TOP TEN BEST SHORT STORY MYSTERIES OF ALL TIME
I cannot think of a quicker way to start an argument than with a “Top
Ten” anything list. And when you dare to do so in a field peppered
with friends whose work undoubtedly deserves mention, you’re guaranteed
to find yourself crossed off a lot of holiday greeting card lists.
Yet, as a former adjunct professor of English teaching mystery
writing at a college that’s decades older than the modern detective
novel, how could I refuse the honor of such a request from The Strand Magazine?
However, I must admit to prayerfully falling back upon my one-time
lawyerly skills to ameliorate the potential fallout by offering up, in
roughly chronological order, this ten-best list of seminal short stories
penned by writers no longer with us.
***
“Murders in the Rue Morgue,” by Edgar Allan Poe (Graham’s Magazine, 1841)
It’s
only appropriate that the first story on my list is considered the
first modern detective story. In Poe’s tale, he introduces his
brilliantly analytical detective, C. Auguste Dupin, and Dupin’s trusted
friend, who acts as the story’s narrator. Their relationship and
Dupin’s methods and cool demeanor have come to serve as inspiration for
legions of mystery writers,
On Paris’ Rue Morgue at 3 AM, a mother and daughter are brutally and
inhumanely slaughtered in their heavily locked-down fourth-floor
apartment. Neighbors heard their shrieks but also two additional voices
coming from within the apartment, one identified as male and French, the
other as shrill and foreign. When the neighbors break into the
apartment, they find only the daughter inside, dead and stuffed
feet-first up the chimney in a show of superhuman strength, while her
mother lay decapitated on the ground, four unscalable stories below a
still locked window. Though newspapers call it an impossible crime to
solve, and the police remain baffled, a man known to Dupin is accused of
the murders. Through the application of his “ratiocination”
investigatory methods that do not ask “what has occurred,” but rather,
“what has occurred that has never occurred before,” Dupin determines
what transpired and frees an innocent man, establishing in the process
an enduring classic formula for mystery writing.
“The Red-Headed League,” by Arthur Conan Doyle (The Strand Magazine, 1891)
I trace my interest in writing mysteries to my early years as a lawyer when I found an unexpected opportunity to read The Complete Sherlock Holmes straight
through from cover to cover. By the end of that exercise, I was
thinking like Holmes, loving Conan Doyle’s beautiful Victorian prose,
and enthralled at the thought that since Sherlock’s father’s first name
is “Siger,” we were related…if not as kin, at least as kindred spirits.
From the perpetual flow of new Sherlock Holmes-themed projects coming to
market, I’d call him a true cultural phenomenon.
It’s hard to pick a favorite Holmes story. In “The Red-Headed
League,” experts see themes of man-to-man confrontation and greed, plus
Holmes’ high opinion of himself and disdain for lesser minds. To me,
there’s an added lesson: know your setting well because, from that
knowledge, you may find your answer. The assistant to a red-headed
pawnbroker shows his boss an ad offering a busy-work office job paying
male red-heads exorbitant wages and convinces him to take the job.
Eight weeks later, the pawnbroker finds the office suddenly closed and
that the landlord has never heard of the League. He turns to Holmes, who
visits the pawnshop with Watson and concludes he knows the answer to
the mystery. Conan Doyle considered this story his second favorite. “The
Speckled Band” was his first.
“Locked Doors,” by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1914)
Born
in my hometown of Pittsburgh in 1876, she is buried at Arlington
National Cemetery and identified there as: “America’s first woman war
correspondent during World War I for the Saturday Evening Post; wrote
mystery novels, including The Circular Staircase and The Bat; in 1921
was referred to as ‘America’s Mistress of Mystery.” A fearless woman,
also called “America’s Agatha Christie,” she’s credited as the inventor
of the “Had-I-But-Known” mystery novel and for the phrase “the butler
did it.” Her best-selling books and plays were often adapted for film,
and one novel was among the earliest “talking book” recordings.
In much of Rinehart’s work, the challenge is discovering what’s
hidden from view because the “hidden situation” looms more important
than whodunit. An accomplished mystery writer trained in nursing,
Rinehart combined those talents in her series featuring nurse Hilda
Adams, a.k.a Miss Pinkerton, who at times works undercover for the
police. In “Locked Doors,” she’s recruited to replace a badly shaken
nurse who came to the police after four days of living in a large eerie
house, working for a peculiar family with no servants, no working
telephone, two young children confined to their room, and doors barred
shut at night. Its spine-chilling, not-your-normal-mystery sort of
“Gothic thrills” plotting might just keep you from guessing the
“perfectly macabre solution to this mystery.”
