The Detection Collection, edited by Simon Brett (2006)

The Detection Collection, published by St. Martin’s in 2006, is a group of eleven stories, written by as many members of London’s Detection Club.  The Club is a group of crime writers who gather for dinners three or four times a year at the Garrick Club or the Café Royal, where they talk shop and enjoy themselves.  At irregular intervals the members have collaborated on fiction projects.  In the thirties there were serial magazine stories and a murder novel, The Floating Admiral, in which each chapter was written by a different writer. Another collection, entitled The Verdict of Thirteen, came out in 1978.

Simon Brett, who edited this collection, concludes it with a brief history of the Detection Club.  Although he was the current president of the club, Brett seems oddly ill-informed about it: he doesn’t know precisely when it was founded—he thinks about 1928—and he thinks John Dickson Carr was “the only non-British author ever to have been a member,” even though he lists the Texas-born Patricia Highsmith as a contributor to the 1978 collection.  The best Golden Age authors were members, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and G. K. Chesterton.  The club has continued to attract the best British mystery writers.

P. D. James opens the book with a story that could as easily be classified as horror fiction as mystery; it’s a tale of revenge by one of the junior boys at St. Chad’s School against the upperclassman who tormented him, but this particular act of vengeance is deferred for forty years.

Michael Ridpath’s story is a clever one about a big banking outfit, a financial equivalent of John Grisham’s The Firm, that stages a murder to try to identify the best candidate to make partner.  The fake murder, of course, turns into a real one.

H. R. F. Keating’s contribution tells what happens when a man walks into his bathroom one morning and finds a third toothbrush next to his and his wife’s.

There is a contest for the most ingenious story in the collection between Colin Dexter and Robert Barnard.  Dexter’s story, called “Between the Lines,” is in the form of letters and diaries of three people who were present at a theft on board a train from Prague to Vienna.  Two of the three are fledgling authors who accuse each other of the theft in drafts of stories about the incident.  Only the third person, however, knows the whole truth.  Robert Barnard’s entry for most ingenious story is called “The Life-lie,” and in it a murder in the Norwegian town of Bergen at the turn of the twentieth century is solved by none other than the playwright Henrik Ibsen.  Barnard blends some historical fact with imaginative storytelling in this period piece.

Reginald Hill’s contribution features his regular, Detective Superintendent Dalziel of the Mid-Yorkshire Constabulary.  It’s a wicked little tale about a young man who should have known better than to try to involve Dalziel in his nefarious plans.

Most of the stories are cleverly plotted and move rapidly, using interesting, sometimes multiple points of view as well as letters, diary entries, and other plot devices.  If you enjoy British mysteries, I know there are some stories here you’ll like.