A shout-out for The Poisoned Chocolates Case (Anthony Berkeley, 1929)

Most of my fiction reading in the past 3-4 months has been in the form of short stories, but I returned to a full-fledged crime novel (Golden Age, naturally) after a while, and it was a very good choice – Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case, which had been high on my to-read pile.

“In the pantheon of detective fiction, there is nothing quite like [this book],” writes Martin Edwards in his Introduction (this is in the British Library Crime Classics edition), and while that’s the sort of claim one takes with a pinch of salt, I think it can reasonably be made here – especially when you consider that The Poisoned Chocolates Case was written nearly a hundred years ago. This book manages to be a cosy, drawing-room mystery typical of the period (with an easy-to-follow crime and a limited cast of characters) *but is also* a meta-novel that examines and comments on the process of detection and what it might reveal about the person(s) doing the mystery-solving.

This is ingrained in the playful, self-reflexive structure: six members of the Crimes Circle, a group of amateur detectives, apply themselves to the task of solving a real-life mystery, a fatal poisoning, that has lately baffled the police. The salient facts of the case are laid out for them (and for us readers) in the first couple of chapters, then lots are drawn to decide the order in which the members will present their case. The chapters that follow give us the (usually self-important) disquisitions of each member in turn, the method for arriving at their pet solution, the solution itself (with the murderer’s identity often dramatically concealed for as long as possible)… and then the wind is taken out of the speaker’s sails by a counter-point or two showing flaws in the deduction.

For me, the book – though engrossing all the way through – really picked up steam around the halfway mark. The first two or three solutions, though well-thought-out (and interspersed with some entertaining banter amongst the rival characters), also felt a little long-winded in the telling, perhaps because of the personalities involved: the first “detective” to speak is a pedantic barrister, the second is a lady playwright much concerned with the Eternal Triangle as a dramatic trope. But around the time that Roger Sheringham (president of the Crimes Circle, and one of Anthony Berkeley’s regular sleuths) begins his own investigation – which involves a certain degree of legwork – things get more interesting; and even more so when Sheringham’s proposed solution (which is the one I had been expecting to see and had vaguely worked out in my own mind) is debunked as well! (This isn’t a spoiler: we know from the start that Sheringham will be the fourth to present his case, meaning that two more solutions are to follow his.)

It’s just about possible that The Poisoned Chocolates Case won’t work too well for some Golden Age readers who want a pure mystery with a single clear-cut solution (minus quasi-academic reflections on inductive and deductive processes) – but there would be very few such readers, in my view. Most mystery buffs should have a very good time with this book’s multiple false solutions, culminating in the sly “real” solution.

Ah, but IS that the real solution after all? By the very nature of this narrative, you feel the deductions could carry on and on (if there had been more than six members in the circle). And as it happens, this British Crime Classics Library edition includes two Epilogues – further solutions provided by other writers many decades after the book was published. The first of these is a short solution, written in 1979 by Christianna Brand, whom I have become a big fan of over the past year. Perhaps because I have very high expectations of her now, I wasn’t bowled over by her contribution (though it has some of her characteristic wicked humour). The second epilogue, very well done I thought, is by Martin Edwards himself – a solution that takes the mystery in a fresh but plausible new direction, *and yet* stays faithful to the tone and the terms of the original novel.

Purists might suggest, though, that you should forget about those two add-ons and just concentrate on the book itself, as it was originally written – in which case you’d have a perfectly satisfying ending (satisfying for the reader, I mean – not so much for the sleuths, who find themselves in a state of limbo at the end). Meanwhile I’m looking forward to reading a few more Berkeleys soon (once I have finished a couple of Brands and Josephine Teys on my list). 

[A few earlier posts on crime fiction are here]