been republished in the British Library Crime Classics series. She wrote sixty-five novels and at least sixty short stories. “Give Me a Ring” first appeared on 11 November 1955 edition in the Illustrated London News. 

I’d like to take this moment to say how much I love that British Library Publishing includes the date and publication in which the short stories in their collections first appeared. I feel that having that information provides the reader with essential context for the stories themselves within the history of the crime story as a genre. I also love that Martin Edwards shares a short biography of the author before each story, including the author’s noteworthy titles. So helpful for adding to your TBR!

Back to “Give Me A Ring”…

It was Christmas Eve and nearly five of the clock, but an afternoon less like the traditional ideas of the season would be hard to imagine. True, a little snow had fallen in the early hours, but this was rapidly churned into slush by the relentless London traffic and about mid-day a haze of fog began to spread over the city.

While out buying odds and ends on Christmas Eve, Gillian Hinde is disoriented in the fog and finds herself drawn towards a lit shop window. A most unlikely shop to find the perfect gift for herself.

The object in question was a ring, a quite ordinary setting containing a blue stone that glowed and sparkled as if it had gathered up all the light the fog had sucked out of the streets and flung it back with an unbelievable radiance.

Gillian is drawn into a dark plot that puts her, and her worried fiancé, through the paces. By the end, I couldn’t help but feel the couple certainly deserved to have a happy Christmas!

“Father Christmas Come to Orbins” (1963) by Julian Symons

Nothing says, “Happy Christmas!” like a holiday heist! This one is sharp, funny, well-observed, and just plain fun. A little edgier than the others in the collection, but no less enjoyable.

“The Turn-Again Bell” (1959) by Barry Perowne

The setting for this one is an 11th-century village church with a square Norman tower, and a churchyard blanketed in deep snow. There is a legend surrounding the church that once in the incumbency of each Rector, they would hear one of the church bells chime a single stroke at Christmas. The Rector would feel compelled to check to see who had rung the bell and find no one there, and no one else would have heard the bell ring. That Christmas would be his last.

The Rector left the church and headed for home. There had been a new, light fall of snow, under which the criss-crossing tyre-ruts were frozen hard. The night was clear and cold, the stars were bright. Trudging along, hands deep in his coat pockets, his shadow slanting on the snow, he was about halfway to the crossroads, when he heard a bell in the church tower clang once, loud and clear.

This one was chilling, beautifully described, and a heartwarming way to end a stellar collection.

Best enjoyed with a mince tart and a hot cuppa, A Surprise for Christmas would make a great read for December. There are a few short, short stories like one the collection gets its title from and “The Turn-Again Bell”, which could be enjoyed in between wrapping gifts and checking on the Yorkshire pud. I would save my favourite, the lengthy, “Give Me a Ring”, for when you’re up late on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa to appear.

This is a book I borrowed from my local library, but I enjoyed it so much that I’ve decided I must get my own copy in time for rereading it next holiday season.

Murder in Vienna by E.C.R. Lorac

Set in October, E.C.R. Lorac’s 1956 novel, Murder in Vienna, is the perfect atmospheric mystery to curl up with on a wet Sunday afternoon. 

Robert Macdonald heads to Vienna for a holiday to visit his old friend Dr. Franz Natzler, who he hasn’t seen in ten years. While he appreciates the relaxing atmosphere of flying on a Viscount airliner over land travel, he takes note of his fellow passengers. On a stopover in Zurich he becomes acquainted with a young woman, Elizabeth Le Vendre, who is to be the new secretary to retired diplomat Sir Walter Vanbrugh. Upon arrival the two part ways, Elizabeth to her new job and Macdonald to his holiday.

While Macdonald is familiar with Vienna, he hasn’t been back in twenty-five years, and Vienna has been altered by its recent history.* On the second day of his holiday, Macdonald plays the tourist, becoming reacquainted with the city.

In the afternoon Macdonald strolled over to Schönbrunn Palace, to renew his acquaintance with the gardens and fountains: it was another lovely sunny day and the warm coloured stones of the palace looked almost golden in the October sunlight. (“Maria Theresa yellow,” the Austrians called that subtle gold of the masonry.)

It was while he was standing by the garden front of the palace, looking up at the arches and colonnade of the Gloriette on the rising ground to the south that he saw Elizabeth Le Vendre again. She also was looking at the Gloriette, and as she turned and saw Macdonald her quick smile flashed out. (42)

The exchanges between Macdonald and Elizabeth are sweet and he treats her kindly. I appreciated the respect he shows her, despite her being no more than twenty-one and looking “young as a schoolgirl” (42).  Macdonald recognises that because of the position she has been hired for and being fluent in German, she must have studied Modern Languages at Oxford and had secretarial training. 

