The Perfect Crime: The Big Bow Mystery
The first in a new series of classic detective stories from the vaults of HarperCollins is the world’s first locked-room mystery, a seemingly impossible crime story as powerful as any that have copied the scenario since.“The Detective Story Club”, launched by Collins in 1929, was a clearing house for the best and most ingenious crime stories of the age, chosen by a select committee of experts. Now, almost 90 years later, these books are the classics of the Golden Age, republished at last with the same popular cover designs that appealed to their original readers.Originally published as The Big Bow Mystery in 1891, and re-published by the Detective Club to coincide with a new film version called ‘The Perfect Crime’, Israel Zangwill’s novel invented the concept of the ‘locked room mystery’ and influenced almost every crime writer thereafter.‘A man is murdered for no apparent reason. He has no enemies and there seemed to be no motive for anyone murdering him. No clues remained and the instrument with which the murder was committed could not be traced. The door of the room in which the body was discovered was locked and bolted on the inside, both windows were latched, and there was no trace of any intruder. The greatest detectives in the land were puzzled. Here indeed was the perfect crime, the work of a master mind. Can you solve the problem which baffled Scotland Yard for so long, until at last the missing link in the chain of evidence was revealed?’This new edition includes a brand new introduction by the Golden Age crime expert, Dr John Curran, author of ‘Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks’.
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Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain as The Big Bow Mystery by Henry & Co. 1892
Published as The Perfect Crime by The Detective Story Club Ltd
for Wm Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1929
‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’
first published by Graham’s Magazine 1841
Introductions © John Curran 2015
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1929, 2015
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008137281
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008137298
Version: 2015-07-06
Contents
The Big Bow Mystery: BY ISRAEL ZANGWILL
Preface of Murders and Mysteries
WHEN a corpse is found, with its throat cut and no sign of a weapon, in a room locked and bolted from the inside, both murder and suicide must be discarded as impossible. But writers of detective fiction, and their readers, are more circumspect. For them these fascinating conditions pose the questions: Whodunit? and, even more intriguingly, How?
Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) was not only the first detective story, but also the first locked-room detective story; and The Big Bow Mystery (1892) by Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was the first book-length example of the form. As such, it occupies an important place in the history of detective fiction.
The story first appeared in 1891 as a serial in the London daily Star newspaper, for which Zangwill worked at the time; it was published in book form the following year and collected in Zangwill’s The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes in 1903. In a preface, written for an 1895 edition of his book, the author perceptively acknowledged what is, in essence, the ‘fair-play’ rule of detective fiction (as adopted many years later by the Detection Club) when he wrote:
‘The indispensable condition of a good mystery is that it should be able and unable to be solved by the reader, and that that the writer’s solution should satisfy. And not only must the solution be adequate, but all its data must be given in the body of the story.’
Zangwill had long suspected, he explained, that ‘no mystery-monger had ever murdered a man in a room to which there was no possible access’ and that, although he had devised such a solution, it lay dormant until the editor of ‘a popular London evening newspaper’ asked him ‘to provide…a more original piece of fiction’. As the story unfolded—written in a fortnight ‘day by day’, according to the author—readers of the serial submitted ‘unsolicited testimonials in the shape of solutions’, although they ‘had failed, one and all, to hit on the real murderer’. (One can’t help wondering if the variety of possible solutions put forward in the course of the novel were some of these suggestions.)
The previous quarter-century had seen the publication of landmark novels of detective fiction: Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of EdwinDrood (1870), Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case (1878). And in the years immediately preceding The Big Bow Mystery the appearance of the world’s first ‘consulting detective’, Sherlock Holmes, ushered in the pre-Golden Age of detective fiction. Two of Holmes’s full-length investigations—A Study in Scarlet (1888) and The Sign of (the) Four (1890)—were followed by the first dozen of the phenomenally successful short stories in the Strand magazine, beginning in July 1891 with ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. So when Zangwill’s novel was published, the public appetite for crime fiction was well established—and almost insatiable.
Zangwill, the son of Latvian and Polish immigrants, was born in London’s East End and showed literary promise as early as eighteen. A teacher for some years after he graduated from London University, he eventually left the profession to write full-time, publishing hundreds of essays, as well as novels, short stories and plays produced in London and New York. His work concentrated on political, social and Jewish issues but
