CAPITAL CRIMES: LONDON MYSTERIES, edited by Martin Edwards

This delightful collection, from the Poisoned Pen Press' "British Library Crime Classics" series, is simply top-drawer stuff, with stories ranging from the Victorian age to the mid-20th century. Martin Edwards has put together a jewel box here.

It kicks off with one of Arthur Conan Doyle's non-Holmes horror/mystery stories, "The Case of Lady Sannox," an old familiar favorite for me, and then to an abridged version of a serialized story, "A Mystery of the Underground," about a serial killer stalking the subway. The author, John Oxenham (pen name of William Arthur Dunkerly), is almost forgotten today, but in its time the story was a sensation and actually caused a dip in Underground ridership.

Richard Marsh's "The Finchley Puzzle" is fun and interesting, yet utterly preposterous, while R. Austin Freeman's "The Magic Casket" is much more grounded....and yet even more interesting and exciting. You don't mess with Freeman. "The Holloway Flat Tragedy" by Ernest Bramah is him at his best, writing about blind sleuth Max Carrados. I'm not a fan of Bramah; I read his first book of Carrados stories, hailed as classics of detection, and found them poorly written and unengaging, but this story was pretty good.

"The Magician of Cannon Street" by J. S. Fletcher is different from the rest, not quite a straightforward crime-and-detection story, and because it's so different it makes me want to look into Fletcher's work more. Edgar Wallace's "The Stealer of Marble" is a rather good story, impressive as it comes from an author infamous for cranking out stories at an amazing and rapid pace, and often tone-deaf as to quality. Up next, "The Tea Leaf", by Robert Eustace and Edgar Jepson, is a minor classic and a darned good read.

Thomas Burke's "The Hands of Mr. Ottermole" is good melodrama and a fun read, if slightly overwrought, and an example of another author with uneven output. "The Little House" is a great story by H. C. Bailey, an author I've recently discovered, who wrote a very highly-regarded series around medical detective Reggie Fortune. (And everything I've read so far is just delightful.) Hugh Walpole's "The Silver Mask" is a classic cruel tale, and actually pretty unsettling.

"Wind in the East" by Henry Wade is a good police procedural, but the real jewel of this collection is "The Avenging Chance" by Anthony Berkeley. This story is a genuine classic. Inspired by the real-life Christiana Edmunds case (and even mentioning it), a women is poisoned by fatal chocolates. The twist? The box had been sent to someone else and when the recipient wasn't interested, a friend took it home, so its seems as if the wrong person died. The real solution is pretty devious....and the story was later expanded into a novel, "The Poisoned Chocolates Case," which has a different solution.

"They Don't Wear Labels" is a darkly subtle tale from an author better known as a humorist, E. M. Delafield, author of "Diary of a Provincial Lady". Margery Allingham's "The Unseen Door" is a short-short with her series detective, Albert Campion. "Cheese," by Ethel Lina White, is a wryly humorous suspenser from the author whose work inspired the films "The Lady Vanishes" and
"The Spiral Staircase." And winding it up is "You Can't Hang Twice" by Anthony Gilbert, in which a not-always-ethical (but still battling for the right) lawyer plays cat-and-mouse with a murderer in the London fog.

I can't speak highly enough of this collection; this is a great candybox of some of the best British crime writing out there, and a good way of being introduced to some of the best Golden Age detectives. This is a recent issue, still out there in bookstores and available in libraries. Required Reading.

A Couple of Recent Reads

Getting some reading done lately...and here's two samples from the bookshelf.

I came across Frank Tallis' A Death in Vienna in the local library and was intrigued. It's first in a series set in Vienna of the early 1900s, a setting I've always found fascinating. And it didn't disappoint.

Max Liebermann is a psychologist, a student of Freud, and something of a maverick in his focus on talk therapy for patients rather than crude electrotherapy or other discredited treatments. He's friends with Oskar Rheinhardt, a police detective, who calls his friend in to help him when a young medium is found dead. She's posed as if it were a suicide, and shot in the chest...but there's no bullet. And the room is locked from the inside. It's a classic locked-room mystery with a twist in the setting and characters. Which of the medium's regular clients could be responsible?

Lots of cool atmosphere here, and the descriptions of Old Vienna are fun. Oskar applies the latest police methods, and Max applies the latest psychological ideas, and are a great team. The story is great classic detection; the medium is revealed as a fraud, and they dip into the issues of fake mediums of the era. And there's echoes of the quiet firm step of the Nazi party coming down the line, with some characters being openly anti-Semitic. We get a lot of the character's inner lives, with Oskar coping with his anniversary, and Max getting engaged...but by the end appears to be having second thoughts.

My only complaint is that I wish we knew more about how the two became friends...but maybe that comes in a later book. This is a series I definitely want to read more of...this one left me craving strudel and Strauss, so maybe I can whip up some treats and play some waltzes next time I dip into it.

The Red Thumb Mark (1907) is R. Austin Freeman's first novel, and the work that introduced pioneering medical detective John Thorndyke. It spends a bit of time establishing characters, and is inevitably narrated by Thorndyke's Watson, Dr. Jervis. Thorndyke was a very new type of character, really. He used his medical knowledge and all the latest knowledge, and was also written with style and verve. Thorndyke was also a very handsome man; R. Austin Freeman's way of thumbing his nose at the then-current literary habit of having heroes and detectives being unattractive or even rather ugly. (Sapper's Bulldog Drummond was described in the books as a fairly ugly man, although he was played by the dashing Ronald Coleman in film.)

Young Reuben Hornby has been accused of theft form his uncle's gold and silver business; most damning is a bloody thumbprint that is unmistakably Hornby's, even though he claims innocence. It's up to Thorndyke and Jervis to figure out how it happened, and find evidence that the thumbprint is faked....and how?

There are debits in this novel, partly because the crime itself is a bit dull, and really, this is something that could be a longish short story and sometimes feels padded. Problems with plotting aside, it's well-written and with good characterizations, and the final courtroom confrontation, when it's revealed how the thumbprint was faked, is exciting and excellent reading. I definitely want to read more of these.

More coming up....