After enjoying a coffee on the sunny terrace against the old stables, Macdonald and Dr. Natzler drop Elizabeth off at the Vanbrugh mansion. The next time we meet her is in a thunderstorm in heavy rain near an old gun-site overlooking Vienna. 

It was there that they found Elizabeth Le Vendre: she was lying at the foot of the steps, as though she had fallen down them. In the beam of the torch, her fair hair shone a little, as the runnels of rain-water shone: she lay face down in a pool of water and her light woollen coat lay in sodden folds on the saturated ground. (62)

It is quickly determined that she isn’t dead, only unconscious, but she has a bump on her head and having spent up to two hours in the pouring rain, she is “deadly cold” (63).

Macdonald looks at the scene through the eyes of a detective, and immediately entertains the possibility that the seemingly accidental fall down stairs in a thunderstorm was actually an attempted murder. But who would want to kill Elizabeth Le Vendre, a woman who only just arrived in Vienna a couple of days ago?

And so, Macdonald dismisses the idea. He is on holiday, after all. That is until Walsingham, a writer who has been staying with the Vanbrugh’s, is found lying dead in the middle of a road with tire tracks over him. As luck, or lack of, would have it, it’s Sir Walter Vanbrugh’s nephew, Anthony, who discovers the body after nearly running over it in the storm.

Before long, a call is put through to London, the appropriate strings are pulled, and Macdonald is saying so long to his holiday. 

This book has so many things going on that at times I found it difficult to remember who is who, and who was supposed to be where and at what time. However, I suspect this may have been a fault of my own, as I did get distracted a few times while I was reading this book. Even so, it would only take me a moment to get my bearings and be on my way again. The timeline became perfectly clear at the end, and I was applauding E.C.R. Lorac’s ability to keep so many plates spinning at once without dropping a single one.

Readers who have come across Macdonald before in E.C.R. Lorac’s forty-five other novels featuring Superintendent Robert Macdonald of the C.I.D. will get a kick out of Elizabeth telling him, “You ought to be a detective!” (42). If you fall under the category of readers who have not read any of the other Macdonald novels, not to worry, I fall into this group and I can assure you that Murder in Vienna reads like a standalone. 

With a climax set to the backdrop of moonrise over the Gloriette (LINK), from start to finish, this book uses the history, landscape, and atmosphere of Vienna to great effect. I think this book would be best enjoyed with at least rudimentary knowledge of Vienna, its rough geography, and a few points of interest. However, a general familiarity with London would do. On occasion one of the characters will compare some aspect of the Viennese setting to London, providing the reader with a frame of reference for what they are meant to be seeing.

Regarding the area near the old gun-site where Elizabeth is found, Dr. Natzler’s son observes:

‘I often thought of this place when I used to go for a walk on Hampstead Heath when we were in London during the war. The distances in London are much bigger, of course, but Hampstead Heath gives a view over London as these hills do over Vienna.’ (61-62)

And on another occasion Macdonald compares the Tiergarten (zoo) in the gardens of the Schönbrunn Palace to Regent’s Park, London.

As he stood in the darkness Macdonald could hear some of the animals calling in their cages: nocturnal animals to whom the night brought their time of greatest awareness. It was a bit like being in Regent's Park at night, where the call of lions and the howl of wolves mingled with the rumble of the London traffic. Here, as in London, there was a glow in the sky, a glow which had replaced the afterglow of the sunset. In the eastern sky, the myriad lights of Vienna were reflected up to the misty clouds, and Macdonald knew that when his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he would be able to see the open arches of the Gloriette up there on the hill, opposite the garden front of the palace. (214-15)

Lorac only used this technique of comparing Vienna to London in times when the setting was of particular import. From the places I noted, the differences between the two cities are commented on, as well as the similarities, which I think respects the individuality of both cities.

In this novel, there is a juxtaposition between the familiar and the unfamiliar. In the beginning, Macdonald watches through the plane’s window as the English coast slips away. “He had often seen all this before, but never wearied of it.” (1) From up in the air all is tranquil on that September morning. I think it was a purposeful choice that once Macdonald is out and about, exploring Vienna, it is a new month, October. The transition starts even before the plane touches down. “He had seen Vienna and the Danube long ago, from the heights of the Leopoldsberg and the Wienerwald, but there was a sense of drama in seeing it thus from the air—the river, the city, the plain.” (28) Macdonald is getting a new perspective, and that theme continues throughout this novel. 

