MWA Historian Barry T. Zeman returns with another installment elucidating Queen’s Quorum, a list of the most important anthologies and collections of mystery short stories. BANDERSNATCHES will return next week after Steve Steinbock recovers from his intemperate New Year’s Eve celebration. I have it on good authority that he actually had two glasses of champagne on the big night. — JLW

QUEEN’S QUORUM: “THE DOYLE DECADE”

by Barry T. Zeman

The 1890s brought some of the best mystery short story writing ever seen-and still enjoyable to read today. Sherlock Holmes burst upon the scene in 1887 with his appearance in A Study in Scarlet. Thereafter, Holmes short stories appeared regularly in “The Strand Magazine”, rabid fans waiting in long lines to grab each new issue. The first book of short stories featuring Arthur Conan Doyle’s remarkable creation was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1892. Queen called it “one of the world’s masterworks” and millions of Holmes fans today would still agree. Millions more would say it is THE world’s masterwork, at least in the field of detective and mystery fiction. The entire Holmes canon is equally enjoyable to read-and reread today if you haven’t it lately.

As important, and just as satisfying to read, is short story volume appearing earlier in 1892. The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill is an extraordinary breakthrough tale that Queen called the world’s “first fully-developed locked room” mystery. In his high praise for this effort, Queen said, “Zangwill added simple daring, brilliant ingenuity to Poe’s original concept of a ‘sealed room’ mystery”. This innovation started an entire sub-genre loved by many millions of fans through the years.

Of the remaining short story volumes from this prolific decade, a notable few are worth the effort to find for pure reading purposes. Martin Hewitt, Investigator (1894) is perhaps the only one of imitations from the huge number that sprang forth from the Holmes phenomenon worth searching out. Many Martin Hewitt stories appeared in “Strand Magazine”, and three or four books were spawned, even one consisting of six short stories strung together to form a novel. Then, as today, short stories did not sell as well as novels and publishers resorted to all sorts of devices to sell books.

Another gem(s) to discover appeared in 1899 when Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung, created the great and wholly original character A. J. Raffles amateur cracksman- the first gentleman criminal. In the appropriately named book, The Amateur Cracksman, Hornung began a long love affair with the public for this unique character. Dozens of books, movies, and a legion of imitators still going strong, pay tribute to Raffles.

Two other volumes are worthy of reading consideration, not only for their prose, but for innovation. Prince Zaleski (1895) is a small volume containing three fascinating, flamboyant and sometimes weird stories straight out of a romantic era. If deliciously sumptuous prose, accompanied by an oddball sleuth turns you on, then hunt down these stories by M. P. Sheil, a member of the circle of Oscar Wilde, Robert Lewis Stevenson and other brilliant literary lights of the period. The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason penned by Melville Davisson Post introduced the first lawyer in mystery fiction to use the “inadequacies and weaknesses of the law to defeat justice” according to Queen, who also relates Post’s own explanation of the literary hypothesis behind this originally book, “is it possible to plan and execute wrongs in such a manner that they will have all the …resulting profit of desperate crimes and yet not be crimes before the law?” Three highly popular books about Mason followed, with Post having a change of heart in the third, The Corrector of Destinies (1908), making his character a ‘hero’ by using his vast legal powers to help rather than confound the cause of justice. Queen also intimates that perhaps Erle Stanley Gardner named Perry Mason, his own lawyer-sleuth who appeared just 21 years later in 1929, after Post’s super-smart legal creation, Randolph Mason. Connection or not the Randolph Mason stories still attract interest and will make you glad you found them.