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BODIES FROM THE LIBRARY
2
Forgotten stories of mystery and suspense by the Queens of Crime and other Masters of the Golden Age
Selected and introduced by
Tony Medawar
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Published by Collins Crime Club 2019
Selection, introduction and notes © Tony Medawar 2019
For copyright acknowledgements, see Acknowledgements
Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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: 9780008318758
Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008318765
Version: 2020-10-23
CONTENTS
Copyright
Introduction
NO FACE
Christianna Brand
BEFORE AND AFTER
Peter Antony
HOTEL EVIDENCE
Helen Simpson
EXIT BEFORE MIDNIGHT
Q Patrick
ROOM TO LET
Margery Allingham
A JOKE’S A JOKE
Jonathan Latimer
THE MAN WHO KNEW
Agatha Christie
THE ALMOST PERFECT MURDER CASE
S. S. Van Dine
THE HOURS OF DARKNESS
Edmund Crispin
CHANCE IS A GREAT THING
E. C. R. Lorac
THE MENTAL BROADCAST
Clayton Rawson
WHITE CAP
Ethel Lina White
SIXPENNYWORTH
John Rhode
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DORSET SQUIRE
C. A. Alington
THE LOCKED ROOM
Dorothy L. Sayers
Acknowledgements
Also available
About the Publisher
‘A great many crime short stories continue to be written with nothing but entertainment in mind.’
Julian Symons
As with the first volume of Bodies from the Library (HarperCollins, 2018), the aim of this volume is to bring into the light more lost or previously unknown short fiction by some of the best-known writers active during the Golden Age of crime and detective fiction, a period that can be loosely defined as starting in 1913 and ending in 1937. These dates mark the publication of two major titles: Trent’s Last Case, in which the journalist E. C. Bentley provided an antidote to Sherlock Holmes; and Busman’s Honeymoon, described as ‘a love story with detective interruptions’ by its author Dorothy L. Sayers.
For our purposes, there is also a loose definition of crime and detective fiction and in this volume, as well as stories that conform to S. S. Van Dine’s requirement that ‘there simply must be a corpse’, there is a story that sets out merely to deceive the reader by only appearing to be criminous, one that blurs the distinction between fact and fiction and another that was published after the end of the Golden Age but playfully tweaks its tail …
Enjoy!
Tony Medawar
February 2019
They sat in their silent ring in the darkened room and their touching fingers trembled and jerked
