David Stuart Davies

'Locked-room' mystery stories are fundamentally flawed, in that they require considerable suspension of disbelief just to accept their improbable scenarios, let alone their often even-more-improbable solutions, but once you accept all of this they become a lot of fun. This means that even though the quality of the stories in Classic Locked-Room Mysteries vary, the book itself is consistently entertaining.

After a great introduction from David Stuart Davies, who compiled this 2016 collection, which summarises an interesting tale from Herodotus and provides useful colour on the various authors included in the volume, Classic Locked-Room Mysteries actually begins unpromisingly, with the unspectacular 'The Aluminium Dagger'. It then proceeds to Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' which, although it deserves immense respect for practically inventing the detective genre and its formula, has a solution which is pretty silly to modern readers.

Fortunately, the book then proceeds to a quintessential 'locked-room' story in Jacques Futrelle's 'The Problem of Cell 13', complete with deductions, conundrums and outlandish solutions. The next story is a real and surprising gem, Lord Dunsany's 'The Two Bottles of Relish'. I won't spoil its rewards, but it unfolds fantastically and its success whets the appetite for the rest of the book. With this goodwill built up, Jepson & Eustace's 'The Tea Leaf' proves entertaining and has one of the best solutions of the collection. Things then dip slightly with Howel Evans' 'The Mystery of the Taxi-Cab'. Wilkie Collins' 'A Terribly Strange Bed' is a better story for its atmosphere than for any ingenuity, as is Hodgson's 'The Thing Invisible'.

A Sherlock Holmes story is always welcome in any company, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Adventure of the Retired Colourman' is effortlessly rewarding even if its not Holmes at his absolute best. David Stuart Davies then uses his editorial remit to insert his own story, 'The Curzon Street Conundrum'. This inevitably feels more modern than the other (classic) stories, even if it is set in the same period. But though it seems out of place, it doesn't feel inferior by any means.

The best is now past, and the rest of the book is just for the reader to indulge in the concept of the locked-room. Aldrich's 'Out of His Head' is curious, and Melville Davisson Post's 'The Doomdorf Mystery' is the best of this late sequence of stories. The American West setting of 'Doomdorf' is a nice change of pace from the British parlour-room atmosphere of most of the other selections, and its solution to the locked-room murder as delightfully far-fetched as any of the others.

The Williamsons' 'The Adventure of the Jacobean House' passed me by, unfortunately, though G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown story 'The Invisible Man' redeemed this with some quality writing. That said, Chesterton's solution seemed the most unlikely of the lot. The collection ends with the return of Jacques Futrelle, the only author included twice. 'The Motor Boat' isn't a locked-room story, making it an unusual inclusion, but it's a fun mystery regardless.

All told, Classic Locked-Room Mysteries does exactly what it says on the tin. There's just something satisfying about stories like this; figuring out how someone was murdered in a room locked from the inside, or escaped from a cell. The stories are, by-and-large, well-chosen and sequenced well and the book will entertain any willing reader throughout.… (meer)

In this spin off novel, Oliver Twist is a 28 year old junior lawyer in the marvellously named firm of Gripwind and Biddle. Oliver and his assistant who is none other than Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, are tasked with making an alteration to the will of Sir Ebenezer Throate. The old man, disgusted with his wastrel of a son, charges the pair with finding his long lost illegitimate other son, offspring of a "moment of madness" with a maidservant a quarter of a century before, so that he can make him his heir. The plot is twisty and turny with various red herrings as to the identity of someone making successive attempts on the life of Sir Ebenezer, though the central device of the wastrel brother and the virtuous brother of course mirrors the roles of Monks and Twist themselves in Dickens's novel. This was colourfully written, if rather implausible in places and, as in Dickens's novel, Twist is actually probably the least interesting character in the story. The final line hints at further stories featuring Oliver and Jack, but this does not seem to have been followed up by the author so far. The book also contained rather a lot of typos. Overall, worth a read, though I didn't enjoy this as much as the author's spin off Sherlock Holmes novels of which I have read two so far.… (meer)

One of the most famous incidents mentioned in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories as having taken place "off the page", as it were, is that of "the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared", mentioned in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire. This is the second full length novelisation I have read based on this throw away line, and it was much better I thought than Paul D Gilbert's interpretation. This one has a thick atmosphere of dread as the foul scheme of Baroness Emmuska Dubeyk to spread bubonic plague through London emerges and her hypnotic powers are used effectively against the Great Detective himself to secure his temporary and unwilling support for her dreadful cause. My only issue was with the conclusion, where I thought the Baroness and her dread creatures were defeated rather too easily through the course of nature, and without Holmes's direct intercession, which felt a bit of a cop out.… (meer)

This compendium of information about Sherlock Holmes stories would be most useful for someone with limited knowledge of the stories and the background to their composition. For each story there is a summary of the plot, something on any composition issues (eg dramatic devices) and a box or two on relevant context. Some of the stories (and of course the novels) have lengthier treatment than others.

The perspective is very much 21st century (eg in discussions on attitudes to race). At the end there are sections on film and stage representations and more contextual material. This is very much the product of an editorial team rather than a single guiding hand, and there is an air of it being assembled by committee. Still worth buying, though it is not a substitute for a fully annotated set of the canon.… (meer)