Over the long New Year break, I was richly sustained by an omnibus volume of crime stories I had found tucked away at the back of a cupboard at Roshanara. This was Fifty Famous Detectives of Fiction which was published, in the edition I found, by the Home Library Club which was conducted ‘under the joint management’ of two Indian newspaper groups and the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon. But looking further I found that this was a famous collection that had first been published in England in 1938. Full marks then to our newspaper conglomerates for ensuring that the colonies too got the benefit of stories redolent of the mother country at its most preposterous, zany plots and zany sleuths aplenty.
It has been recommended by the Crime Writers Association as their first choice as to a short story collection of golden age stories. I have noted previously, in other posts on this blog, my joy in that golden age, and its stars feature prominently in this collection, Agatha Christie (with Poirot and Miss Marple and Mr Quin stories) and Margery Allingham and Dorothy L Sayers and John Dickson Carr. But there are also stars of earlier periods, Conan Doyle and G K Chesterton and E Phillips Oppenheim whom I discovered at Roshanara and even Edgar Allan Poe. And there were also several new names, including some interesting Americans, with stories set in New York and Chicago and also rural New England. Sadly the last story in the book was without its last page, when its hero Trevis Tarrant was about to solve the mystery of several people jumping off a pleasure boat to drown in a lake. The book ends with him having just one shot left in his Winchester to deal with a creature coming towards his boat with the speed of lightning.
I could not find the conclusion on the internet, though I assume all went well in the end. Comments which suggest Tarrant was well over the top noted however that this story, ‘The Episode of “Torment 4”’, was one of the better ones.
But quality did not really come into it, I felt, though obviously some stories were more gripping than others. They were all readable, and all made you want to know who had done it. They included mysterious deaths caused by idols, some with secret weapons concealed in them, others aided and abetted by humans.
There are lots of crimes in country houses, robbery as well as murder, lots of stolid policemen, some of whom are brilliant while others are duly shown up by amateurs, lots of elegant society women who need to be defended or thwarted.
One cannot really talk of favourites in such a broad collection, but I should perhaps mention the simplicity with which problems are solved in stories such as ‘East Wind’ (where only the ending reveals the importance of the title), or the lunatic ‘Snowball Burglary’ which was created to tease the expert in crime Reginald Fortune but had an unexpected outcome, or the delightfully complex ‘Curious Circumstances of the Two Left Shoes’ where the stolen silver is found at the bottom of a river.
It was a splendid conclusion to the great range of detective fiction I had found at Roshanara, which had been such a solace in this extended convalescence.