The Big Bow Mystery

THE BIG BOW MYSTERY

East End landlady Mrs Drabdump is alarmed when she cannot rouse her lodger Arthur Constant. She summons the assistance of her neighbour, retired Scotland Yard detective George Grodman. He breaks down the door to Constant’s room, only to find the man lying dead on his bed, with a deep cut to his throat. No-one, it seems, could have got in or out of the locked room and there is no sign of the murder weapon. Who was the killer and how will he be identified? A man is condemned to death for the seemingly impossible crime but Grodman is unconvinced that he is guilty. With its sardonic style and vivid, Dickensian characters, Zangwill’s short novel remains a cleverly plotted and ingenious murder mystery which will still appeal to readers today.

Whodunit fans who prefer their murders mysteriously committed behind locked doors will appreciate this reissue of the first impossible crime novel’ Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Israel Zangwill (January 21, 1864–August 1, 1926) was an English humourist and writer. Zangwill was born in London on January 21, 1864 in a family of Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia (Moses Zangwill from what is now Latvia and Ellen Hannah Marks Zangwill from what is now Poland). He dedicated his life to championing the cause of the oppressed. Jewish emancipation, women’s suffrage, assimilationism, territorialism and Zionism (understood as a national liberation movement) were all fertile fields for his pen. His brother was also a writer, the novelist Louis Zangwill, and his son was the prominent British psychologist, Oliver Zangwill. Zangwill received his early schooling in Plymouth and Bristol. When he was nine years old Zangwill was enrolled in the Jews’ Free School in Spitalfields in east London, a school for Jewish immigrant children. The school offered a strict course of both secular and religious studies while supplying clothing, food, and health care for the scholars; today one of its four houses is named Zangwill in his honour. At this school young Israel excelled and even taught part-time, moving up to become a full-fledged teacher. While teaching, he studied for his degree in 1884 from the University of London, earning a BA with triple honours. In later life, his friends included well-known Victorian writers such as Jerome K Jerome and HG Wells.

GASLIGHT CRIME – A GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Nick Rennison

When fans of crime novels talk of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, they are usually referring to the 1920s and the 1930s – the era of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham. Yet there was an earlier and arguably greater Golden Age – the period between 1887, the year in which Sherlock Holmes first appeared, and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This was the Age of Gaslight Crime. It was during these years that crime fiction emerged as a full-fledged genre of literature. This was the time when dozens of weekly and monthly magazines regularly featured crime stories. It was when some of the major publishers of the day began to publish detective novels in large numbers for the first time. It was when Sherlock Holmes grew and grew in popularity until he was established as the iconic figure in British culture he has remained to the present day.

The era had other genre bestsellers in addition to Conan Doyle’s novels and collections of short stories about his great detective. Some even sold more copies than the works of the maestro. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume, for instance, was first published in 1886 in Melbourne, Australia, the city in which the story takes place. The following year – the same year in which Sherlock Holmes took his first bow in A Study in Scarlet – the novel appeared in an edition published in London. It went on to sell half a million copies worldwide, far outstripping early sales of Conan Doyle’s book. Hume published more than a hundred other novels, not all of them crime fiction, in a career that lasted until 1932 but none had the startling success of his first one.

However, the story is not all about Holmes and big bestsellers. What is striking about crime fiction in the 1890s and 1900s is its sheer diversity. Inspired by Conan Doyle, plenty of pipe-smoking imitations of his great detective prowled the foggy streets of London. Some were mere clones created by hack penny-a-liners to fill the pages of the proliferating magazines. Others were more substantial and original creations in themselves. Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, a lawyer turned private detective, featured in stories that were originally published, like the Sherlock Holmes adventures, in the Strand magazine. Hewitt was a much less flamboyant character than Holmes but his adventures remain well worth reading. (Morrison was also the creator of Horace Dorrington, an intriguingly amoral private detective in 1890s London who’s not even averse to trying to bump off his clients if they become troublesome.) Dr Thorndyke, the invention of R Austin Freeman, was a medical man who became a lawyer and used the knowledge he had gained in both professions to solve crimes. He made his debut in 1907 in The Red Thumb Mark, a tale that highlights the then fledgling science of fingerprints, and continued to appear in novels and short stories until 1942.

