British Library Crime Classics’ latest collection of mystery short stories has some connection to the theater. Some stories are only peripherally connected—feature an opera singer, perhaps—while others are set there and show a deep knowledge of that environment. As usual, the stories are ordered chronologically, beginning with a 1905 story by Baroness Orczy and ending with one from 1958 by Christianna Brand.
Baroness Orzcy’s “The Affair at the Novelty Theater” is a complicated story about the disappearance of some priceless pearls.
“The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel” by A. E. W. Mason is one of the super-complicated crime stories common in the earlier years involving people in costumes, a robbery, and a burglary.
“In View of the Audience” by Margarite Steen is a creepy one about a young man who gets on the wrong train and ends up accompanying a strange man to a derelict theater, where he hears about an old unsolved murder.
“Blood Sacrifice” by Dorothy Sayers leaves the reader to decide if there is a crime or not. Young playwright John Scales is furious with Mr. Drury, who has bastardized Scales’s play to make it a success. Then an accident places Drury in Scales’s power. This is the first story in the book in which characterization plays much of a role.
“The Blind Spot” by Barry Perowne is about a playwright who had a brilliant idea for a locked room mystery when he was drunk but can’t remember it sober.
“I Can Find My Way Out” by Ngaio Marsh probably shows the most knowledge of the theater, as a leading man is murdered in his dressing room.
“The Lady Who Laughed” by Roy Vickers is a strange story about a clown who murders his wife for finding him funny.
I enjoyed the satisfying surprise ending of “The Thirteenth Knife” by Bernard J. Farmer.
In “Credit to William Shakespeare” a poisoning onstage is solved through a man’s knowledge of Hamlet.
I think my favorite story was “After the Event” by Christianna Brand, where her detective, Inspector Cockrill, ruins the Great Detective’s favorite story by explaining how he got it wrong.
I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.
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