Book Review Resorting to Murder

Resorting to
Murder

Edited by Martin Edwards

(British Library, 2015)

The oldest of the rules for reviewers is that you shouldn't judge a book by its
cover. In the case of the project by the British Library to
rediscover and republish forgotten crime writers from the 'Golden
Age' of the genre it is hard not to, it is just as well then that the
resulting verdict is a favourable one.

The cover artwork draws on classic railway posters of the inter-war years, with
the British seaside presented here as a paradise of golden sands and
sunshine without a rain-cloud or surly B&B landlady in sight. If
the poetry of John Betjeman makes you go all misty eyed you'll want
to buy at least one of these books.

If the packaging is unquestionably appealing the contents, as is always the
case with anthologies, is something of a mixed bag. Here in many
cases it is the contributions from writers you've heard of that often
disappoint.

'The Adventure of the Devil's Foot' by Arthur Conan Doyle is a late period
Holmes story, still clever and enjoyable, but you can't help feeling
that by then he was giving his audience what it wanted not
necessarily doing work that he found stimulating. 'A Schoolmaster
Abroad' and 'Murder', by E W Hornung and Arnold Bennett respectively
fare less well, coming over as just plain dated.

Less well known contributors prove more interesting, 'A Posteriori' by Helen
Simpson is a neatly ironic story about a spinster holidaying abroad
having her dull life enlivened by a brush with crime. An experience
that turns into a catalogue of embarrassments. 'Razor Edge', the
contribution from Anthony Berkeley is good enough to make a case for
these stories and the novels he wrote as Francis Isles to be better
known outside the confines of the crime genre. The pick of the bunch
though is 'The House of Screams' by Gerald Findler, about whom no
biographical information is available and this appears to be his only
published story, a genuine mystery hidden amongst a lot of pretend
ones.

The stories collected in this anthology have all the flaws and virtues of work of
their vintage. There is no sex or bad language; the gratuitous
violence that infects so much of modern crime writing is, thankfully,
absent too.

On the down side the characterisation of everyone apart form their regular hero,
if they had one, is usually thinner than a boarding house blanket.
These stories for the most part take place in a sunny fantasy world
where everyone, everyone with a speaking role anyway, is upper middle
class at least and the more awkward bits of reality seldom intrude. A
nice enough place to visit; but you wouldn't want to stay there for
the whole summer.

That said it mines a good haul of gold from the creaky cliché of a detective's
holiday turning into a busman's one.