The Perfect Crime: The Big Bow Mystery

Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain as The Big Bow Mystery by Henry & Co. 1892

Published as The Perfect Crime by The Detective Story Club Ltd

for Wm Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1929

‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’

first published by Graham’s Magazine 1841

Introductions © John Curran 2015

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1929, 2015

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008137281

Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008137298

Version: 2015-07-06

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

The Big Bow Mystery: BY ISRAEL ZANGWILL

Preface of Murders and Mysteries

Note

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

The Murders in the Rue Morgue: BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

Introduction

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

WHEN a corpse is found, with its throat cut and no sign of a weapon, in a room locked and bolted from the inside, both murder and suicide must be discarded as impossible. But writers of detective fiction, and their readers, are more circumspect. For them these fascinating conditions pose the questions: Whodunit? and, even more intriguingly, How?

Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) was not only the first detective story, but also the first locked-room detective story; and The Big Bow Mystery (1892) by Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was the first book-length example of the form. As such, it occupies an important place in the history of detective fiction.

The story first appeared in 1891 as a serial in the London daily Star newspaper, for which Zangwill worked at the time; it was published in book form the following year and collected in Zangwill’s The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes in 1903. In a preface, written for an 1895 edition of his book, the author perceptively acknowledged what is, in essence, the ‘fair-play’ rule of detective fiction (as adopted many years later by the Detection Club) when he wrote:

‘The indispensable condition of a good mystery is that it should be able and unable to be solved by the reader, and that that the writer’s solution should satisfy. And not only must the solution be adequate, but all its data must be given in the body of the story.’

Zangwill had long suspected, he explained, that ‘no mystery-monger had ever murdered a man in a room to which there was no possible access’ and that, although he had devised such a solution, it lay dormant until the editor of ‘a popular London evening newspaper’ asked him ‘to provide…a more original piece of fiction’. As the story unfolded—written in a fortnight ‘day by day’, according to the author—readers of the serial submitted ‘unsolicited testimonials in the shape of solutions’, although they ‘had failed, one and all, to hit on the real murderer’. (One can’t help wondering if the variety of possible solutions put forward in the course of the novel were some of these suggestions.)

The previous quarter-century had seen the publication of landmark novels of detective fiction: Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case (1878). And in the years immediately preceding The Big Bow Mystery the appearance of the world’s first ‘consulting detective’, Sherlock Holmes, ushered in the pre-Golden Age of detective fiction. Two of Holmes’s full-length investigations—A Study in Scarlet (1888) and The Sign of (the) Four (1890)—were followed by the first dozen of the phenomenally successful short stories in the Strand magazine, beginning in July 1891 with ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. So when Zangwill’s novel was published, the public appetite for crime fiction was well established—and almost insatiable.

Zangwill, the son of Latvian and Polish immigrants, was born in London’s East End and showed literary promise as early as eighteen. A teacher for some years after he graduated from London University, he eventually left the profession to write full-time, publishing hundreds of essays, as well as novels, short stories and plays produced in London and New York. His work concentrated on political, social and Jewish issues but The Big Bow Mystery was his only venture into detective fiction.

Given this background, his novel is more socially aware than many of its contemporaries. Two of the main characters are closely involved with the labour movement and a detailed picture of the social conditions of London’s East End and its denizens is conveyed through the characters and their circumstances. Dickensian names—the upright Arthur Constant, the hugely entertaining Mrs Drabdump, the enigmatic Edward Wimp, the elusive Jessie Dymond and the wonderfully named Denzil Cantercot—help to reinforce this milieu. A less than flattering picture of the police, and their initial attempts to solve the case, against a background of ‘a frigid grey mist’ and ‘cold [that] cut like a many-bladed knife’ contribute to the overall mood of a powerless stratum of society.

In the course of the novel the reader is treated to a baffling murder, an investigation, an inquest, a checking of alibis, a court case, a last-minute revelation and a shocking denouement; in fact, most of the components of the best detective fiction. And throughout, the locked room problem shares centre-stage with the ‘whodunit’ element. A nod to Poe in Chapter IV and the somewhat similar problem presented to his detective and readers in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is inevitable; although rest assured that while the problem in both stories may be similar, Zangwill’s solution is totally different. Arguably it is superior, because, like all clever solutions, it contains elements of the psychological as well as the physical; as the villain confidently asserts in the closing pages, ‘to dash a half-truth in the world’s eyes is the surest way of blinding it altogether’. The explanation of the riddle is, in retrospect, tantalisingly simple and maddeningly obvious and, as with many such problems, if you can discern the ‘how’, you automatically know the ‘who’. Variations on the solution have been adapted and adopted many times since; and by some of the most resourceful practitioners in the genre.

