The Perfect Crime: The Big Bow Mystery. Israel Zangwill

      

      Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      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.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008137281

      Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008137298

      Version: 2015-07-06

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Introduction

       The Big Bow Mystery: BY ISRAEL ZANGWILL

       Preface of Murders and Mysteries

       Note

       Chapter I

       Chapter II

       Chapter III

       Chapter IV

      

       Chapter V

      

       Chapter VI

      

       Chapter VII

      

       Chapter VIII

      

       Chapter IX

      

       Chapter X

      

       Chapter XI

      

       Chapter XII

      

       The Murders in the Rue Morgue: BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

      

       Introduction

       The Murders in the Rue Morgue

      

       The Detective Story Club

      

       About the Publisher

       INTRODUCTION

      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,