HIDDEN corNErs
MURDER
IN THE STACKS Richard Davenport-Hines on the escapist pleasures to be found in the Library’s detective fiction collection
T
Above Nicholas Blake’s A Question of Proof (1935). Opposite, left to right Ellery Queen’s The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933); G.K. Chesterton’s The Incredulity of Father Brown (1923); Michael Innes’s Death at the President’s Lodging (1936), 1962 edition.
20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
he London Library is a treasure trove of works from the golden age of detective fiction. The whodunits are heavily borrowed from the Fiction shelves – carried home with stealthy pleasure by members of the Library who feel a heavy cold coming on or are facing a Bank Holiday weekend with dull or abrasive relations. They are an escapist consolation for all of us who want to step away from the harsh din, angular edges and importunate needs of the present. ‘To resist living in one’s own time, to attempt to live in an imaginary past, is human in the same way that being neurotic is human, ’ the American scholar Edward Mendelson has written. Detective novels are a retreat into an imaginary past in which a small number of protagonists circle one another in an enclosed dream world. A cordon sanitaire of fantasy protects the characters from the clumsy, grubby reality of life around them; although there are plots, betrayals and killings, these seem far removed from the paranoia of one’s own time, and readers have the satisfying certainty that the sleuth will resolve the puzzle and rout the murderer. The Library’s collection of detective fiction is rich, idiosyncratic and uneven – like much of the best of this unique
institution. This is a brief survey of the more significant or suggestive holdings. I promise not to spoil any surprise endings. In England, Agatha Christie published her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, Freeman Wills Crofts made his debut with The Cask in 1920, Dorothy L. Sayers published Whose Body? in 1923, Nicholas Blake A Question of Proof in 1935, Edmund Crispin The Case of the Gilded Fly in 1944. We have them all. These English whodunits, in which the pleasure lies in deducing the guilty party from baffling clues, had American imitators, notably the drug-besotted art critic writing under the pseudonym of S.S. Van Dine, who launched his camp sleuth Philo Vance in 1926 (we have nine of his twelve novels); Ellery Queen, who published his first whodunit, The Roman Hat Mystery, in 1929 (one of the nineteen Queen books at the London Library); and John Dickson Carr, who published the first of his locked-room mysteries in 1930. Raymond Chandler declared in his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950) that ‘a writer who is afraid to over-reach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong’ . I wish, though, that Dickson Carr had been more fearful in the stretch of his plots. The contrivances of The Waxworks Murder (1936) or The Problem of the Wired Cage (1939) are just
