Seventeen scenarios of skulduggery, stealing, and slaughter in the British Library Crime Classics range, all centred on London, the finest city on god’s green Earth, and selected by the ne plus ultra of classic crime appreciation, Martin Edwards.

It must have been a monster of a job assembling this, and Edwards is to be commended for the doubtless long job of narrowing down his focus to the selection herein. How do the stories themselves stand up? Let’s have a look…

We begin with ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’ (1893) by Arthur Conan Doyle, detailing the very public affair betwixt the eponymous ex-showgirl and the brilliant, devil-may-care surgeon who is the latest to fall under her spell. This is a little long in setup, and its pay-off would be more surprising had the opening paragraphs not spoiled it, but it’s interesting to see Doyle be so uncompromising.

A succession of baffling shootings are the focus of ‘A Mystery of the London Underground’, a.k.a. ‘A Mystery of the Underground’(1897) by John Oxenham, which presents itself largely through a series of newspaper excerpts. Alas, an opportunity is missed in all the newspaper voices sounding the same, the conclusion has nothing to do with the setup, and if you can understand the workings of the borderline-impossible slayings you’re a better reader than me.

‘The Finchley Puzzle’ (1915) sees a return to the world of Richard Marsh‘s lip-reading detective Judith Lee, whom I first encountered in The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime [ss] (2011). Investigative fiction is still in its nonage, so what unfolds here is over-reliant on coincidence and intuitions, and seems to bear out my feeling from our last meeting that Marsh and his brave, resourceful young woman are forgotten for a reason.

I have read ‘The Magic Casket’ (1926) by R. Austin Freeman previously, in the collection of the same name, but any chance to revisit Freeman will be seized avidly. This story of a stolen handbag leading Dr. John Thorndyke to a mysterious theft of pearls, some Sinister Japanese Types, and a lecture on obscure metallurgy isn’t the strongest of Freeman’s offerings, but it’s fun enough and there’s very little in the short form in this sometimes-exquisite series that’s not worth your time.

I’ll not repeat too many thoughts from the post linked above, but I really do enjoy Thorndyke’s closing admission that he opted to end the case in the most dramatic manner possible. It’s a very Sherlockian touch, and this might be the closest Thorndyke comes to pastiching his illustrious forebear.

When a man in fear of his life ends up murdered, it’s a welcome return for Ernest Bramah‘s blind detective Max Carrados in ‘The Holloway Flat Tragedy’ (1927). Not only is Bramah’s written expression delightful — “At first there was no reason why I should [tell her I was married]; afterwards — well, there was a certain amount of reason why I shouldn’t.” — but he also plays her game with a smile on his face (c.f. the parenthesised appeal that the reader not judge inquiry agent Louis Carlyle too harshly).

While I could read this sort of thing all day — “[T]aking refuge behind her whirling head Mrs Jones held out against precision.” — and Carrados’s ‘man’ Parkinson remains an unmitigated delight, I’d have appreciated the terminal deduction being more fully explained; despite previous experience of Carrados’s methods, it does come rather out of nowhere and leave a slightly damp feeling at the end of such joyful crispness.

You can tell by the date of ‘The Magician of Cannon Street’ (1914) by J. S. Fletcher that it’s not going to be a tale of detection, but this fast-moving tale of a hypnotically-gifted criminal mastermind engaged in financial shenanigans is light, fun, and difficult to object to even if it — perhaps fittingly — won’t live long in the memory.

I read ‘The Stealer of Marble’ (1924) by Edgar Wallace in The Mind of Mr. J.G. Reeder [ss] (1925), but have read about 500 books since then and so this clever story about intended murder stemming from the eponymous theft from a stonemason’s was pleasantly novel revisit. Wallace is enjoying himself — c.f. a room with “soft carpet and dainty etceteras” — his characters are bold and memorable, and it reads like something Sir Henry Merrivale would have had a lot of fun solving from his armchair.

I’ve somehow gotten this far into classic crime and detection without reading ‘The Tea-Leaf’ (1925) by Robert Eustace & Edgar Jepson, but maybe I avoided it because the puzzle — the copper-bottomed murder in a Turkish bath of a scientist by an engineer, a strong mutual hatred binding them — held no surprises for me. It is, however, very well-written:

Then the judge came in; and with his coming the atmosphere of the Court became charged with that sense of anxious strain peculiar to trials for murder. It was rather like the atmosphere of a sick room in a case of fatal illness, but worse.

The earliest example of this solution I’d read previously was ‘The Invisible Weapon’ (1928) by Nicholas Olde, so it’s fun to see an older instance of its use. Not going to startle anyone, but definitely worth reading.

Concerning a series of stranglings in the East End, ‘The Hands of Mr. Ottermole’ (1929) by Thomas Burke is richly phrased…

Mr Whybrow was going to die. Somewhere within a hundred yards of him, another man was walking: a man much like Mr Whybrow and much like any other man, but without the only quality that enables mankind to live peaceably together and not as madmen in a jungle. A man with a dead heart eating into itself and bringing forth the foul organisms that arise from death and corruption.