This book marked two firsts for me. If I’ve read a book set in Vienna before now, I’ve long forgotten it. This is also my first foray into Edith Caroline Rivett’s writing. I would be keen to read more of the books she wrote under either of her pseudonyms, E.C.R. Lorac or Carol Carnac.

Thank you to British Library Publishing for kindly sending me a copy of Murder in Vienna for review. As always, all opinions on the book are my own.

*If you have no knowledge of Vienna’s history around this time, Martin Edwards touches on it in his thoughtful introduction to the British Library Crime Classics edition. I usually read introductions after I’ve read the book for fear of plot spoilers, but Martin Edwards’ introduction only discusses the first quarter of the book. He is careful not to reveal any plot points you would not already know from reading the back cover.

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War Among Ladies by Eleanor Scott

Expectation is a powerful thing. It alters your perspective, often imperceptibly. If reality does not match up with the figment you created, it can take some getting used to. Reality might even feel a tad disappointing, if only at first. That, I am afraid to say, was my experience reading Eleanor Scott’s 1928 novel, War Among Ladies. 

I had heard this book described as a school story told from the perspective of the teachers. And while this sums up the novel accurately, it misleads one into thinking this is going to be a bit of fun. Sure, it’s called War Among Ladies, but there are always feuds in school stories, with lots of fun to be had in between the tiffs, with field hockey or lacrosse practice, girl guides meets, midnight feasts, etc. I expected to find much of the same in this book, only with teachers having misunderstandings and disagreements on teaching methods and whatnot, but, overall, having a lovely time. Boy, was I wrong! Thankfully, once I managed my expectations, I started to appreciate this book for what it is, which is a novel that is a whole lot smarter than the one I had envisioned.

Besley High School for girls works on a graduation system, which means that the failure of a student in one subject makes for a fail overall. When even Miss Cullen’s best student fails the public examination, the other teachers are out for blood. Because it is not just the girls of this school that are judged harshly. The future of the teachers and the school itself, is at risk, if the girls fail their end of year exams.

"Oh, I don't expect it's as bad as you think, you know," she said with her nervous half-laugh. "May I keep this just for to-night, Nellie? I have a collection of papers, and I should like to copy this out to add to it." Nellie handed it over, quite willingly, but without enthusiasm. Miss Cullen recognised the difference from her usual manner and sighed.

"Well, cheer up, girls. I'm sure you've all done better than you think," she said as she turned away.

But it was a lie, and she knew it was; and the girls knew it too, and she knew that they did. For the paper was a modern one, and Miss Cullen taught by the methods of thirty years ago. The collection of papers was a myth, too; she wanted time, time to study those conundrums that demanded original thought and not the reproduction of textbooks. Not that it mattered now. Nothing could help her. She had failed, and she knew it; and she also knew that, for her, failure meant—the end. (42)

Things go downhill from here for Miss Cullen. Because there is nothing to be done. There is no retraining plan in place for teachers to update their methods, and there is no option for most of these women to do anything besides teaching. Certainly not for Miss Cullen, who is so close to retirement, but not close enough to retire early as that would mean losing everything she has put into her pension. Getting another placement is not an option for many of the other teachers either. For what school will hire them if their last job was at a school so notorious for its poor performance it had to be closed?

It would have been good if I had read the back cover copy of this one before reading the book. It would certainly have set me straight on my whole “fun school story” expectation. The last line on the back cover of the newly republished edition best describes this novel, “This is a quietly devastating novel about the realities of life for single working women in the 1920s and the systems that failed them”.

The devastation may be quiet, but it is all but relentless. It was the relentlessness of this book that made it a difficult read for me. I don’t intend that to be a criticism. Although, it does sound like one. What I mean is that it is hard to be in the mood to read about someone who has reached the end of the line and is out of options. You cannot really hold it against them when they are willing to do what they have to to ensure their own survival, but it does not exactly endear them to you either.

Miss Cullen’s colleagues go to the Head to request her dismissal and Miss Cullen feels as thought it is only a matter of time before she is asked to leave. So she writes a letter to the school inspector. 

She signed it with a distinct feeling of pleasure. It was, she told herself, true—true in every word. No one could deny what she had written. All she wanted was justice, impartial justice, and that she would never get, either from her colleagues or the Head... And she liked the tone of the letter, it seemed to her to be both independent and courteous, warm and yet restrained.

