Resorting to Murder

May 18, 2015
Fans of classic British mysteries will welcome this anthology of 14 vacation-themed stories, most of them published during the first half of the 20th century. As Edwards points out in his introduction, "Holidays offer us the luxury of getting away from it all. So, in a different way, do detective stories." Tales by familiar names in the genre include Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot," a Sherlock Holmes story set in Cornwall, and G.K. Chesterton's "The Finger of Stone," in which art-loving English tourists in France come across a murder sans body. Anthony Berkeley's obscure "Razor Edge" centers on a bathing accident that is anything but. Other hard-to-find selections include Phyllis Bentley's "Where Is Mr. Manetot?," Helen Simpson's "A Posteriori," and Leo Bruce's "Holiday Task." This volume in Poisoned Pen's British Library Crime Classics series is ideal summer vacation reading.

April 1, 2015
Fourteen reprints from England's golden age of detection (here, 1910-1953) show that although favorite sleuths may go on vacation, murder never does. The very first story, Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot," sets the pattern: rarely reprinted lesser tales that have been neglected for good reason. After Sherlock Holmes untangles "the Cornish horror," Doyle's brother-in-law E.W. Hornung sends Dr. John Dollar to Switzerland to determine why a doctor prescribed his patient a lethal dose of strychnine in "A Schoolmaster Abroad"; Paul Beck, closer to home, confronts the killer of a man unlucky in love in M. McDonnell Bodkin's "The Murder on the Golf Links"; G.K. Chesterton sends poet Gabriel Gale to southern France to reveal the fate of a heterodox fossil scientist in "The Finger of Stone"; H.C. Bailey's Reggie Fortune is on hand to unravel a double attack in the Swiss Alps in "The Hazel Ice"; Dr. John Thorndyke minutely reconstructs the appearance of a seaside victim and his killer in R. Austin Freeman's "A Mystery of the Sand-Hills"; Anthony Berkeley shows Roger Sheringham performing remarkably similar offices on Penhampton Beach in "Razor Edge"; and Sgt. Beef divines how the new governor of a Normandy prison was killed in his car without ever getting clocked out of his office in Leo Bruce's "Holiday Task." Less formulaic but equally routine are Arnold Bennett's "Murder!," set on the Channel Coast, and a pair of stories-Basil Thomson's "The Vanishing of Mrs. Fraser" and Michael Gilbert's businesslike "Cousin Once Removed"-that rehash well-worn patterns. The most original entries here are Gerald Findler's haunted-house tale "The House of Screams"; Phyllis Bentley's spooky, twisty "Where is Mr. Manetot?"; and, best of all, "A Posteriori," Helen Simpson's unexpectedly funny crossing of prim Miss Charters with a spy whose work leaves unforgettable traces. One truth emerges unchallenged: when English detectives go on holiday, they really do seem to relax a bit, or at least their creators do.