…but is so determinedly in this vein that the Heavy Oppression of it all starts to pall quite quickly. And the solution, familiar to anyone who ever listened to a Jack the Ripper theory, isn’t worth the effort, nor is the conclusion all that surprising. I wanted to like this, but I can’t.

I really, really, really must track down some of H.C. Bailey‘s Reggie Fortune collections, because ‘The Little House’ (1926) is another unusual and undeniably hard-edged tale from someone who I always imagined was something of a big softy. It concludes with an unfortunate piece of surmise that would have been better had something been sewn into the foregoing narrative to set it up, but this story of a missing kitten, with genius little touches like a policeman “so ordinary [that] anything which isn’t ordinary disturbs him”, goes interesting place quickly and engrossingly.

Two sort of nothing stories next, with the first, ‘The Silver Mask’ (1932) by Hugh Walpole having a dimly elegiac air (“[S]he wanted — oh, so terribly — to be kind to someone!”) but then fading out and not really being anything. Probably better if written by Edogawa Rampo, is the only way I can sum up my feelings here.

Then ‘Wind in the East’ (1930) by Henry Wade, which isn’t good and isn’t bad and so remains…just there, really; just words on pages, ink and wood that could have been put to millions of possible uses and ended up here, merely existing.

Puzzle Doctor will tell you that ‘The House in Goblin Wood’ (1947) by Carter Dickson is the finest short story ever written, but I think Anthony Berkeley‘s ‘The Avenging Chance’ (1929) runs it pretty damn close. Ignoring the fact that it proved the wellspring for one of the best GAD novels ever written, the telling is fresh, the characters sharp, the dialogue magnificent…

“Do they think I’m a blank chorus-girl?” fumed Sir William. “Write ’em testimonials about their blank chocolates, indeed! Blank ’em! I’ll complain to the blank committee. That sort of blank thing can’t blank well be allowed here.” Sir William, it will be gathered, was a choleric man.

…and little moments of comedy positively sparkle, like Roger Sheringham sitting too close to a stranger on a bus, or his subtle deflation in a moment when he “had thought he was being rather clever”. There’s also a great closing fillip, and it counts as one of Sheringham’s rare successes — a triumph all round.

There are echoes of Berkeley, or at least his Francis Iles alter ego, in ‘They Don’t Wear Labels’ (1939) by E. M. Delafield. Concerning the hypochondriac Mrs. Peverelli and her long-suffering husband moving into a rooming house, this is one of those crime stories that leaves a certain amount up to the reader, and it’s well-written in achieving this, a harder job than good examples like this make it seem.

A strangled corpse in the billiard room of a gentlemen’s club, and a witness who insists that only one other person entered or left — someone who had not the strength to commit the murder. ‘The Unseen Door’ (1945) by Margery Allingham uses this setup well, doesn’t overstretch its limited resources, and proves a nicely diverting short case for Mr. Albert Campion.

The ‘Cheese’ (1923) of Ethel Lina White‘s title is young Jenny Morgan, set up by Inspector Duncan as the bait with which to catch a particularly nasty killer. This is full of wonderful phrasing — c.f. Duncan reflecting that the country-raised Jenny “could hardly cull sophistication from clover and cows” — and as a piece of suspense is exquisitely measured, earning forgiveness for the convenient parrot. But, wow, that sickly sweet ending, entirely unearned and about as tone-deaf as it gets. What the hell, Ethel? What the hell?

We end with ‘You Can’t Hang Twice’ (1946) by Anthony Gilbert, in which a London pea-souper provides atmospheric background as a witness who has stories to tell that will see an innocent man pardoned tries to make his way to lawyer Arthur Crook. The pacing here is propulsive, the mood beautifully limned, the subtle drops of demobilised troops and fire-watching fill out the milieu nicely, and the eventual resolution cannily achieved.

I’d like to read more by Gilbert, but she’s increasingly hard to find in paperback. Perhaps the BL, having the rights to her short fiction, might deign to put out some of the Arthur Crook noels in due course? A man can dream…

So, a top 5:

1. ‘The Avenging Chance’ (1929) by Anthony Berkeley
2. ‘You Can’t Hang Twice’ (1946) by Anthony Gilbert
3. ‘The Stealer of Marble’ (1924) by Edgar Wallace
4. ‘The Tea-Leaf’ (1925) by Robert Eustace & Edgar Jepson
5. ‘They Don’t Wear Labels’ (1939) by E. M. Delafield

Inevitably some of these don’t work for me, the Wade and Walpole stories in particular, but the joy of the BLCC series is how well they manage to select a range of authors and styles to appeal to such a vast audience: someone reading this probably holds up that Wade as a masterpiece. They’re wrong, but you get my point.

It’s lovely to see a different side to Conan Doyle, wonderful to revisit the Berkeley, and always a joy to spend time in the company of Dr. Thorndyke, though, and as with all the collections in this series you’d be an exceptionally harsh judge to say there’s nothing in here of value. One of the things I really appreciate about Edwards’s editorial eye is how he manages to show the breadth and depth of the genre so well in each individual volume, and that certainly continues to be the case here: you might not love what I did, but there’s absolutely something in here for you.

These BLCC collections always provide an interesting trek though some of the oft-forgotten corners of the classic era, and I eagerly await whichever one I pick up next.