Part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series, a collection of reprints of crime books originally published from the late Victorian era to the 1960’s but now long out of print. I love the way that this can introduce modern readers, who don’t have access to collections such as my Penguin library, to forgotten stories or even forgotten authors. The series editor is Martin Edwards and he usually provides a brief introduction to each book introducing the author and any unfamiliar context needed. This book is a great starting point, as it is one of the anthologies of short stories, in this case featuring sixteen authors, some still well known such as Ngaio Marsh, Nicholas Blake and even A A Milne but others probably only familiar to fellow bibliophiles (book collectors). I wrote about Milne’s only detective novel back in August 2018, and that blog also includes one of G D H and Margaret Cole’s crime novels, a husband and wife writing team who produced the first story in this collection, Milne’s own contribution here is interesting as it has a novelist talking with a police Chief Constable and saying that the jobs are similar in that they both have a series of items and need to create a story that includes them all:

I could contrive some sort of story out of any assortment of facts, a spot of candlegrease, a badly sharpened pencil, a canary that wouldn’t sing anymore and a man who went to bed one night in his wooden leg. Even as he said this Coleby began to wonder what the story would be. Better start with the canary…

Not all the stories are tales of murder, some like one of my favourites in this collection, the one by E C Bentley featuring his regular amateur detective Philip Trent is far more of a mystery but has an ingenious solution which is based around a mix of ornamental rock gardens and Lewis Carroll. Not a sentence I ever expected to type. One detective I was sort of expecting to find here but didn’t is Lord Peter Wimsey, but thinking about it he is famously a bibliophile but a book is rarely so significant to the plot as to make it into this collection, also Dorothy L Sayers is still a very well known author so is unlikely to feature in a series of books which by their nature are reprinting the more neglected writers. A A Milne of course isn’t neglected for his children’s works but sadly his excellent plays and brief forays into detective fiction are nowadays a lot more obscure. Another great read was ‘Malice Domestic’ by Philip MacDonald, I’ve got a few of his books but oddly haven’t featured him before in this blog, this short story is one of the few I can think of where the resolution doesn’t occur until almost the last sentence and it’s a brilliant twist. But on that subject I really have to mention ‘A Man and His Mother in Law’ where it really is the last line where the whole story turns.

This selection of sixteen stories are well worth reading, there were a couple which I didn’t think were as strong as others but that will be true with any group of stories. The British Library Crime Collection is a superb way to explore the less well known byways of crime fiction and I’m a subscriber so I get a new book every month along with a matching bookmark and a piece of ephemera related to the book especially created for subscribers. If you like murder mysteries then I heartily recommend this service.