I feel like every time I review a short story collection I need to explain upfront that I don’t gravitate towards short stories. I find it difficult to get into them, especially in a collection where there is one story after another, each one a new beginning with new characters, setting, and the rest of it. At best, they tend to feel a little like eating porridge for breakfast. It’s healthy, and it's good to try new things and all the rest of it, but I’d rather be eating toast and marmalade. All this is to say that when I like a short story collection, I’m a little surprised. But honestly, this newest collection of short stories from British Library Crime Classics was the next best thing to toast and marmalade!
Metropolitan Mysteries: A Casebook of London’s Detectives is a collection of eighteen stories set in London. I love London. I’m a bit of a homebody, but if someone said to me, “We’re going to London. Grab your passport and a change of clothes. We’re leaving in five minutes.” I would be ready in four. I love the architecture, the museums, the bookstores, the parks! I even love the weather. Give me lowering skies over constant sunshine any day. I simply love walking around the city and exploring. It should come as no surprise then, that I was all in for a collection of detective stories set in my favourite city.
The stories contained in Metropolitan Mysteries were originally published between 1908 to 1963. Some of the authors included in this collection I had read before, including Dorothy L. Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Anthony Berkeley. There are a host of others that I had heard of, but haven’t read, such as John Dickson Carr, J. Jefferson Farjeon, and Margery Allingham. While Malcolm Gair, Eric Bennett, and Patricia Moyes, I wasn’t familiar with at all.
The earliest title in the collection is Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”. It starts with an image of London as most tourists might picture the city, enveloped in fog.
In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog settled down upon London. From the Monday to the Thursday I doubt whether it was ever possible from our windows in Baker Street to see the loom of the opposite houses. The first day Holmes had spend in cross-indexing his huge book of references. The second and third had been patiently occupied upon a subject which he had recently made his hobby—the music of the Middle Ages. But when for the fourth time, after pushing back our chairs from breakfast we saw the greasy, heavy brown swirl still drifting past us and condensing in oily drops upon the window-panes, my comrade’s impatient and active nature could endure this drab existence no longer. (37)
And what detective, may I ask, is more quintessentially London than Sherlock Holmes? I have found some of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels to be a bit tedious, as I find that his writing can be a bit clunky, but this short story was a real treat!
Eric Bennett’s “Death on Nelson’s Column” centres around the London landmark and makes a very good job of using a most unlikely dumping ground for a body, about 150 feet* above Trafalgar Square. The body is discovered by a steeplejack while making the perilous climb up the monument in preparation for cleaning.
For the first time in forty years the steeplejack lost his nerve. His scream was lost in the harsh cries of the pigeons. Only his terrified assistant saw his body roll half-balanced on the edge, his legs kick wildly in the air.[…]The dead man was lying full length on the platform staring with wide, empty eyes, across the roofs of London to where the Thames was sparkling in the morning sun. The colossal stone Nelson towered above and stared blindly with him. (189)
Aren’t you dying to know how the body got up there?!
Like the many different faces of London, no two stories in this collection are alike. Although, there are two that have a remarkably similar beginning, Henry Wade’s 1933 story, “The Real Thing” and the 1963 story “The Dead Man Climbed Upstairs” by Raymond Postgate. Both open with a ticket collector in the Underground spotting a body at the top of an escalator. But while “The Real Thing” progresses into a tense shoot ‘em up, “The Dead Man Climbed Upstairs” reaches a much quieter, and perhaps more satisfying conclusion.
The most touching story has to be Anthony Berkeley’s “Unsound Mind”. It opens with a Chief Inspector getting a call from a man who says he will momentarily be committing suicide with prussic acid. He gives his name, and says he has left a note, but “this is just to confirm it” (155). Then he rings off. It’s such an intriguing opening and the story has a lot more depth than I had expected. Although, I should have been prepared for something more than a simple detective story from Berkeley. After all, I did just read his book Before the Fact, which was wonderfully atmospheric and showed off his talent for writing complex and messy characters.
Another goodie is J. Jefferson Farjeon’s “Sergeant Dobbin Works It Out”. Sergeant Dobbin is stationed at the police station in quiet Little Warbridge and keen for promotion.
Not much happened in Little Warbridge police station, and when it did Sergeant Dobbin always has to deal with a secret emotion. It had to be secret, because policemen were not supposed to express any, but the sergeant had plenty beneath his official uniform, and whenever the telephone rang at an unusual time—a rare occurrence—he always experienced a somewhat ingenuous hope that this might herald his Big Chance. After all, you never knew, did you? (251)
It must be Sergeant Dobbin’s lucky day, because he has bagged himself a murder, which he is set on solving before he has to hand the case over to his superior. But is he up to the task? Farjeon brings this one to an amusing conclusion. A sense of humour must run in the Farjeon family, as his sister, Eleanor Farjeon, is the author of Miss Granby’s Secret, which, while being a work of genius, in my opinion, is also very witty.
The only story that I felt a bit annoyed with was “The Miser of Maida Vale” by Baroness Orczy. This story from 1925 uses a framing device whereby a character we only know as “the Old Man in the Corner” tells a case to a woman journalist in an ABC teashop. I couldn’t see why the journalist or the Old Man needed to be in the story at all, but I may have simply missed the point. I enjoyed the story, but whenever I was reminded that the narrative was being told secondhand, I felt distanced from the story and, frankly, the story lost some of its agency.
Overall, I found the stories to be outstanding. I tried to pick out a favourite story from the collection and failed, which, I think, is a sign that Martin Edwards has done a fabulous job of selecting the titles in this collection. Through reading this book I’ve discovered a number of new-to-me authors to add to my must read list, and I’ve had the pleasure of doing a bit of armchair travelling to my favourite city to boot. I left this one wishing all short story collections were this good!
Thank you to British Library Publishing for kindly sending me a copy of Metropolitan Mysteries for review. As always, all opinions on the book are my own.
*Nelson’s Column was surveyed in 2006 and measured 169 feet 3 inches (51.59 m) tall from the bottom of the pedestal to the top of Nelson’s hat. The statue of Nelson himself is 18 feet 1 inch (5.52 m) according to Wikipedia. But I couldn’t find the height of the pedestal the statue stands on. Hence the approximation that a body left at the top of the column would be about 150 feet (45.72 m) above street level.
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