Guilty Creatures

Starred review from May 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.

Starred review from April 1, 2022
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.

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