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  NOVELS BY ELLERY QUEEN

  The Roman Hat Mystery

  The French Powder Mystery

  The Dutch Shoe Mystery

  The Greek Coffin Mystery

  The Egyptian Cross Mystery

  The American Gun Mystery

  The Siamese Twin Mystery

  The Chinese Orange Mystery

  The Spanish Cape Mystery

  Halfway House

  The Door Between

  The Devil to Pay

  The Four of Hearts

  The Dragon’s Teeth

  Calamity Town (in preparation)

  BOOKS OF SHORT STORIES BY ELLERY QUEEN

  The Adventures of Ellery Queen

  The New Adventures of Ellery Queen

  CRITICAL WORKS BY ELLERY QUEEN

  Challenge to the Reader (An Anthology)

  101 Years’ Entertainment:

  The Great Detective Stories

  1841-1941 (A Commemorative Anthology)

  UNDER THE PSEUDONYM OF BARNABY ROSS

  The Tragedy of X

  The Tragedy of Y

  The Tragedy of Z

  Drury Lane’s Last Case

  UNDER THE PSEUDONYM OF ELLERY QUEEN, JR.

  The Black Dog Mystery (A Juvenile)

  JUNIOR MYSTERIES BY ELLERY QUEEN

  Ellery Queen, Master Detective

  The Penthouse Mystery

  The Last Man Club (A Radio Adaptation)

  101 YEARS’ ENTERTAINMENT

  THE GREAT DETECTIVE STORIES, 1841-1941

  EDITED BY

  ELLERY QUEEN

  LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY BOSTON

  1942

  COPYRIGHT 1941, BY LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT

  TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PORTIONS

  THEREOF IN ANY FORM

  Published November 1941

  Reprinted December 1941 (twice)

  Reprinted January 1942

  Reprinted May 1942

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  CONTENTS

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE GREAT DETECTIVES

  THE PURLOINED LETTER by EDGAR ALLAN POE

  THE SCIENCE OF DEDUCTION by A. CONAN DOYLE

  THE LENTON CROFT ROBBERIES by ARTHUR MORRISON

  THE S.S. by M. P. SHIEL

  THE DUBLIN MYSTERY by BARONESS ORCZY

  THE PROBLEM OF CELL 13 by JACQUES FUTRELLE

  THE ABSENT-MINDED COTERIE by ROBERT BARR

  THE RED SILK SCARF by MAURICE LEBLANC

  THE PUZZLE LOCK by R. AUSTIN FREEMAN

  THE SECRET GARDEN by GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

  THE MAN WHO SPOKE LATIN by SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS

  THE DOOMDORF MYSTERY by MELVILLE DAVISSON POST

  THE SWEET SHOT by E. C. BENTLEY

  THE TRAGEDY AT BROOKBEND COTTAGE by ERNEST BRAMAH

  THE PINK EDGE by FRANK FROEST AND GEORGE DILNOT

  THE LONG DINNER by H. C. BAILEY

  A CHESS PROBLEM by AGATHA CHRISTIE

  THE OWL AT THE WINDOW by G. D. H. AND M. I. COLE

  A MATTER OF TASTE by DOROTHY L. SAYERS

  THE CYPRIAN BEES by ANTHONY WYNNE

  SOLVED BY INSPECTION by RONALD A. KNOX

  THE AVENGING CHANCE by ANTHONY BERKELEY

  THE BORDER-LINE CASE by MARGERY ALLINGHAM

  THE TWO BOTTLES OF RELISH by LORD DUNSANY

  A MAN CALLED SPADE by DASHIELL HAMMETT

  THE RESURRECTION OF CHIN LEE by T. S. STRIBLING

  THE MAD TEA PARTY by ELLERY QUEEN

  THE CRIME IN NOBODY’S ROOM by CARTER DICKSON

  THE GREAT WOMEN DETECTIVES

  THE TEA LEAF by EDGAR JEPSON AND ROBERT EUSTACE

  THE MACKENZIE CASE by VIOLA BROTHERS SHORE

  INTRODUCING SUSAN DARE by MIGNON EBERHART

  THE GREAT HUMOROUS DETECTIVE STORIES

  THE TREASURE HUNT by MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

  THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MRS. LEIGH GORDON by AGATHA CHRISTIE

  THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING WASH by OCTAVUS ROY COHEN

