The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits Volume 1 (The Mammoth Book Series) Read online

  Mike Ashley is a leading authority on horror, fantasy and science fiction. Since 1974 he has written and edited over thirty books, including Weird Legacies, Souls in Metal, Mrs Gaskell’s Tales of Mystery and Horror, Jewels of Wonder, Best of British SF (2 vols.), Who’s Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of Short Horror Novels, Pendragon Chronicles and The Camelot Chronicles.

  He has also contributed widely to fantasy magazines and encyclopedias in Britain and America, including Amazing Stories, Locus and Twilight Zone Magazine.

  THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF

  HISTORICAL WHODUNNITS

  Also available

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  of the 1940s

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  The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories 2

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  The Mammoth Book of Terror

  The Mammoth Book of Puzzles

  The Mammoth Book of Vampires

  The Mammoth Book of Killer Women

  The Mammoth Book of

  HISTORICAL

  WHODUNNITS

  Edited by

  Mike Ashley

  Robinson

  London

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published by Robinson Publishing Ltd 1993

  Introductory material and this arrangement copyright

  © Mike Ashley 1993

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  eISBN 978-1-47211-708-3

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: The Chronicles of Crime

  Foreword by Ellis Peters

  PART I: THE ANCIENT WORLD

  1 The Locked Tomb Mystery Elizabeth Peters

  2 The Thief versus King Rhampsinitus Herodotus

  3 Socrates Solves a Murder Brèni James

  4 Mightier Than the Sword John Maddox Roberts

  5 The Treasury Thefts Wallace Nichols

  6 A Byzantine Mystery Mary Reed and Eric Mayer

  7 He Came With the Rain Robert van Gulik

  8 The High King’s Sword Peter Tremayne

  PART II: THE MIDDLE AGES

  9 The Price of Light Ellis Peters

  10 The Confession of Brother Athelstan Paul Harding

  11 The Witch’s Tale Margaret Frazer

  12 Father Hugh and the Deadly Scythe Mary Monica Pulver

  13 Leonardo Da Vinci, Detective Theodore Mathieson

  14 A Sad and Bloody Hour Joe Gores

  PART III: REGENCY AND GASLIGHT

  15 The Christmas Masque S. S. Rafferty

  16 Murder Lock’d In Lillian de la Torre

  17 Captain Nash and the Wroth Inheritance Raymond Butler

  18 The Doomdorf Mystery Melville Davisson Post

  19 Murder in the Rue Royale Michael Harrison

  20 The Gentleman from Paris John Dickson Carr

  21 The Golden Nugget Poker Game Edward D. Hoch

  PART IV: HOLMES AND BEYOND

  22 The Case of the Deptford Horror Adrian Conan Doyle

  23 Five Rings in Reno R. L. Stevens

  Afterword: Old-Time Detection Arthur Griffiths

  Appendix: The Chroniclers of Crime

  Acknowledgements

  There have been a number of people who have helped me in the compilation of this anthology. First and foremost I must thank Miss Edith Pargeter for kindly providing the foreword, and her own words of encouragement on the project. I must also thank Jack Adrian, a most learned expert on mystery and detective fiction, who suggested a number of stories to me, and provided me with copies of the lesser known ones. Likewise Peter Berresford Ellis who brought several other stories to my attention. My thanks to Michael Williams who provided me with his memories of Wallace Nichols. Finally my thanks to Robert Adey and Richard Dalby, both of whom took the great risk of loaning me copies of particularly rare volumes, and which I hope are now safely restored to them.

  Acknowledgements are accorded to the following for the rights to reprint the stories in this anthology.

  “Captain Nash and the Wroth Inheritance” © 1975 by Ragan Butler. Originally published by Harwood-Smart Publishing, Lewes. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Gentleman from Paris” © 1950 by John Dickson Carr. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1950. Reprinted by permission of the agents for the author’s estate, David Higham Associates (UK).

  “Murder Lock’d In” © 1980 by Lillian de la Torre. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1, 1980. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agents, David Higham Associates (UK), and in the US by Harold Ober Associates.

  “The Case of the Deptford Horror” © 1954 by Adrian Conan Doyle. Originally published in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (London: John Murray, 1954). Reprinted by permission of Richard Doyle for the author’s estate.

  “The Witch’s Tale” © 1993 by Margaret Frazer. First printing, used by permission of the authors.

