Another Locked Room

The Big Bow Mystery was first published serially in 1891 by British author Israel Zangwill (1864- 1926), and then in book form in 1892. At the beginning of the story, it’s 7 AM and a man in rented rooms can’t be roused by his landlady, Mrs. Drabdump, banging on his door, though he had asked her to help him get out of the house early. Alarmed, she goes across the street to the home of a retired police detective and yells for him to help. When they break down the door of his tightly locked and bolted second-floor room, they find the lodger dead with his throat cut from ear to ear and no razor in the room. The windows were so tightly locked that the early-morning London fog hadn’t penetrated the room, the witnesses later testified. 

Yup — it’s a locked room mystery, maybe the first. Definitely years before The Mystery of the Yellow Room published in 1907 by French author Gaston Leroux, which is usually identified as the first, with a nod to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allen Poe (1841).

After the first dramatic chapter, the middle chapters of the book are a bit desultory, describing a variety of police and other interviews with people who really have nothing to add to the sparse and incontrovertible facts of the case. These chapters are quite amusing to read, as the author does a lot of caricature of the various people, including funny names like Detective Wimp. In fact, I would call it Dickensian! Compared to the fast pace and total focus usually present in the modern mystery genre, these scenes add only a little to the question of who did it and how the murderer could have left the room so fully locked up. 

Here are a couple of examples of the type of humor I enjoyed:

“Mrs. Crowl surveyed Denzil Cantercot so stonily and cut him his beef so savagely that he said grace when the dinner was over. Peter fed his metaphysical genius on tomatoes. He was tolerant enough to allow his family to follow their Fads; but no savory smells ever tempted him to be false to his vegetable loves. Besides, meat might have reminded him too much of his work. There is nothing like leather, but Bow beefsteaks occasionally come very near it.” (p. 34)

“Denzil Cantercot sat in his fur overcoat at the open window, looking at the landscape in water colors. He smoked an after-dinner cigarette, and spoke of the Beautiful. Crowl was with him. They were in the first floor front, Crowl's bedroom, which, from its view of the Mile End Road, was livelier than the parlor with its outlook on the backyard. Mrs. Crowl was an anti-tobacconist as regards the best bedroom; but Peter did not like to put the poet or his cigarette out. He felt there was something in common between smoke and poetry, over and above their being both Fads.” (p. 47)

“Mrs. Drabdump shrank from accepting Wimp's attentions, not so much perhaps because he was a man as because he was a gentleman. Mrs. Drabdump liked to see the fine folks keep their place, and not contaminate their skirts by contact with the lower castes. ‘It's set wet, it'll rain right into the new year,’ she announced. ‘And they say a bad beginnin' makes a worse endin'.’ Mrs. Drabdump was one of those persons who give you the idea that they just missed being born barometers. …Haunted rooms—or rooms that ought to be haunted if the ghosts of those murdered in them had any self-respect—are supposed to fetch a lower rent in the market.” (p. 53)

 Slowly, you learn a lot of things about the people who had associated with the murder victim, but it feels as if no one is getting closer to envisioning how the murder was done or who had done it. Eventually, there’s an arrest and a trial and a surprise ending, but I won’t say any more than that.

My thank-you goes to Reese at the blog Typings for informing me of this interesting literary work! Images in my post are from the Project Gutenberg edition of this book, a facsimile of the 1895 edition.

Blog post © 2023 mae sander.