Guilty Creatures: A Menagerie of Mysteries

by Martin Edwards (Editor)

Overview

"An unusually rewarding anthology whose most dangerous species remain Homo sapiens."— Kirkus Reviews

Feline friends, canine companions and aviary associates are often the truest reflections of their owners and have played a crucial role in classic crime fiction—be they detectives, or delinquents. Martin Edwards reaches into the British Library of Crime Classics to collect mysteries featuring an animal cohort.

Guilty Creatures celebrates an often-overlooked species of classic crime fiction. Since the dawn of the crime fiction genre, animals of all kinds have played a memorable part in countless mysteries, and in a variety of roles: the perpetrator, the key witness, the sleuth's trusted companion. This collection of fourteen stories corrals plots centered around cats, dogs, and insects alongside more exotic incidents involving gorillas, parakeets, and serpents—complete with a customary shoal of red herrings.

The collection includes an introduction on animals in detective fiction by Martin Edwards. "From the first detective story, Edgar Allan Poe's locked room puzzle 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' onwards, animals, birds, and insects have played a memorable part in countless mysteries, and in a wide variety of ways. Count Fosco, the brilliantly characterized villain in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White was surrounded by "a cockatoo, two canary-birds and a whole family of white mice," while the hound of the Baskervilles famously terrorised Dartmoor in Arthur Conan Doyle's superb Sherlock Holmes novel. Since then, many crime writers have written about members of the animal kingdom."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781464215841
Publisher:	Sourcebooks
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Series:	British Library Crime Classics
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	313,007
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Martin Edwards is an award-winning crime writer best known for two series of novels set in Liverpool and the Lake District. He is series consultant for British Library Crime Classics, the Vice Chair of the Crime Writers' Association, and President of the Detection Club. The Golden Age of Murder, his study of the Detection Club, was published in 2015 to international acclaim, and has been nominated for both the Edgar and Agatha awards for the year's best book about the genre. He received the CWA 2020 Diamond Dagger Award for sustained excellence in crime writing and significant contributions to the genre, joining the ranks of Sue Grafton, Ian Rankin, and Lee Child.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

The Adventure of the Lion's Mane Arthur Conan Doyle 1

The Case of Janissary Arthur Morrison 26

The Sapient Monkey Headon Hill 56

The Green Parrakeet F. Tennyson Jesse 68

The Oracle of the Dog G. K. Chesterton 96

The Man Who Hated Earthworms Edgar Wallace 125

The Courtyard of the Fly Vincent Cornier 142

The Yellow Slugs H. C. Bailey 152

Pit of Screams Garnett Radcliffe 199

Hanging by a Hair Clifford Witting 213

The Man Who Shot Birds Mary Fitt 223

Death in a Cage Josephine Bell 243

The Man Who Loved Animals Penelope Wallace 259

The Hornet's Nest Christianna Brand 268

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/23/2022

The 14 stories in this excellent reprint anthology from Edwards (Settling Scores: Sporting Mysteries) feature animals in a variety of roles, including killer, witness, and source of clues. One highlight is G.K. Chesterton’s “The Oracle of the Dog,” in which evidence provided by a retriever helps Father Brown solve a baffling impossible murder. In Edgar Wallace’s intriguing “The Man Who Hated Earthworms,” his vigilante protagonists, the Four Just Men, must figure out why a golfing acquaintance of one of their members stopped to kill earthworms with extreme fury every time he spotted one. Wallace’s daughter, Penelope Wallace, provides the most chilling selection: “The Man Who Loved Animals,” in which a woman enlists the help of an old man known for being able to calm even the most vicious canine. Christianna Brand’s series sleuth, Inspector Cockrill, is on the case in “The Hornet’s Nest,” another exemplar of the subtle but fair clueing Brand made her trademark in which both insects and mollusks play a part in the solution. Edwards succeeds again in sharing quality classic short mysteries with a common theme. This is another winner from the British Library Crime Classics series. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"[An] excellent reprint anthology from Edwards featur[ing] animals in a variety of roles, including killer, witness, and source of clues…[Guilty Creatures is] another winner from the British Library of Crime Classics." — Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"An unusually rewarding anthology whose most dangerous species remain Homosapiens. " — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

From the Publisher

★ 2022-03-16
Fourteen more-or-less golden-age mystery stories, originally published between 1918 and 1967, featuring animals in a wide range of roles.

The title is something of a misnomer, since most of the nonhuman creatures turn out to be quite innocent. The title character in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” the only story Sherlock Holmes narrates himself, is certainly guilty, and the jackdaw in Mary Fitt’s “The Man Who Shot Birds” will have some awkward questions to answer. But the monkey man in Headon Hill’s “The Sapient Monkey,” the retriever in G.K. Chesterton’s masterly “The Oracle of the Dog,” the apparently thieving fly in Vincent Cornier’s “The Courtyard of the Fly,” the slugs in H.C. Bailey’s old-fashioned yet strikingly contemporary “The Yellow Slugs,” and the cat in Clifford Witting’s admirably concise one-off “Hanging by a Hair” offer clues or red herrings instead of violence. The snakes in Garnett Radcliffe’s “Pit of Screams” and the dogs in Penelope Wallace’s “The Man Who Loved Animals” are collateral agents, not true malefactors. The racehorse threatened with doping in Arthur Morrison’s “The Case of Janissary”; the lowly worms in Edgar Wallace’s “The Man Who Hated Earthworms,” featuring more summary justice administered by the “four just men”; and the vanished baby gorilla in Josephine Bell’s “Death in a Cage” are all victims, not perpetrators. In a fitting sendoff to the volume, the title characters in Christianna Brand’s miraculously compressed “The Hornet’s Nest,” which poses multiple solutions to the wedding-day poisoning of a poisonous bridegroom, remain a decorously offstage metaphor.

An unusually rewarding anthology whose most dangerous species remain Homo sapiens.

Kirkus Reviews