Perhaps because ‘the solution of the inexplicable problem agitated mankind from China to Peru’ and had been ‘discussed in every language under the sun’, the novel features, in the closing chapters, the (unnamed) Home Secretary, as well as a guest appearance by William Gladstone. Zangwill writes in a prefatory Note that the justification for introducing the then Prime Minister ‘into a fictitious scene is defended on the grounds that he is largely mythical’.

Within a decade of Zangwill’s novel, Sherlock Holmes returned, miraculously, from the Reichenbach Falls, Chesterton’s immortal Father Brown and Freeman’s famous Dr Thorndyke began their careers in ‘The Blue Cross’ (1903) and The Red Thumb Mark (1907) respectively; and the world of crime fiction was never the same again.

The Big Bow Mystery was filmed in a semi-silent version as The Perfect Crime in 1928 and as The Verdict in 1946. With the former very much in the public consciousness when Collins began The Detective Story Club imprint in July 1929, Zangwill’s book was an obvious choice as one of the launch titles, and explains the change of title on the jacket, even though it was still entitled The Big Bow Mystery inside.

DR JOHN CURRAN

Dublin, March 2015

PREFACE OF MURDERS AND MYSTERIES

AS this little book was written some four years ago, I feel able to review it without prejudice. A new book just hot from the brain is naturally apt to appear faulty to its begetter, but an old book has got into the proper perspective and may be praised by him without fear or favour. The Big Bow Mystery seems to me an excellent murder story, as murder stories go, for, while as sensational as the most of them, it contains more humour and character creation than the best. Indeed, the humour is too abundant. Mysteries should be sedate and sober. There should be a pervasive atmosphere of horror and awe such as Poe manages to create. Humour is out of tone; it would be more artistic to preserve a sombre note throughout. But I was a realist in those days, and in real life mysteries occur to real persons with their individual humours, and mysterious circumstances are apt to be complicated by comic. The indispensable condition of a good mystery is that it should be able and unable to be solved by the reader, and that the writer’s solution should satisfy. Many a mystery runs on breathlessly enough till the dénouement is reached, only to leave the reader with the sense of having been robbed of his breath under false pretences. And not only must the solution be adequate, but all its data must be given in the body of the story. The author must not suddenly spring a new person or a new circumstance upon his reader at the end. Thus, if a friend were to ask me to guess who dined with him yesterday, it would be fatuous if he had in mind somebody of whom he knew I had never heard. The only person who has ever solved The Big Bow Mystery is myself. This is not paradox but plain fact. For long before the book was written, I said to myself one night that no mystery-monger had ever murdered a man in a room to which there was no possible access. The puzzle was scarcely propounded ere the solution flew up and the idea lay stored in my mind till, years later, during the silly season, the editor of a popular London evening paper, anxious to let the sea-serpent have a year off, asked me to provide him with a more original piece of fiction. I might have refused, but there was murder in my soul, and here was the opportunity. I went to work seriously, though the Morning Post subsequently said the skit was too laboured, and I succeeded at least in exciting my readers, so many of whom sent in unsolicited testimonials in the shape of solutions during the run of the story that, when it ended, the editor asked me to say something by way of acknowledgement. Thereupon I wrote a letter to the paper, thanking the would-be solvers for their kindly attempts to help me out of the mess into which I had got the plot. I did not like to wound their feelings by saying straight out that they had failed, one and all, to hit on the real murderer, just like real police, so I tried to break the truth to them in a roundabout, mendacious fashion, as thus:

To the Editor of The Star.

Sir: Now that The Big Bow Mystery is solved to the satisfaction of at least one person, will you allow that person the use of your invaluable columns to enable him to thank the hundreds of your readers who have favoured him with their kind suggestions and solutions while his tale was running and they were reading? I ask this more especially because great credit is due to them for enabling me to end the story in a manner so satisfactory to myself. When I started it, I had, of course, no idea who had done the murder, but I was determined no one should guess it. Accordingly, as each correspondent sent in the name of a suspect, I determined he or she should not be the guilty party. By degrees every one of the characters got ticked off as innocent—all except one, and I had no option but to make that character the murderer. I was very sorry to do this, as I rather liked that particular person, but when one has such ingenious readers, what can one do? You can’t let anybody boast that he guessed aright, and, in spite of the trouble of altering the plot five or six times, I feel that I have chosen the course most consistent with the dignity of my profession. Had I not been impelled by this consideration I should certainly have brought in a verdict against Mrs Drabdump, as recommended by the reader who said that, judging by the illustration in the Star, she must be at least seven feet high, and, therefore, could easily have got on the roof and put her (proportionately) long arm down the chimney to effect the cut. I am not responsible for the artist’s conception of the character. When I last saw the good lady she was under six feet, but your artist may have had later information. The Star is always so frightfully up to date. I ought not to omit the humorous remark of a correspondent, who said: ‘Mortlake might have swung in some wild way from one window to another, at any rate in a story.’ I hope my fellow-writers thus satirically prodded will not demand his name, as I object to murders, ‘at any rate in real life’. Finally, a word with the legions who have taken me to task for allowing Mr Gladstone to write over 170 words on a postcard. It is all owing to you, sir, who announced my story as containing humorous elements. I tried to put in some, and this gentle dig at the grand old correspondent’s habits was intended to be one of them. However, if I am to be taken ‘at the foot of the letter’ (or rather of the postcard), I must say that only today I received a postcard containing about 250 words. But this was not from Mr Gladstone. At any rate, till Mr Gladstone himself repudiates this postcard, I shall consider myself justified in allowing it to stand in the book.