  “A Sad and Bloody Hour” © 1965 by Joe Gores. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1965. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Confession of Brother Athelstan” © 1993 by Paul Harding. First printing, used by permission of the author.

  “Murder in the Rue Royale” © 1967 by Michael Harrison. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1968. Unable to trace the author’s representative.

  “The Golden Nugget Poker Game” © 1986 by Edward D. Hoch. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1987.

  “Five Rings in Reno” © 1976 by Edward D. Hoch [R. L. Stevens]. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1976. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Socrates Solves a Murder” © 1954 by Brèni James. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1954. Unable to trace the author or the author’s representative.

  “Leonardo Da Vinci, Detective” © 1958 by Theodore Mathieson. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mys
tery Magazine, January 1959. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Treasury Thefts” © 1950 by Wallace Nichols. Originally published as “The Case of the Empress’s Jewels” in the London Mystery Magazine, April 1950, and as “The Treasury Thefts” in the London Mystery Magazine, June 1950. Unable to trace the author’s representative.

  “The Locked Tomb Mystery” © 1989 by Elizabeth Peters. First published in Sisters in Crime, edited by Marilyn Wallace, New York: Berkley Books, 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, David Grossman Literary Agency.

  “Foreword” © 1993 by Ellis Peters. First printing, used by permission of the author.

  “The Price of Light” © 1979 by Ellis Peters. Originally published in Winter’s Crimes 11, edited by George Hardinge (London, Macmillan, 1979), and in the author’s collection A Rare Benedictine (London, Headline Book Publishing PLC 1988). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s publisher, Headline Book Publishing PLC.

  “Father Hugh and the Deadly Scythe” © 1990 by Mary Monica Pulver. Originally printed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, 1990. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Christmas Masque” © 1976 by S.S. Rafferty. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1976. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Byzantine Mystery” © 1993 by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer. First printing, used by permission of the author.

  “Mightier Than the Sword” © 1993 by John Maddox Roberts. First printing, used by permission of the author.

  “The High King’s Sword” © 1993 by Peter Tremayne. First printing, used by permission of the authors.

  “He Came With the Rain” © 1967 by Robert van Gulik. First published in Judge Dee at Work (London: William Heinemann, 1967). Reprinted by permission of Dr. Thomas M. van Gulik.

  Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material. The Editor would be pleased to hear from anyone if they believe there has been any inadvertent transgression of copyright, and also from anyone who can help trace the representatives of Michael Harrison, Brèni James and Wallace Nicols.

  Introduction

  THE CHRONICLES

  OF CRIME

  This anthology is the first of a kind. It’s the first to bring together a selection of stories featuring detectives from the entire history of the civilised world.

  Stories about historical detectives are relatively new, though they are not as new as some may feel. To many, the historical detective field burst forth fully fledged with the Brother Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters. There is no doubt that Miss Peters’s superbly developed works created a little niche of their own with the medieval mystery story, and that world has grown substantially in the last ten years. But the historical detective story has been around a while longer than that, though until Ellis Peters’s creation, it lacked an identity.

  So, what do I mean by the historical detective story. Quite simply it’s the union of two much older literary fields – the historical fiction field with that of the detective story, but the emphasis has to be on the detective element, otherwise it is nothing more than a historical story containing some element of mystery. For the purposes of this anthology, and to give it some structure, I have been rather stringent in my definition of the historical detective story. Strictly speaking any detective story set in a period earlier than its composition would have to be regarded as historical. But I personally believe that any writer who can draw upon his direct personal memories of the past is still, in his own mind, writing a relatively contemporary work. I have thus been very restrictive and decided that a historical detective story should, at the very least, be set at a period before the author’s birth, and to all intents and purposes that really means before the twentieth century.

  I’ve made one exception to that self-imposed rule for a special reason that will be obvious when you encounter it. As you will see from the contents page, the stories I have selected range from as far back as 1400 BC, down through the years to the time of Sherlock Holmes. En route they pass through ancient Greece and Rome, the mystic Orient, the Middle Ages and Elizabethan period, to the Regency and Victorian periods. Over three thousand years of historical detection.

  As an afterword I have reprinted a piece on the origins of detective work to show how it really developed. I’ve also assembled a checklist of novels and stories featuring historical detectives for further reading.

  It’s perhaps a little surprising that the fields of historical fiction and detective fiction didn’t come together earlier than they did, but throughout the nineteenth century they kept to their own separate paths.

