Here's another entry in the British Library Crime Classics series - this time, another anthology of short stories, edited by Martin Edwards. It's called The Measure of Malice: Scientific Detection Stories, and, as you might expect, it features fourteen stories in which the science of detectng crime - as practiced between 1891 and 1955 - forms a central theme. The Measure of Malice is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete audio review by clicking here. The book is being published in the United States next week, the first week in February, by Poisoned Pen Press, a Sourcebooks imprint, and the publisher has sent me an Advance Reader's Copy for my use in this review.
Some of the authors whose stories appear in this anthology will be quite familiar to mystery readers, especially those who enjoy traditional, plot-oriented mysteries - in this case, with the added feature of some kind of scientific detective work being used to solve (or prevent) a crime. The book opens with a Sherlock Holmes mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – the adventure called “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” first published in The Strand magazine in 1891. A young man is accused of murdering his father, but Holmes discovers clues involving footprints and tobacco ash that will bring the crime home to the real killer.
At the other end of the book is a story by Freeman Wills Crofts, many of whose short stories and novels rely on timetables and alibis to explain how a crime was carried out. In a story called “The New Cement,” written in 1955, however, the scientific secret lies in a powerful chemical reaction – and Inspector French must come up with a plan to save a potential victim’s life.
Between the Holmes story from 1891 and the Crofts story from 1955, Edwards has chosen another dozen stories, arranged in more-or-less chronological order based on their original publication dates. There are well-known authors, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, R. Austin Freeman and Edmund Crispin, and other authors from the Golden Age who may not be as familiar to today's readers, including J. J. Connington, John Rhode and Ernest Dudley. All the stories are preceded by concise and informative introductions by Martin Edwards.
If you'd like more information about the individual stories that make up The Measure of Murder, I would invite you to click here to listen to my audio review, which includes some information about each of the 14 stories. I do think this is another collection of gems from the British Library Crime Classics series. I think you'll enjoy it.
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