Not To Be Taken

by Anthony Berkeley

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 256
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating:

Synopsis:

A classic case of the apparent suicide that proves to be murder. John Waterhouse's death certificate gives cause of death as gastric ulcers, but when his brother insists on the body being exhumed so that a post mortem can be carried out, it proves the case that poison has been at work. Will Douglas Sewell, who watched his good friend die, be able to use his knowledge of those concerned to unravel the clues and uncover the murderer?

Anthony Berkeley’s books can be a bit hit or miss for me, apparently: there’s one I quickly gave up on for bizarre misogynistic shenanigans, and others that I really liked. Not to be Taken is one of the latter: it’s a slow-moving, contemplative one, a fair-play mystery very deliberately set up for the audience to guess, because it was originally a competition!

The female characters are mostly handled with respect, except the hypochondriac Angela, but I think that’s mostly because she’s a hypochondriac, and it’s basically about two microns away from being “hysteria”. (Or you could view her as deliberately manipulative, and not really a hypochondriac — which is a mental illness which deserves sympathy and treatment — but I’m not sure she’s meant to be doing it deliberately.)

The main character, the accidental detective, isn’t an amazing detective, but nor is he a completely dim “Watson” type, which I found interesting as well. For Berkeley’s purposes in writing a solveable mystery, he has to have enough intelligence to be observant, and it’s clear he’s rather underestimated by the culprit — while not really being on their intellectual level, perhaps.

The edition from British Library Crime Classic includes the final chapter (presumably not originally published with it, since it contains the solution) and a report by Anthony Berkeley on the submissions for the contest. It’s interesting to me that nobody understood the full solution (and I wouldn’t have either), considering that people so often complain about mysteries being totally predictable.

It was a playful time for mystery fiction, and that’s always really fascinating to read.

Rating: 4/5