One morning, Paul Larkins is rudely awakened in his London home by frantic knocking and anguished shouting. A murder is announced: Maria, a 19-year-old dancer from a neighboring apartment, has been found in her bed with her throat slit. Larkins visits the scene of the crime and wonders how the perpetrator made the escape with the door locked and the key left inside and the distance from the window to the ground too far to drop. He reads testimonies in the newspaper from Maria’s landlady, fiancé, and colleague — and from a doctor who reveals Maria was pregnant. He learns that the crime’s complexities and anomalies “threaten to baffle the sagacity of the police.” He admits he found Maria attractive: “She was one of Beauty’s best thoughts.” Eventually, he also admits to killing her.
This is a faint outline of “Hanged by the Neck,” a short yet perfectly formed and deliciously toxic tale by a British writer called Charles Martel (1810-1865). It isn’t the whole story, and Martel fleshes out his bare bones further. It transpires that Larkins is insane but also innocent. Inviting the real culprit to his prison cell, Larkins explains how and why the guilty party carried out their murderous deed. He then sits back and looks forward to the “ecstasy” of being hanged for a crime he didn’t commit. But in an unexpected twist of fate, his best-laid plans backfire.
REVIEWED: THE POLE BY J.M. COETZEE
Subtitled “A Confession,” Martel’s story shines a light into a warped mind and dark soul. Again and again, even within such tight confines, the author wrongfoots his reader. Small surprises give way to big shocks. We grapple with both a miniature whodunit and a locked-room mystery. One conundrum dominating the whole proceedings concerns the author’s identity: Charles Martel was the pen name of one Thomas Delf, a London bookseller, but why Delf chose the name of an eighth-century Frankish military hero for his literary alter ego remains an unsolved enigma.
This tale is one of 13 that make up The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries. All the stories have been cherry-picked from the 19th century. All show how the genre developed, with each writer introducing key ingredients that have become standard components: a fiendish premise, a detective or some other crime-solver, scattered clues, various suspects, dubious alibis, and a handful of red herrings. Tension and excitement build to a neat denouement that brings, if not justice, then some semblance of resolution.
Finally, all the stories are by writers who, for the most part, remain either overlooked or underappreciated. There are no offerings from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle or Edgar Allan Poe, much less Baroness Orczy or Wilkie Collins. Some stories are especially obscure and appear here in print for the first time since their original publication. Editor Michael Sims deserves credit for his selection process. Instead of another greatest hits list of familiar favorites, we get a treasure trove of forgotten gems.
Two standout stories are the two longest. “The Hand and Word” by Irish writer Gerald Griffin is a tragic tale about a pair of thwarted lovers and a vengeful jilted suitor. Although not a bona fide mystery — the murderer’s identity is revealed early on — its account of smuggling, press-ganging, and violent passions is compelling, and Griffin’s tightly focused narrative builds to a gripping clifftop climax and a bombshell discovery.
From a coastal village in Ireland to a mountain village in Austria, “The Case of the Pool of Blood in the Pastor’s Study” revolves around, in the words of one character, “murder and sacrilege.” Vienna-born Auguste Groner enjoyed literary success in America with her creation of Joseph Muller, “the bloodhound of the Austrian police” — that is, until World War I killed interest in German-speaking writers. Muller’s case here is an immersive affair that sees the detective investigating the gruesome death of a clergyman and the perplexing disappearance of the corpse. Groner adds color with a cast that includes a Hungarian count, a hunchbacked sexton, the inmates of an insane asylum, and a shepherd who has strange visions. But Muller has sharper eyes: “My business is to see more than others see,” he announces before homing in on his quarry.
Elsewhere, we encounter a couple of firsts. Richard Dowling’s “Negative Evidence” is, according to Sims’s author profile, the first detective story to make use of photographic evidence. And Andrew Forrester Jr.’s “The Judgement of Conscience” introduces the first female detective, one known enigmatically as Mrs. G.
She isn’t the only woman on the trail of a killer in this anthology. C.L. Pirkis’s “The Murder at Troyte’s Hill” presents the inestimable Loveday Brooke, a professional private eye dubbed the female Sherlock Holmes by reviewers of the day. In this story, a kind of prototype of the English country house murder mystery, Brooke goes undercover in a grand residence to flush out the brutal slayer of the property’s seemingly harmless lodgekeeper. Meanwhile, in Anna Katharine Green’s “An Intangible Clue,” Violet Strange, a New York socialite-sleuth averse to sordid or bloody “low-down crime,” suppresses her squeamishness to contend with a murder most foul.
Green, author of the seminal detective novel The Leavenworth Case, is one of the known entities in the book. The others are Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Glasgow and pioneer black writer Charles W. Chesnutt. Both are welcome but surprise additions, as neither author is associated with the crime genre. Their respective stories — one examining ethical killing, the other the consequences of race murder — constitute fascinating forays into new territory.
Some stories are let down by a lack of logical deduction from the detective and an all-too-convenient confession from the miscreant. Others are tarnished by patches of overwrought prose — one writer sets the scene by informing us that the sun was “king absolute of the pale azure realms, and ruled in lonely despotism.” However, most stories hit the spot, and their potent blend of thrills, chills, puzzles, and ingenuity will satisfy those who like to hunker down with a murder mystery by the fire.
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Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.