She felt a glow of triumph, almost of virtue, as she dropped that epistle, heavy with the fate of the school, into a pillar-box. (116)

It is difficult to feel that an injustice is really being done to Miss Cullen. Her students are doing abysmally in her subject. Still, I found myself feeling very sorry for her, as does one of her fellow teachers. Viola Kennedy, who is in her first year of teaching, approaches the start of school with all of the naive optimism that one would expect of someone who is eager to educate and inspire their students. However, before too long teaching, and all the profession entails, begins to wear on her. Her head is a sea of questions concerning things she has no control over.

Like most of her profession, Viola was fast losing her sense of humour and proportion. She felt that these questions filled the whole horizon, so that nothing else, no question of State or religion or personal relationship or anything whatever, was of the smallest importance in comparison. […] Suddenly she realised, for one sickening second, the tortures that a bad disciplinarian (Miss Cullen, for instance) must feel when she dreads, not for an instant, but for hours every day, the coming of a new day. ... How perfectly horrible. ... (153)

Viola Kennedy and Miss Cullen are in contrast to each other. For one, as Simon Thomas points out in the Afterword, Viola is never diminished to “Miss”. She retains her first name throughout the book. Viola, who is young and is just starting out in teaching, still has options. One of her fellow teachers recommends that she get out, before teaching has left its mark on her, and while she still has the option to marry, and, as we might imagine, before Viola's identity has been completely overshadowed by "Miss Kennedy" and she is Viola no longer. In comparison, we are lead to believe that Miss Cullen, even as a young woman, never had the option of marriage, or a life outside of teaching.

Still, this book is not without glimmers of light, and my favourites are those moments of optimism that Viola finds while in the natural world.

Viola felt that touch of excitement that the romantic young often know with the coming of misty evenings—that sense of adventure, of suspense almost, of a dream coming true, as if something were suddenly to be revealed....

She turned into the wet grass. How still it was in the hushed, dewy field, shrouded in the autumn mist. How remote it was from the lights and sounds of the town. How real, how true, it was in its chill aloof silence. She stood and listened to her own hushed breathing. Softly, like a magic bell, the church clock sounded. It was like the prelude to adventure. ... 

With a sigh she realised that that note of enchantment was no more than a call back to the world of duty. She walked on up to the school. (180)

Viola is able to find some respite in nature, and contemplate the possibilities of her future, because she is of the “romantic young” who still have adventures and dreams within their grasp. While at the end of this quotation, Viola is brought back to the “world of duty” by the church bell reminding her of the time, there is the suggestion that she could travel along the line of wherever those tantalising asterisks are headed, instead of answering the call to go back to school.

It is these glimpses of future possibilities for Viola that kept me reading, despite how much Miss Cullen’s narrowing future was causing me worry. 

I am so thankful I pushed through my discomfort! This book provided a perspective of what teaching was like for women in 1920s that I had not been exposed to before. The throughly researched Afterword provides a helpful explanation of the systems women would have been up against at this point in history.

Thank you to British Library Publishing for kindly sending me a copy of War Among Ladies for review. As always, all opinions on the book are my own.

Metropolitan Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards

I feel like every time I review a short story collection I need to explain upfront that I don’t gravitate towards short stories. I find it difficult to get into them, especially in a collection where there is one story after another, each one a new beginning with new characters, setting, and the rest of it. At best, they tend to feel a little like eating porridge for breakfast. It’s healthy, and it's good to try new things and all the rest of it, but I’d rather be eating toast and marmalade. All this is to say that when I like a short story collection, I’m a little surprised. But honestly, this newest collection of short stories from British Library Crime Classics was the next best thing to toast and marmalade!

Metropolitan Mysteries: A Casebook of London’s Detectives is a collection of eighteen stories set in London. I love London. I’m a bit of a homebody, but if someone said to me, “We’re going to London. Grab your passport and a change of clothes. We’re leaving in five minutes.” I would be ready in four. I love the architecture, the museums, the bookstores, the parks! I even love the weather. Give me lowering skies over constant sunshine any day. I simply love walking around the city and exploring. It should come as no surprise then, that I was all in for a collection of detective stories set in my favourite city.

The stories contained in Metropolitan Mysteries were originally published between 1908 to 1963. Some of the authors included in this collection I had read before, including Dorothy L. Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Anthony Berkeley. There are a host of others that I had heard of, but haven’t read, such as John Dickson Carr, J. Jefferson Farjeon, and Margery Allingham. While Malcolm Gair, Eric Bennett, and Patricia Moyes, I wasn’t familiar with at all.

The earliest title in the collection is Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”. It starts with an image of London as most tourists might picture the city, enveloped in fog.

