Metropolitan Mysteries: A Casebook of London's Detectives

by Martin Edwards (editor)

Genres: Crime, Mystery, Short Stories
Pages: 316
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating:

Synopsis:

Lord Peter Wimsey reads murder in the minutiae of a Bloomsbury kitchen. Dr. Gideon Fell unravels a locked-room mystery from a flat in Chelsea. Superintendent Aldgate cracks the case of the body atop Nelson’s Column.

The streets of London have been home to many great detectives since the days of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, with some of the best authors in the genre taking to the short story form to pit their sleuths against crimes ranging from murders on the Tube to heists from the capital’s finest jewellers.

Featuring a roster of Scotland Yard’s meticulous best, a cohort of daring doctors and a cadre of characterful private investigators, this new selection by Martin Edwards includes eighteen vintage mystery stories from a period between 1908 and 1963 to showcase the city’s most compelling classic cases.

With contributions by Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr and Dorothy L. Sayers along with rare finds by Raymond Postgate, J. Jefferson Farjeon and many more, this anthology invites you to join some of the greatest detectives ever written on their perilous trail through London’s darker underside.

Metropolitan Mysteries is another anthology edited by Martin Edwards for the British Library Crime Classics series, this time themed around London’s fictional detectives. Some of the famous ones are here, of course — Wimsey, Holmes — but some more obscure ones as well. As usual with this series’ anthologies, it’s an interesting survey of the “classic” crime fiction (though I think “classic” is a bit tired and ill-defined when it comes to this series: Golden/Silver Age would be a better descriptor, perhaps).

Also as usual with these anthologies, I think it’s greater than the sum of its parts. I’d read some of the stories before, but some of the others are of surprising interest, and altogether it’s a bit like a series of taster dishes for different authors and slightly different phases of crime fiction.

There are some stories that are better than others (I thought the Allingham one was pretty weakly related, just included just to shoehorn Campion into it, just barely), but as a whole it’s fun.

Rating: 3/5