“The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb,” Agatha Christie (The Sketch Magazine, 1923)
What
more can I possibly tell you than you already know about Dame Agatha
Christie, the undisputed Queen of Crime and creator of Hercule Poirot,
Miss Marple, and the world’s longest-running play, “Mousetrap.” Hmm,
perhaps you didn’t know that this best-selling fiction writer of all
time with more than two billion novels sold (trailing only the Bible and
the works of William Shakespeare) loved surfing? That was news to me,
so I took it as a suggestion on how to find a favorite among her more
than 150 short stories. I went surfing through her work and came up
with this Poirot and Captain Hastings gem that’s celebrating its
one-hundredth anniversary.
The widow of a famous Egyptologist asks Poirot to journey to the
excavation site of a Pharaoh’s tomb where her husband died by heart
attack, the wealthy backer of the dig died from blood poisoning, and
from which the backer’s nephew left for New York only to commit suicide
soon after arriving there. The widow fears for the life of her son, who
intends to continue his father’s work. Poirot cables New York for
information on the nephew and leaves for the dig. By the time he and
Hastings arrive, another American has died, this one from tetanus, and
talk of an Egyptian Curse fills the papers. Tension builds as Poirot
suddenly begins choking on the tea he’s been served. It’s a tour de
force example of how Christie’s least likely characters so often turn
out to be the guilty and of Poirot’s penchant for gathering the guilty
together for their unmasking.
“Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” by Raymond Chandler (Black Mask, 1933)
Chandler
is considered a founder of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction.
Mention his name, and private detective Philip Marlowe immediately
springs to mind. Chandler coined the phrase “down these mean streets,”
and Marlowe lives on them. It’s a rough place for a compassionate guy
with a more noble sense of purpose than accumulating wealth and power.
Marlowe’s compassion makes him vulnerable, and so he plays a tough guy
to the world, using wisecracks as his defense against whatever that
world throws at him.
“Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” is Chandler’s first mystery story, written
when he was 44. All the dames, guns, gangsters, shady dealings, lies,
deceptions, crooked cops, fights, tough guy talk, and elements of the
mythical quests knight Marlowe feels compelled to pursue are there. But
not yet the Marlowe name. That change doesn’t happen until 1939 in “The
Big Sleep.” In 1933, he’s Mallory, and at center stage, in a swanky
club attempting to blackmail a beautiful movie star over love letters
she’d long ago sent to a gangster. She dismisses the attempt, leaves the
club, and is kidnapped. Mallory leaves later, only to be strong-armed
into the middle of a falling out among gangsters over her kidnapping. He
turns the situation to his advantage, leading to the Star’s ultimate
rescue, the death of her gangster ex-boyfriend, and the return of her
letters. But Mallory has more left to do. Chandler likes it that way.
“Death Threats,” by Georges Simenon (cir. 1936-42)
SIMENON, Georges, 1963, Ecrivain (F) © ERLING MANDELMANN ©
Belgian writer Georges Simenon is one of the most prolific authors of the 20th
Century, estimated to have written over 400 novels, plus as many as
1200 stories under his own name and more than a dozen pen names. His
sales total more than 500 million copies, and his highly popular
Inspector Jules Maigret appears in 78 novels and 28 short stories, often
confronting serious themes rarely touched upon by more traditional
detectives. Maigret does not adhere to the genre’s conventional approach
of searching for clues and using deductive reasoning to solve a case.
Rather, he immerses himself in the surroundings and lives of those who
interest him, much as would a therapist or professor looking for
psychological insights to help better understand the human condition and
criminal mind.
“Death Threats” has Maigret dispatched to spend the weekend at the
country villa of the senior member of a wealthy merchant family. The
merchant received an anonymous note threatening his death before 6 PM on
Sunday. His twin brother reaches out to Maigret, trying to convince him
that his brother is paranoid and the threat must be a joke. At the
villa, Maigret discovers a family of ambitious, self-absorbed, greedy
narcissists wracked by mutual hatred for each other, who, despite all
their advantages, utterly fail to appreciate life. Things get exciting
around 6, but don’t go quite as Maigret had expected even though he knew
from the outset who’d sent the note.