  THE GREAT THIEVES

  THE CRIMINOLOGISTS’ CLUB by E. W. HORNUNG

  ARSÈNE LUPIN IN PRISON by MAURICE LEBLANC

  BLIND MAN’S BUFF by FREDERICK IRVING ANDERSON

  THE STOLEN ROMNEY by EDGAR WALLACE

  PARIS ADVENTURE by LESLIE CHARTERIS

  THE GREAT CRIME STORIES

  THE CLOCK by A. E. W. MASON

  THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME by RICHARD CONNELL

  THE ELEVENTH JUROR by VINCENT STARRETT

  PHILOMEL COTTAGE by AGATHA CHRISTIE

  FAITH, HOPE AND CHARITY by IRVIN S. COBB

  THE HANDS OF MR. OTTERMOLE by THOMAS BURKE

  TREASURE TROVE by F. TENNYSON JESSE

  SUSPICION by DOROTHY L. SAYERS

  THE SILVER MASK by HUGH WALPOLE

  RANSOM by PEARL S. BUCK

  THE DETECTIVE STORY TO END DETECTIVE STORIES

  THE PERFECT CRIME by BEN RAY REDMAN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Those of you who find no charm in facts and figures, names and dates and footnotes, commentaries and asides, have the editors’ permission to skip over this Introduction and proceed without delay to the fifty tales we have selected to commemorate the first 101 Years’ Entertainment.

  I. Prenatal Note

  The first violent crime of literature was a murder, complete with victim, criminal, motive, and — inferentially — weapon; for although Chapter 4 of Genesis merely remarks: “Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him,” we may assume the instrument to have been a forked-stick plow, or a primitive hoe, since it came to pass “when they were in the field,” and Cain, as everyone knows, was “a tiller of the ground.”

  This historic fratricide nevertheless cannot be said to have initiated the literature of detection for the profound reason that the case lacked the essential element — a detective. And while the bloody corpse of history swarms with homicides and inferior crimes, and literature has fattened on the pleasant details, the simple fact is that the detective story had to wait upon the detective, and the detective — as we know him today — did not make his début on the human scene until A.D. 1829, when Sir Robert Peel created the first official police force in London. After all, literature follows man like a dog, and in this connection man has lagged badly.

  A round dozen years after the first bobby, the young editor of a Philadelphia magazine, Graham’s, while pondering the problems of circulation, wrote a new kind of tale and inserted it — we may suppose with the twin-barreled anxiety of author and editor — into one of his issues. Mark well the date — April, 1841 — for upon this date the first detective story the world had ever known was thrust before its astonished nose.

  Many editors since have found that Edgar Allan Poe, in this as in peculiarly literary matters, was a gentleman of prescience. For detective stories have saved many a bashful journal from oblivion, and to say that they have given joy and surcease to multitudinous millions for three long generations would be merely to repeat a point grown dull with repetition.

  II. The First Hundred Years

  Modern readers tend to think of “detective stories” as novels, and admittedly the novels are numberless. But the original, the “legitimate,” form was the short story. The detective novel is a short story inflated by characterization and description and romantic nonsense, too often for purposes of padding, and adds only one innovation to the short-story form: the byplot, or red herring, which when badly used serves only to irritate when it is meant to confuse. Poe published the world’s first detective short story in 1841, but what is generally considered the world’s first detective nov
el — Gaboriau’s L’Affaire Lerouge — did not appear in Le Pays until 1866, twenty-five years after The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

  Notwithstanding the pristine purity of the short form, there has been a deplorable tendency among many prominent authors of detective fiction to avoid it. Whether this is because in the 20th Century the publication of detective short stories has proved commercially unprofitable — especially in more recent years — or for some less worthy reason, the fact remains that no short story exists which involves Detectives Charlie Chan (Earl Derr Biggers), Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout), Nick Charles (Dashiell Hammett), Perry Mason (Erie Stanley Gardner), or Philo Vance (S. S. Van Dine). [i] And so, unhappily, they will not be found in this book.