Again thanking your readers for their valuable assistance,

Yours, etc.

One would have imagined that nobody could take this seriously, for it is obvious that the mystery-story is just the one species of story that cannot be told impromptu or altered at the last moment, seeing that it demands the most careful piecing together and the most elaborate dovetailing. Nevertheless, if you cast your joke upon the waters, you shall find it no joke after many days. This is what I read in the Lyttelton Times, New Zealand: ‘The chain of circumstantial evidence seems fairly irrefragable. From all accounts, Mr Zangwill himself was puzzled, after carefully forging every link, how to break it. The method ultimately adopted I consider more ingenious than convincing.’ After that I made up my mind never to joke again, but this good intention now helps to pave the beaten path.

I. ZANGWILL

London, September 1895

NOTE

THE Mystery which the author will always associate with this story is how he got through the task of writing it. It was written in a fortnight—day by day—to meet a sudden demand from the Star, which made ‘a new departure’ with it.

The said fortnight was further disturbed by an extraordinary combined attack of other troubles and tasks. This is no excuse for the shortcomings of the book, as it was always open to the writer to revise or suppress it. The latter function may safely be left to the public, while if the work stands—almost to a letter—as it appeared in the Star, it is because the author cannot tell a story more than once.

The introduction of Mr Gladstone into a fictitious scene is defended on the ground that he is largely mythical.

I. Z.

CHAPTER I

ON a memorable morning of early December London opened its eyes on a frigid grey mist. There are mornings when King Fog masses his molecules of carbon in serried squadrons in the city, while he scatters them tenuously in the suburbs; so that your morning train may bear you from twilight to darkness. But today the enemy’s manoeuvring was more monotonous. From Bow even unto Hammersmith there draggled a dull, wretched vapour, like the wraith of an impecunious suicide come into a fortune immediately after the fatal deed. The barometers and thermometers had sympathetically shared its depression, and their spirits (when they had any) were low. The cold cut like a many-bladed knife.

Mrs Drabdump, of 11 Glover Street, Bow, was one of the few persons in London whom fog did not depress. She went about her work quite as cheerlessly as usual. She had been among the earliest to be aware of the enemy’s advent, picking out the strands of fog from the coils of darkness the moment she rolled up her bedroom blind and unveiled the sombre picture of the winter morning. She knew that the fog had come to stay for the day at least, and that the gas bill for the quarter was going to beat the record in high-jumping. She also knew that this was because she had allowed her new gentleman lodger, Mr Arthur Constant, to pay a fixed sum of a shilling a week for gas, instead of charging him a proportion of the actual account for the whole house. The meteorologists might have saved the credit of their science if they had reckoned with Mrs Drabdump’s next gas bill when they predicted the weather and made ‘Snow’ the favourite, and said that ‘Fog’ would be nowhere. Fog was everywhere, yet Mrs Drabdump took no credit to herself for her prescience. Mrs Drabdump indeed took no credit for anything, paying her way along doggedly, and struggling through life like a wearied swimmer trying to touch the horizon. That things always went as badly as she had foreseen did not exhilarate her in the least.

Mrs Drabdump was a widow. Widows are not born but made, else you might have fancied Mrs Drabdump had always been a widow. Nature had given her that tall, spare form, and that pale, thin-lipped, elongated, hard-eyed visage, and that painfully precise hair, which are always associated with widowhood in low life. It is only in higher circles that women can lose their husbands and yet remain bewitching. The late Mr Drabdump had scratched the base of his thumb with a rusty nail, and Mrs Drabdump’s foreboding that he would die of lockjaw had not prevented her wrestling day and night with the shadow of Death, as she had wrestled with it vainly twice before, when Katie died of diphtheria and little Johnny of scarlet fever. Perhaps it is from overwork among the poor that Death has been reduced to a shadow.

Mrs Drabdump was lighting the kitchen fire. She did it very scientifically, as knowing the contrariety of coal and the anxiety of flaming sticks to end in smoke unless rigidly kept up to the mark. Science was a success as usual; and Mrs Drabdump rose from her knees content, like a Parsee priestess who had duly paid her morning devotions to her deity. Then she started violently, and nearly lost her balance. Her eye had caught the hands of the clock on the mantel. They pointed to fifteen minutes to seven. Mrs Drabdump’s devotion to the kitchen fire invariably terminated at fifteen minutes past six. What was the matter with the clock?

