I first read Not to be Taken, a.k.a. A Puzzle in Poison (1938), my debut experience of the work of Anthony Berkeley, after happening across a Black Dagger Crime edition in about 2005. And I bloody hated it. Over the years, however, I’ve come to love Berkeley’s work, so the recent reissue of the title in the British Library Crime Classics range was a (welcome…?) chance to reappraise it.

And, y’know what? A second visit has shown me that this is very much not the book I remember. Sure, I have a better coverage of the genre now and so can appreciate some of the tropes Berkeley is playing with, but I really do recall this being much more leaden-footed and cumbersome; and instead it’s a delightfully light and fun little puzzle which, perhaps, only suffers because — once again — Berkeley is keen to impress us with his cleverness.

Ostensibly about the death by poisoning of popular local man John Waterhouse in the village of Anneypenny in Dorset as seen through the eyes of fruit farmer Douglas Sewell, this is as much an exploration of the burgeoning field of psychological crime that Berkeley would himself exploit under the name Francis Iles as it is an examination of the tropes of detective fiction, the ‘village murder’ among them.

Just as at a sensational trial it is said that the spectator quite loses sight of the issues of guilt or innocence in watching the game as it is played between the opposing counsels, so in a way we tended to overlook the huge question of who, if anyone, poisoned John Waterhouse, in the excitement of wondering what was going to happen next. Our point of view was, in fact, quite different from that of the readers of the newspaper sensation; we were as much in the dark as they were, and yet we could not help feeling that we ourselves were a part of the sensation.

While it can certainly be argued that there is sufficient evidence within the narrative to point to the guilty party, this is not really detection in the way that Berkeley had exploited so brilliantly in The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) or so minutely in The Piccadilly Murder (1929). Indeed, there’s a distinct whiff of anti-detection about this, as you’re parcelled out tiny clues and then told by one character that such things are often meaningless anyway:

“Take a point in anyone’s life, any point, and…you’ll get things…like a cook under notice, a parcel of samples by the morning post, a glass of cider when no one else in the house had a glass of cider, and so on and so forth. That’s just ordinary life. But assume murder, and these things take on a totally different complexion. The people who for one reason or another aren’t sorry the man’s dead then have a motive for killing him; the parcel of samples (which John probably threw in the fire) becomes a sinister package, the cook puts arsenic in the [dessert], and the parlourmaid puts poison in the porridge.”

And yet Berkeley has a reputation of sorts to uphold, and so he plays the game alongside these reflections, if a little tepidly at times. There’s little purpose, after all, in stirring in the red herring of Nazism and the prospect of military intelligence rearing its head when we’re told at the end of chapter II that “poison was being administered to [Waterhouse] by one of the very persons who had sat at his dinner-table that night”, or that the root of the solution was to be found in the “trivialities” that were “raked over” following the conversation at said dinner-table.

If the plot is far from Berkeley’s strongest — “You’d never get a conviction on that story. You wouldn’t even get an arrest,” our admitted murderer tells Sewell when he confronts them in the closing chapter — it’s a superbly engaging novel of character and, not to get too high falutin’ about it, the prospect presented by the genre as a whole (“I doubt very much whether our local police would have grasped the psychological complexities involved,” says one character late on). Berkeley is at pains to present more rounded, complex people than one might typically find in genre fiction of this ilk, with tired out cliches like the adulterous husband or wife brushed aside as mere trifles and the eventual motive behind the death having about it the satiric kick in the teeth that we’ve come to associate with Berkeley.

Among other tropes addressed is the notion of the ‘friendly village’ where everyone knows each other and takes a genuine interest in their fellow man (“[I]t is sometimes difficult to say whether one likes a person in the country or not. Rural friendships are formed by propinquity, not by attraction.”), the perceived dullness of the working classes (“I often think it would be salutary for the Prime Minister or the Foreign Secretary to have a chat with my men. They would be surprised at the vigour of opinions held in rural districts and the force with which any weakness in our foreign policy is deplored.”), and the perceived astuteness of the characterless Scotland Yard men who call around with their “imbecil[ic] softness”. And yet this must also be a recognisably English Village Tale, and so some expectations are fulfilled, and given a strong ring of truth by being declared accurate in the face of such a background of subtle criticism:

How do rumours arise in a small village community such as ours? Nine times out of ten when you read of an exhumation taking place in a country churchyard, with all the melodramatic accompaniments of lanterns and secrecy, the act is the result of rumours with which the place has been seething for weeks.