Eager to make their characters stand out from the crowd, writers sought for novel and distinguishing features with which to endow them. At the very end of the gaslight era, Ernest Bramah introduced his blind investigator Max Carrados, a man whose other senses had become preternaturally acute since he lost his sight. Thorpe Hazell, a railway obsessive and passionate vegetarian, was the unlikely hero of a series of stories by Victor Whitechurch, first collected in a volume published in 1912 entitled Thrilling Stories of the Railway and read recently on BBC Radio by Benedict Cumberbatch. Some detectives of the time had a particular attraction to the occult. William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder and Alice and Claude Askew’s Aylmer Vance faced up to mostly supernatural antagonists in their investigations. Gentlemen burglars were popular on both sides of the Channel. Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law EW Hornung created Raffles, a cricketer and amateur cracksman who appeared in twenty-six short stories and one novel between 1898 and 1909; the French writer Maurice Leblanc came up with the similarly larcenous Arsène Lupin in 1905 and his adventures were rapidly translated into English.

Sleuths of all nationalities from French (Robert Barr’s Eugène Valmont) and Indian (a wise old Hindu named Kala Persad featured in stories by Headon Hill) to Canadian (the woodsman November Joe, created by Hesketh Prichard) flourished in the magazines. Women detectives were also popular. Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke who appeared in short stories in The Ludgate Monthly in 1893 and then in book form, was a resourceful employee of the Fleet Street Detective Agency; Dorcas Dene, an actress turned detective, featured in two books by George R Sims; Lady Molly of Scotland Yard was the creation of Baroness Orczy, best known for her novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, the dashing hero of the French Revolution.

Many of the categories of crime fiction familiar today originated in this era. Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery, published as a serial in 1891, was the first full-length ‘locked-room’ mystery; the ‘inverted detective story’, in which the murderer’s identity is known from the beginning and the interest lies in the investigative process, has its beginnings in the work of R Austin Freeman; many of Freeman’s books can also be seen as forerunners of forensic science mysteries; and the psychological thriller, which might seem an exclusively contemporary form, has its prototypes in books like Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger. Even the beginnings of the police procedural, usually dated to the years after the Second World War, can be glimpsed in Edwardian stories about police officers like B Fletcher Robinson’s Inspector Addington Peace and George R Sims’s Detective Inspector Chance.

The Gaslight Crime and Mystery Club reflects the huge variety of crime fiction from the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. It really was a Golden Age. In the pages of the Club’s books, readers will find all the evidence they need that there is much more to gaslight crime than just Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. There are many more riches just waiting to be discovered.

THE BIG BOW MYSTERY

A Preface by Nick Rennison

The locked-room mystery has long been popular in crime fiction. Impossible murders. Crime scenes to which no killer could have apparently gained access. Barred and bolted rooms from which none could seemingly have escaped. These have figured in novels by some of the best-known names in the genre including Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie. Some writers of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction – most famously John Dickson Carr – specialised in the locked-room mystery. Its origins lie in Poe’s short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, first published in 1841, but the first locked-room novel appeared half a century later. It was The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill. Zangwill was best known in his lifetime for his novel Children of the Ghetto, which provides a vivid portrait of the East End Jewish community in which he grew up, and for his play The Melting Pot, set in America; but today it is his one venture into crime fiction which still attracts readers. The Big Bow Mystery opens in a London fog of the kind familiar from the Sherlock Holmes short stories which began to appear in the Strand magazine in the same year that Zangwill’s novel was serialised in the Star newspaper. East End landlady Mrs Drabdump is alarmed when she cannot rouse her lodger Arthur Constant. She summons the assistance of her neighbour, retired Scotland Yard detective George Grodman. He breaks down the door to Constant’s room, only to find the man lying dead on his bed, with a deep cut to his throat. No one, it seems, could have got in or out of the locked room and there is no sign of the murder weapon. Who was the killer and how will he be identified? A man is condemned to death for the seemingly impossible crime but Grodman is unconvinced that he is guilty. More than 120 years after its publication The Big Bow Mystery remains a compelling read. Zangwill is a clever writer. As the names of some of his characters suggest, he was an admirer of Dickens (indeed he has sometimes been called ‘the Jewish Dickens’) and his evocation of East End London life is often as memorable as the work of his master. His wit, humour and satirical digs at society are also occasionally Dickensian. In the final analysis, however, a mystery novel stands or falls on the quality of the mystery at its heart. As Zangwill himself wrote in the introduction to a later edition of his book, reproduced after this introduction, ‘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.’ He has justifiable confidence in the puzzle he has devised. Halfway through the book, secure in the knowledge that he is several steps ahead of all his readers, he even cheekily proposes a series of possible solutions to it before showing why each one can’t be true. (This is a trick that John Dickson Carr repeated fifty years later.) His later claim that ‘the only person who has ever solved ‘The Big Bow Mystery’ is myself’ may be hyperbole but there is no doubt that his working out of his plot is ingenious. It depends on a device that has been echoed, indeed downright plagiarised, in many novels by later writers but it can still fool the unwary. With its final, ironic twist on its last page, The Big Bow Mystery is not only the first locked-room novel. It remains one of the best.

INTRODUCTION 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