  For that matter there are other, equally important, detectives of fiction whose short-story exploits are so few as to escape all but the keenest-eyed enthusiast. John Rhode’s Dr. Priestley appears in only two short stories, The Elusive Bullet and The Vanishing Diamond. Freeman Wills Crofts’s Inspector French appears in only three: East Wind, The Match, and The Hunt Ball; A. E. W. Mason’s Hanaud in only one, The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel; Anthony Berkeley’s Roger Sheringham in a mere two: The Avenging Chance (included in this volume) and White Butterfly; John Dickson Carr’s Dr. Fell in one, The Wrong Problem; Anthony Abbot’s Thatcher Colt in two, About the Disappearance of Agatha King and About the Perfect Crime of Mr. Digberry; and David Frome’s Mr. Pinkerton in one, Policeman’s Cape.

  But if the aforementioned worthies have been remiss, certainly others have not; and this book is dedicated to those others. The stories in 101 Years’ Entertainment are not necessarily “the best”; perfection is a matter of the nicest individual judgment, and it would be presumptuous of us to attempt to canonize for posterity our betters.

  But we can paint a whole picture of what the First Hundred Years have brought forth by reprinting stories old, derivative, not so old, recent, and new; representative stories; interesting stories; unusual stories; the classic greats as well as tales which to the average reader — indeed, to many an expert — are unknown. For we have kept an eye cocked for that four-leaf clover which is the object of all who browse in the green pastures of literary research — the “discovery,” the story overlooked by other anthologists. Of such we have been fortunate to detect a surprising number; and they are here, in this book, for your delight. Most readers know The Purloined Letter of Poe, The Absent-Minded Coterie of Robert Barr, and The Cyprian Bees of Anthony Wynne; but how many know Inspector Barraclough and The Pink Edge, or that fascinating female Gwynn Leith in The Mackenzie Case of Viola Brothers Shore, or The Two Bottles of Relish, by Lord Dunsany, in which an astounding deduction is made by a gentleman named Linley — a deduction which, if it were the only one he ever made (as happens to be the case), would give him automatic citizenship in the Eternal City of the elite?

  For the rest, we give you joy of Doyle’s incomparable Sherlock Holmes; that most durable of Sherlockian imitators, Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt; scholarly Dr. Thorndyke of R. Austin Freeman; that humble little genius of the cloth, Father Brown, invented by the master of paradox, Gilbert K. Chesterton; Melville Davisson Post’s stalwart, religious, early-American Uncle Abner; Ernest Bramah’s blind sleuth, Max Carrados; Agatha Christie’s conceited and delightful exponent of the little gray cells, M. Hercule Poirot; H. C. Bailey’s mourning, moaning, indefatigable Mr. Fortune; Dorothy L. Sayers’s dilettante Lord Peter Wimsey; and E. C. Bentley’s Philip Trent of Trent’s Last Case renown.

  Nor will you take less joy in these less advertised but no less brilliant lights: M. P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski; Samuel Hopkins Adams’s Average Jones; Ronald A. Knox’s Miles Bredon; Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion; Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade; Pulitzer Prizewinner T. S. Stribling’s Professor Poggioli; Carter Dickson’s Colonel March — among many many others known and unknown to the connoisseur of the detective short story.

  III. Sources and Classifications

  What have the First Hundred Years of the detective-crime short story produced? Let us examine the record.

  The two principal sources of the detective-crime short story for student and lay reader are: periodicals and books. On the number of such tales published in magazines and newspapers since 1841, no statistics are available; but certainly their total must run into astronomical figures. All slick-paper popular magazines at one time or another publish detective-crime stories; and among the so-called “pulps” of America and England there have been hundreds of particolored publications dedicated vigorously to this brand of fiction. See your nearest kiosk.

  As a rule, the best magazine stories eventually achieve book publication. This natural winnowing process has been a boon to enthusiasts, who may read in one volume the grist of scores of scattered and heterogeneous periodicals. Of course, not all the worthy stories find a home between hard covers; magazines do yield nuggets of gold if only one digs hard and deep enough. We unearthed Dashiell Hammett’s A Man Called Spade in American magazine, Miss Shore’s The Mackenzie Case in a long-deceased magazine named Mystery League, T. S. Stribling’s The Resurrection of Chin Lee in that admirable pulp, Adventure, Octavus Roy Cohen’s The Mystery of the Missing Wash in Saturday Evening Post, and Pearl S. Buck’s Ransom in Cosmopolitan. None of these excellent stories has ever been reprinted in a book. But these are exceptions. The point to bear in mind is that, for convenience and quality, books remain the chief source of the detective-crime short story.