“Kiss Me Again, Stranger,” by Daphne du Maurier (Gollancz, 1952)
Du
Maurier’s work rarely has a happy ending, yet she’s often described as a
romantic novelist, a characterization she rejected and despised.
Fantasy and mystery were descriptions she might have found more to her
liking. Whatever one’s opinion on that debate, her short stories are
certainly dark, if not noir, hovering close to the paranormal and often
haunting the reader long after the final sentence is read.
“Kiss Me Again, Stranger” is neither a ghost story nor a supernatural
tale, but rather a classic example of du Maurier’s uncanny ability to
keep the reader thinking it just might end up being one of those. A
nameless young man narrates the story of his evening at the cinema,
where he’s irresistibly taken by a beautiful usherette. He follows her
onto a bus, sits beside her, pulls her close to him, and rests her head
on his shoulder. I shall not tell you what happens when they later go
off together into a cemetery, except to quote what another has written
about the usherette: “it is hard to think of any female character in
British fiction, before this husky siren, who does what she does and
with such cool aplomb: an unexpectedly powerful proto-feminist role
model.”
“The Oblong Room,” by Edward D. Hoch (The Saint Magazine, 1967)
Edward
Hoch is the author of close to 1000 classic detective stories, a record
holder with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for having published a
short story in every one of its issues over a thirty-four-year span, and
the first short story writer to be named a “Grand Master” by Mystery
Writers of America. His work emphasizes mystery and deduction over
other forms, but seldom are they simple police procedurals, and at
times, they’re locked rooms and impossible crime scenarios. His small
town, Connecticut police Captain Jules Leopold has weathered close to
fifty years and one hundred stories, including the Edgar award-winning
“The Oblong Room” – an homage of sorts to Poe’s “The Oblong Box.”
In “The Oblong Room,” Captain Leopold is called to investigate what
seems an open and shut case of murder on a college campus. A man is
found stabbed to death and locked in a room for 24 hours with his
roommate. All that is needed to convict is the roommate’s motive, but
the roommate will not make a statement. The ensuing investigation
establishes: (a) the victim possessed an uncanny ability to manipulate
anyone into obeying him, (b) no one was more devoted to and protective
of the victim than his roommate, and (c) the two were known to use LSD.
But why did the roommate kill someone he’d die to protect? And why a
24-hour vigil after the slaying? Our answers arrive in a
do-not-see-it-coming solution.
“The Last Bottle in the World,” by Stanley Ellin (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine 1968)
This
three-time Edgar award winner and Mystery Writers of America Grand
Master is said to have focused so intently on perfection that it would
take him a year to complete each short story he submitted to Ellery
Queen’s Mystery Magazine. His ingenious imagination, precision plotting,
strong characters, chosen locales, and deft ability to fool and
surprise the reader from a psychological point of view all served to
focus attention on his protagonist’s crisis at hand.
In this story about the last bottle of a famed vintage that a
mega-rich man is determined to buy from the narrator-wine merchant, the
merchant unexpectedly comes across the rich man’s wife in a café, and
there’s a flashback to when the two first met. She’s now in a difficult
marriage and showing interest in another man. The tension rises until
the plot unexpectedly twists in the most satisfying yet realistic of
ways.
“Blood Lines,” by Ruth Rendell (Hutchinson (UK), Crown (US), 1995)
Writing also as Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell is a literary giant of the 20th
Century, possessing an uncanny knack for weaving the strangest of tales
out of the joys and pains of ordinary family life. Rendell offers up
her themes on multiple penetrating levels, drawing upon ancient tragedy,
quixotic dark humor, poignant intellect, and piercing insights into the
darkest regions of the human psyche to reveal the disturbed family
relationships unearthed in her works. In the process, it often shocks
the reader at how fragile the separation between life on the page and
off.
“Blood Lines” features her popular Inspector Reginald “Rex” Wexford
investigating a murder that’s shattered the tranquility of a small
bucolic community. A young woman discovers her stepfather’s brutally
beaten body. She firmly denies knowing the identity of the murderer,
but Wexford is convinced his primary suspects include the victim’s
extended family. Wexford’s patient investigation reveals evidence of
spousal abuse, infidelity, avarice, and betrayal, reminding him that the
criminal impulse may be present in even the most routine or intimate of
situations. It is vintage Rendell.
© 2023 Jeffrey Siger
Jerry House
George Kelley
TracyK