Mrs Drabdump had an immediate vision of Snoppet, the neighbouring horologist, keeping the clock in hand for weeks and then returning it only superficially repaired and secretly injured more vitally ‘for the good of the trade’. The evil vision vanished as quickly as it came, exorcised by the deep boom of St Dunstan’s bells chiming the three-quarters. In its place a great horror surged. Instinct had failed; Mrs Drabdump had risen at half-past six instead of six. Now she understood why she had been feeling so dazed and strange and sleepy. She had overslept herself.

Chagrined and puzzled, she hastily set the kettle over the crackling coal, discovering a second later that she had overslept herself because Mr Constant wished to be woke three-quarters of an hour earlier than usual, and to have his breakfast at seven, having to speak at an early meeting of discontented tram-men. She ran at once, candle in hand, to his bedroom. It was upstairs. All ‘upstairs’ was Arthur Constant’s domain, for it consisted of but two mutually independent rooms. Mrs Drabdump knocked viciously at the door of the one he used for a bedroom, crying, ‘Seven o’clock, sir. You’ll be late, sir. You must get up at once.’ The usual slumberous ‘All right’ was not forthcoming; but, as she herself had varied her morning salute, her ear was less expectant of the echo. She went downstairs, with no foreboding save that the kettle would come off second best in the race between its boiling and her lodger’s dressing.

For she knew there was no fear of Arthur Constant’s lying deaf to the call of duty—temporarily represented by Mrs Drabdump. He was a light sleeper, and the tram conductors’ bells were probably ringing in his ears, summoning him to the meeting. Why Arthur Constant, B.A.—white-handed and white-shirted, and gentleman to the very purse of him—should concern himself with tram-men, when fortune had confined his necessary relations with drivers to cabmen at the least, Mrs Drabdump could not quite make out. He probably aspired to represent Bow in Parliament; but then it would surely have been wiser to lodge with a landlady who possessed a vote by having a husband alive. Nor was there much practical wisdom in his wish to black his own boots (an occupation in which he shone but little), and to live in every way like a Bow working man. Bow working men were not so lavish in their patronage of water, whether existing in drinking glasses, morning tubs, or laundress’s establishments. Nor did they eat the delicacies with which Mrs Drabdump supplied him, with the assurance that they were the artisan’s appanage. She could not bear to see him eat things unbefitting his station. Arthur Constant opened his mouth and ate what his landlady gave him, not first deliberately shutting his eyes according to the formula, the rather pluming himself on keeping them very wide open. But it is difficult for saints to see through their own halos; and in practice an aureola about the head is often indistinguishable from a mist.

The tea to be scalded in Mr Constant’s pot, when that cantankerous kettle should boil, was not the coarse mixture of black and green sacred to herself and Mr Mortlake, of whom the thoughts of breakfast now reminded her. Poor Mr Mortlake, gone off without any to Devonport, somewhere about four in the fog-thickened darkness of a winter night! Well, she hoped his journey would be duly rewarded, that his perks would be heavy, and that he would make as good a thing out of the ‘travelling expenses’ as rival labour leaders roundly accused him of to other people’s faces. She did not grudge him his gains, nor was it her business if, as they alleged, in introducing Mr Constant to her vacant rooms, his idea was not merely to benefit his landlady. He had done her an uncommon good turn, queer as was the lodger thus introduced. His own apostleship to the sons of toil gave Mrs Drabdump no twinges of perplexity. Tom Mortlake had been a compositor; and apostleship was obviously a profession better paid and of a higher social status. Tom Mortlake—the hero of a hundred strikes—set up in print on a poster, was unmistakably superior to Tom Mortlake setting up other men’s names at a case. Still, the work was not all beer and skittles, and Mrs Drabdump felt that Tom’s latest job was not enviable. She shook his door as she passed it on her way to the kitchen, but there was no response. The street door was only a few feet off down the passage, and a glance at it dispelled the last hope that Tom had abandoned the journey. The door was unbolted and unchained, and the only security was the latchkey lock. Mrs Drabdump felt a whit uneasy, though, to give her her due, she never suffered as much as most housewives do from criminals who never come. Not quite opposite, but still only a few doors off, on the other side of the street, lived the celebrated ex-detective Grodman, and, illogically enough, his presence in the street gave Mrs Drabdump a curious sense of security, as of a believer living under the shadow of the fane. That any human being of ill-odour should consciously come within a mile of the scent of so famous a sleuth-hound seemed to her highly improbable. Grodman had retired (with a competence) and was only a sleeping dog now; still, even criminals would have sense enough to let him lie.