  The volumes in which such tales have been collected may be divided into six groups: (a) The short stories of “pure” detection; (b) books containing tales of mixed types; (c) books of crook short stories; (d) parodies and pastiches of Sherlock Holmes; (e) pseudo-real life tales; and (f) anthologies.

  IV. The Short Story of “Pure” Detection

  Considering the virulence of the literary bug and its affinity for all manner of hosts, the first century since Poe has produced a remarkably small number of books of detective short stories. One reason for this we have already mentioned: even detective-story writers must live, and such books do not sell. It is interesting in this connection to note the extremes of desperation to which some authors (or their publishers) have resorted to keep from their innocent patrons, in whom this prejudice against volumes of short stories generally persists, the fact that a given book is in truth a book of short stories. The favorite device is to disguise the book as a novel. This feat of publishing magic is achieved by editorial and typographic legerdemain — dividing the book into “chapters” instead of candidly separate stories, and assigning consecutive chapter numbers and chapter titles to the stories — usually two or more “chapters” per story. An unsuspecting glance, and the purchaser is deceived. His subsequent howl, after the transaction, dies as he begins bitterly to read, and he finishes the book grumbling, but mollified. At least, this is the theory. Such business psychology no doubt dictated the interior format of Robert Barr’s The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont (1906), Jacques Futrelle’s The Thinking Machine on the Case (1908), Baroness Orczy’s The Old Man in the Corner (1909), T. W. Hanshew’s Cleek, the Man of the Forty Faces (1910), Melville Davisson Post’s The Nameless Thing (1912), and Herbert Jenkins’s Malcolm Sage, Detective (1921).[ii]

  If the number of books of detective short stories of all types is surprisingly small, the number of those of the “pure” detection type is amazingly so. Only 247 known titles of this type exist, breaking down into three classifications: (1) 215 about male detectives, like Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Mr. Fortune; (2) 27 about female detectives — from C. L. Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke (1894), George R. Sims’s Dorcas Dene (1897), and McDonnell Bodkin’s Dora Myrl (1900) to the more modern Mme. Storey (1926) of Hulbert Footner, Mignon Eberhart’s Susan Dare (1934), and the Coles’ Mrs. Warrender (1939); and (3) 5 books of short stories about boy detectives. Four of these last concern the adventures in detection of young P. J. Davenant written by Lord Frederic Hamilton; the other is The Adventures of Detective Barney, by Harvey
O’Higgins.

  Of the 247 volumes of stories of “pure” detection, 50 are the work of only 5 authors! These fertile scriveners are Dick Donovan (believe it or not, once an immensely popular writer — his real name was Joyce Emmerson Muddock); Gilbert K. Chesterton, who created not only Father Brown but also Home Fisher, Mr. Pond, and Gabriel Gale; Arthur B. Reeve, creator of Craig Kennedy and Constance Dunlap; Agatha Christie; and H. C. Bailey. This leaves a mere 197 books of “pure” detective short stories written by all the rest of mankind since 1841! And many of these 197 volumes are so scarce today as to be virtually unobtainable — such oddities as Headon Hill’s Zambra the Detective (1894); David Christie Murray’s The Investigations of John Pym (1895); H. Frankish’s Dr. Cunliffe, Investigator (1902); Duncan Dallas’s Paul Richards, Detective (1908); Victor Whitechurch’s Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912), about Thorpe Hazell, detective; Cecil Henry Bullivant’s Garnett Bell, Detective (circa 1918); Scott Campbell’s paperbacks about Detective Felix Boyd; and numerous others.

  V. The Books of “Mixed Types”

  To add to the labors of the research worker, many books exist whose stories are not exclusively devoted to the adventures of a single detective. In such collections of stories a tale of “pure” detection may be smothered under a haystack of straight mystery stories, or stories of crime-sans-detection. Such a heterogeneous volume is Anna Katharine Green’s Masterpieces of Mystery (1913) — surely the publisher’s title, which he regretted, for six years later it was reissued under the new title Room Number 3. J. S. Fletcher is the author of many such: The Secret of the Barbican, The Malachite Jar, etc. Prolific as he was, Fletcher produced only one volume of stories of “pure” detection: Paul Campenhaye: Specialist in Criminology (1918). The books of William LeQueux often concern a single central character (as In Secret, 1920; Bleke the Butler, 1923; and others) but the tales are nonetheless of the mixed type — some detection, some mystery, some crime, and some out-and-out adventure. [iii]