In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog settled down upon London. From the Monday to the Thursday I doubt whether it was ever possible from our windows in Baker Street to see the loom of the opposite houses. The first day Holmes had spend in cross-indexing his huge book of references. The second and third had been patiently occupied upon a subject which he had recently made his hobby—the music of the Middle Ages. But when for the fourth time, after pushing back our chairs from breakfast we saw the greasy, heavy brown swirl still drifting past us and condensing in oily drops upon the window-panes, my comrade’s impatient and active nature could endure this drab existence no longer. (37)

And what detective, may I ask, is more quintessentially London than Sherlock Holmes? I have found some of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels to be a bit tedious, as I find that his writing can be a bit clunky, but this short story was a real treat!

Eric Bennett’s “Death on Nelson’s Column” centres around the London landmark and makes a very good job of using a most unlikely dumping ground for a body, about 150 feet* above Trafalgar Square. The body is discovered by a steeplejack while making the perilous climb up the monument in preparation for cleaning.

For the first time in forty years the steeplejack lost his nerve. His scream was lost in the harsh cries of the pigeons. Only his terrified assistant saw his body roll half-balanced on the edge, his legs kick wildly in the air.

[…]

The dead man was lying full length on the platform staring with wide, empty eyes, across the roofs of London to where the Thames was sparkling in the morning sun. The colossal stone Nelson towered above and stared blindly with him. (189)

Aren’t you dying to know how the body got up there?!

Like the many different faces of London, no two stories in this collection are alike. Although, there are two that have a remarkably similar beginning, Henry Wade’s 1933 story, “The Real Thing” and the 1963 story “The Dead Man Climbed Upstairs” by Raymond Postgate. Both open with a ticket collector in the Underground spotting a body at the top of an escalator. But while “The Real Thing” progresses into a tense shoot ‘em up, “The Dead Man Climbed Upstairs” reaches a much quieter, and perhaps more satisfying conclusion.

The most touching story has to be Anthony Berkeley’s “Unsound Mind”. It opens with a Chief Inspector getting a call from a man who says he will momentarily be committing suicide with prussic acid. He gives his name, and says he has left a note, but “this is just to confirm it” (155). Then he rings off. It’s such an intriguing opening and the story has a lot more depth than I had expected. Although, I should have been prepared for something more than a simple detective story from Berkeley. After all, I did just read his book Before the Fact, which was wonderfully atmospheric and showed off his talent for writing complex and messy characters. 

Another goodie is J. Jefferson Farjeon’s “Sergeant Dobbin Works It Out”. Sergeant Dobbin is stationed at the police station in quiet Little Warbridge and keen for promotion.

Not much happened in Little Warbridge police station, and when it did Sergeant Dobbin always has to deal with a secret emotion. It had to be secret, because policemen were not supposed to express any, but the sergeant had plenty beneath his official uniform, and whenever the telephone rang at an unusual time—a rare occurrence—he always experienced a somewhat ingenuous hope that this might herald his Big Chance. After all, you never knew, did you? (251)

It must be Sergeant Dobbin’s lucky day, because he has bagged himself a murder, which he is set on solving before he has to hand the case over to his superior. But is he up to the task? Farjeon brings this one to an amusing conclusion. A sense of humour must run in the Farjeon family, as his sister, Eleanor Farjeon, is the author of Miss Granby’s Secret, which, while being a work of genius, in my opinion, is also very witty.

The only story that I felt a bit annoyed with was “The Miser of Maida Vale” by Baroness Orczy. This story from 1925 uses a framing device whereby a character we only know as “the Old Man in the Corner” tells a case to a woman journalist in an ABC teashop. I couldn’t see why the journalist or the Old Man needed to be in the story at all, but I may have simply missed the point. I enjoyed the story, but whenever I was reminded that the narrative was being told secondhand, I felt distanced from the story and, frankly, the story lost some of its agency.

Overall, I found the stories to be outstanding. I tried to pick out a favourite story from the collection and failed, which, I think, is a sign that Martin Edwards has done a fabulous job of selecting the titles in this collection. Through reading this book I’ve discovered a number of new-to-me authors to add to my must read list, and I’ve had the pleasure of doing a bit of armchair travelling to my favourite city to boot. I left this one wishing all short story collections were this good!

Thank you to British Library Publishing for kindly sending me a copy of Metropolitan Mysteries for review. As always, all opinions on the book are my own.

*Nelson’s Column was surveyed in 2006 and measured 169 feet 3 inches (51.59 m) tall from the bottom of the pedestal to the top of Nelson’s hat. The statue of Nelson himself is 18 feet 1 inch (5.52 m) according to Wikipedia. But I couldn’t find the height of the pedestal the statue stands on. Hence the approximation that a body left at the top of the column would be about 150 feet (45.72 m) above street level.