Warning: strpos(): Empty needle in /homepages/5/d845057890/htdocs/clickandbuilds/LionessatLarge/wp-content/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails-advanced/classes/Environment.php on line 47
Martin Edwards (ed.), Various Authors: Blood on the Tracks – Lioness at Large

Martin Edwards (ed.), Various Authors: Blood on the Tracks


The January “side read” — topic: Murder by Transport — for the Appointment with Agatha / Agatha Christie Centenary Celebration group read (blog master post HERE; Goodreads group HERE): For me, another reread after first having read this collection only last year, but decidedly one of my favorites among the British Library Classic Crime short story anthologies edited by Martin Edwards.  Like its sister anthologies, the book features a number of short mysteries by Golden — and Silver — Age writers, tied together topically (in this instance, as the title indicates, the overarching topic is “railroads”) and ordered roughly by publication date.  In all, there are 15 stories in this volume:

  • Arthur Conan Doyle: The Man with the Watches
  • L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace: The Mystery of Felwyn Tunnel
  • Matthias McDonnell Bodkin: How He Cut His Stick
  • Emmuska Orczy: The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway
  • Victor L. Whitechurch: The Affair of the Corridor Express
  • R. Austin Freeman: The Case of Oscar Brodski
  • Roy Vickers: The Eighth Lamp
  • Ernest Bramah: The Knight’s Cross Signal Problem
  • Dorothy L. Sayers: The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face
  • F. Tennyson Jesse: The Railway Carriage
  • Sapper: Mystery of the Slipcoach
  • Freeman Wills Crofts: The Level Crossing
  • Ronald Knox: The Adventure of the First-Class Carriage
  • Michael Innes: Murder on the 7.16
  • Michael Gilbert: The Coulman Handicap

Having previously read something else by most of these authors in my personal exploration of the world of Golden Age mysteries, I can say that in most cases these stories give a fairly good impression of the respective writers’ style (at least at the time of these writings); this is particularly true for the stories by Orczy, Whitechurch, Freeman, Bramah, and Sayers (whose style, in turn, probably evolved most later on) — so they are very apt to serve as an introduction to these writers for anybody thinking about exploring their work at greater length.

That said, although I am a great fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s, the story included here, The Man with the Watches (which is taken from a collection named Round the Fire Stories) is decidedly not one of my favorites, but it is also the only story for which this is the case, and it is more than made up for by the Ronald Knox entry, The Adventure of the First-Class Carriage.  Knox was a considerable authority on Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, and his story featured here is not concerned with his own series hero, an insurance detective named Miles Bredon, but rather, with Sherlock Holmes himself (complete with Dr. Watson and Inspector Slack in tow).  And as Holmes pastiches go, it’s an admirable effort — except for the fact that anybody familiar with the Holmes canon will be able to spot the who, how and why a mile away, and the story’s ending is (though ostensibly still paying hommage to Conan Doyle) perhaps a bit more Knox than ACD after all.

Overall, my favorite stories in this collection are R. Austin Freeman’s much-anthologized Case of Oscar Brodski (one of the early short stories in which Freeman developed his unique structural narrative approach — another famous and equally frequently-anthologized one being The Singing Bone),* Dorothy L. Sayers’s Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face (a fine example of an early Wimsey mystery), Michael Gilbert’s The Coulman Handicap (featuring a cleverly-designed cat and mouse game all across London between the police and a gang of thieves), and Freeman Wills Crofts’s The Level Crossing.  The latter for once also has the virtue of not being typical Crofts fare at all: As mentioned in connection with J.J. Connington’s Mystery at Lynden Sands, in most of his writing Crofts is a representative of the “plodding / humdrum detective” tradition; i.e., of mysteries which, in their desire to play fair with the reader and to place him / her on exactly the same footing as the fictional detective by laying out the path to each and every clue precisely as it is travelled by the detective, more than just occasionally sacrifice suspense for detail.  Not so here, however: The Level Crossing is, like R. Austin Freeman’s story, styled as an inverted mystery, i.e. one where you see the crime being committed from the first (for a classic screen version using this format, think of the Columbo series), and which nevertheless manages to offer up more than just one surprise twist before the end.

_____________________________________________________

In Freeman’s own words, from the introduction to the five-story collection The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke:

Some years ago I devised, as an experiment, an inverted detective story in two parts. The first part was a minute and detailed description of a crime, setting forth the antecedents, motives, and all attendant circumstances.  The reader had seen the crime committed, knew all about the criminal, and was in possession of all the facts.  It would have seemed that there was nothing left to tell.  But … the reader would be so occupied with the crime that he would overlook the evidence.“”

(And it would then, of course, be for Dr. Thorndyke to unravel the evidence and solve the case.)

4 thoughts on “Martin Edwards (ed.), Various Authors: Blood on the Tracks

  1. Somehow there’s something cursed about the Doyle stories in the Crime library anthologies for me (admittedly that were…3 or 4 so far). I didn’t enjoy any of them much, Holmes or not. Somehow they all followed the format of: mysterious crime happens that baffles everyone and that no-one can solve but a few years later one of the criminals is kind enough to send a letter to explain everything

    1. Hmmm. The only other story with that format that I can think of off the top of my head is „The Lost Special“, which I agree isn‘t a favorite, either, but chiefly because I don‘t buy that the crime could have happened the way it does. (It, too, is from „ Round the Fire Stories“, btw — overall not ACD‘s best work anyway. It’s included in “Miraculous Mysteries“, the locked room mystery collection.) But there‘s another one, IIRC in „Resorting to Murder“ — I‘d have to check — where ACD basically does a „Cask of Amontillado“, only set in Italy and among archeologists, and that one I liked extremely well, even if about halfway through I could tell where we were headed; I thought the atmosphere was done very well and the motive (albeit sinister) absolutely credible.

      1. Yes I definitely read Miraculous Mysteries so that was one of those I meant…but I still haven’t read Resorting to Murder so Murder so I’m curious how I’ll enjoy that one. It does sound interesting and definitely different

Leave a Reply to Aoife Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Literature Reviews

Adventures in Arda

Note: This was my summer 2022 project — but while I posted the associated project pages here at the time (Middle-earth and its sub-project pages concerning the people and peoples, timeline, geography, etc. of Arda and Middle-earth, see enumeration under the Boromir meme, below), I never got around to also copying this introductory post from […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Michael J. Sullivan: Riyria

The Riyria Revelations are the fantasy series that brought Michael J. Sullivan instant recognition back in the late 2000s.  Originally published as a series of six installments, they are now available as a set of three books, with each of the three books comprising two volumes of the original format.  As he did with almost […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Michael J. Sullivan: Legends of the First Empire

Michael J. Sullivan’s Riyria books have been on my TBR for a while, but until I’d read two short stories from the cycle — The Jester and Professional Integrity — I hadn’t been sure whether his writing would be for me.  Then I found out that (much like Tolkien’s Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History […]

Read More