Berkeley’s characters are true, too, from the capable Rona, sister of village doctor Glen Brougham and perhaps trusted more than her brother in the matter of medical know-how, whose own strong intellectual streak seems to obliterate all before it:

As to her views, which were advance, there were some of us who deplored them and more who were puzzled by them; but most of us, I imagine, had an uneasy conviction that if Rona held them there must be something in them.

Threading the needle finely again, Berkeley evinces sympathy for the German people when it was most likely in short supply (“It’s not worth any German’s while not to be [a Nazi].”) and yet manages to paint the Waterhouse’s German cook Mitzi as a bigoted fool who genuinely seems to have been seduced by that revolting regime with her lazy talk of greedy “Chews”. Too, there’s the uneasy dichotomy that the British people still evince towards immigration, wishing to offer succour to oppressed people from overseas yet lamenting that “[a]ny Austrian who wants a nice trip to England with three times as much to eat…and four times as high wages has only to call herself a cook and she can get into this country without question”. it doesn’t make for easy reading, but, again, I believe in these people as people for saying it.

Little character pieces fill out the cast and halo of context, too, like the parallel with Waterhouse’s invalid wife Angela drawn with the nameless woman who took to bed and “became the most interesting member of [her] family”, or this wonderful exchange in the extended inquest in which the pompous coroner has an envelope handed to him mid-examination:

The coroner snatched it and threw it on the table in front of him. “That sort of thing can wait.”

“It’s marked ‘Very Urgent’, sir,” I heard the policeman say in a low voice.

There’s commentary on the Press, to boot, with the national papers who had ravened for every morsel of the inquest while it proceeded “dropp[ing] the thing like an unclean rag” once no more sensation can be wrung from proceedings. It’s the actions of the press herein that modern readers will recognise most, I feel, with that arm of British society becoming only more vituperative and incorrigible as the decades have passed.

And then we come to the solution.

The jigsaw was complete. It only remained to compare it with the picture on the box.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the solution Berkeley offers is in any way poor or lacking, but, this being originally published as a competition, it would prove something of a damp squib if someone wrote in with the correct solution (as Edgar Wallace will tell you). So, while I have no doubt that Berkeley’s solution is solid, it’s a shame that he has to start the final chapter by dismissing some perfectly good suggestions simply because he doesn’t want them to be the answer. I’m also not entirely convinced that someone would carry on their person…the…thing…that they suddenly need instant access to to make Berkeley’s final answer the answer. Honestly, seeing him resolve this as he has intended, without the clever-clever games would have been preferable, even if he does work in a real gut-punch of an element that still stings on this second encounter.

It is my sincere hope that this slightly-too-long post makes up for the bad things I’ve said about Not to be Taken down the years; I’m very grateful to have had the chance to revisit it, and even more grateful that it makes so much more sense to me second time around. And the British Library’s decision to include as an appendix Berkeley’s own analysis of the solutions received is a delightful one (especially when Berkeley admits that one false solution nevertheless contains “a most admirable notion which I regret not having thought of myself”) and shows why these reprints are so valued by fans the world over. I’m still no clearer on what Berkeley himself imagines the Dominant Clue he mentions in the Challenge to the Reader to be, but, well, maybe it’ll come to me on third reading in another 20-odd years.

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Nick @ The Grandest Game in the World: Berkeley’s gifts for characterisation, psychology and dialogue are at their most impressive, showing how [his] gifts would work with the detective story proper and suggesting the direction in which they would have developed had he not softly and suddenly vanished away in 1939.  There is little detection in the material sense.  The first half is largely conversation, revealing character and psychology (detection from the inside); the clues, without detection, are given as evidence at the coroner’s inquest, recalling the similar approach adopted in The Poisoned Chocolates Case.  Yet this novel approach, the detective story without detection, works extremely well.

Jose @ A Crime is Afoot: While it’s true that the story may be somewhat slow at first, it’s also worth noting that toward the middle of the plot, it begins to gain substance and becomes very engaging. It’s a clever and well-crafted story. The characterization is superb, and Berkeley embellishes his narrative with a good dose of red herrings. Some critics consider it Berkeley’s most conventional work; I don’t think so, especially taking into account that the story was a editor’s request for a competition. In any case, that doesn’t make it any less interesting, even if it has been overshadowed by Berkeley’s other, better-known titles.