  The detective story was created almost single-handedly by that tragic American genius Edgar Allan Poe, with his gruesome “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, published in Graham’s Magazine for April 1841. It introduced the first detective in fiction, C. Auguste Dupin. Poe wrote two more stories featuring Dupin, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842) and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). Since the settings for these stories were contemporary for Poe they could not qualify for this anthology, even though the stories are most certainly historic if not historical. However, a hundred-and-twenty years later the author Michael Harrison wrote a new series of stories about Dupin, and these of course do qualify. So I’m delighted to be able to include a story featuring the first ever fictional detective.

  Dupin was a master of logical or ratiocinative deduction, a skill brought to the ultimate by the doyen of detection, Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, Dupin was one of a number of influences upon Arthur Conan Doyle in creating Holmes. I find it surprising that Doyle did not create a historical detective because Doyle preferred writing historical fiction and, in later years, came to resent the time he felt obliged to spend on creating new Holmes’ stories. Quite why he never put the two together I do not know.

  In researching for this anthology I tried to find if Doyle had written any story set in the past featuring someone using detective skills. A few of the Brigadier Gerard stories, set in the Napoleonic period, involve mysteries but no detection. With the assistance of Christopher and Barbara Roden of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society, the closest we could get was “The Silver Hatchet”. This was written in 1883 but set in 1861 when Doyle was two years old, so it almost qualified. However, although the story does feature a police detective, he does very little detection.

  I almost cheated! The Sherlock Holmes stories themselves are often set in periods earlier than their writing, as Watson dusts off another set of papers from his archives and recounts an ancient case. The earliest recorded investigation by Holmes is “The Gloria Scott”, published in 1893 but set some twenty years earlier when Holmes was at college. But the story has a contemporary setting with Holmes relating to Watson his first case. It doesn’t really qualify. Still, it’s a good game working out the gap between the publication of a Holmes story and its setting. There are in fact a number of stories about Holmes by Doyle published well into the twentieth century but set in the 1880s and 90s, and the biggest span of years I could find is with “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger” set in 1896 but not published until 1927.

  However, I decided to remain pure to the cause. There have, in fact, been many stories written about Sherlock Holmes since Conan Doyle laid down his pen, including several by his son, Adrian. These have been unfairly overlooked, and since they are genuine historical detective stories, I have selected one of those for this volume.

  The first author to write a story featuring a genuine historical detective was an American lawyer, Melville Davisson Post. In Uncle Abner, Post created a strong, upright, god-fearing man, in the early years of the nineteenth century, who had phenomenal powers of observation and deduction and at times equals Holmes in his perceptiveness. The first Uncle Abner story, “Angel of the Lord”, was published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1911, and Post wrote another twenty or so over the next few years. “The Doomdorf Mystery”, which is reprinted in this volume, remains to my mind the mos
t ingenious.

  Some may argue that there was an earlier historical detective in print, none other than the Scarlet Pimpernel, created by Baroness Orczy in 1905. There is no denying the popularity and influence of the character, but Sir Percy Blakeney, who masqueraded as the Pimpernel in the days of the French revolution, was really a secret agent and the purist in me does not regard a secret agent as a genuine detective.

  In fact although the occasional short story appeared which could perhaps be shoe-horned into the historical detective genre, including some by the great author of swashbucklers, Rafael Sabatini, the Uncle Abner stories remained unique for almost thirty years. Then, in the forties, the American academic and mystery writer Lillian de la Torre, saw the wonderful opportunities presented by the British giant of letters, Dr Samuel Johnson, with his ready-made Watson, James Boswell. Starting in 1943 she began what has become the longest-running series of historical detective stories featuring the investigations of Dr Sam Johnson, Detector.

  At about that same time, Agatha Christie became attracted to the possibilities of writing a detective novel set in ancient Egypt. It was in response to an idea suggested by an Egyptologist friend, Professor Stephen Glanville, to whom the book is dedicated. Up until that time no one had written an entire detective novel set in an historical period, let alone one so far back as 2000 BC.

  It wasn’t long though before another great writer of detective stories started to make the historical detective novel something of his own. John Dickson Carr, the master of the impossible crime, had toyed with historical mysteries for some years as short stories, but in 1950 he completed The Bride of Newgate. Set at the end of the Napoleonic era, the story is about Richard Darwent, imprisoned in Newgate and then pardoned for a crime he did not commit, who sets out to identify the real criminal. It is one of Carr’s best novels, written when he was at the peak of his power. It was at the same time that he penned the story included in this anthology, “The Gentleman from Paris”.