Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. was celebrating exactly 100 years of book publishing when in the spring of 1919 Sir Godfrey Collins and his staff announced its first detective novel—The Skeleton Key by Bernard Capes. Capes, a prolific and versatile writer best known for his ghost stories, had delivered his manuscript to Collins shortly before falling prey to the worldwide flu pandemic in the autumn of 1918, and died before his most lucrative book in a 20-year writing career was published.

Sir Godfrey, who had served in the Victorian navy and later entered politics to become a Liberal M.P. and later Secretary of State for Scotland, had become head of publications at the Glasgow-based printing company in 1906 when his uncle, the ambitious and colourful William Collins III, plunged to an untimely death down an empty lift shaft in a freak accident at his Westminster flat. It is not known now whether Sir Godfrey had intended The Skeleton Key to be a one-off book or the start of a new initiative, but its immediate success coincided with a growing post-war interest in modern exciting fiction based on crime and mystery. Within ten years of The Skeleton Key, Collins had built up a rich stable of reliable and popular crime writers, among them Lynn Brock, J. S. Fletcher, Anthony Fielding, Herbert Adams, John Stephen Strange, Hulbert Footner, G. D. H. & M. Cole, J. Jefferson Farjeon, Vernon Loder, John Rhode, Francis D. Grierson, Miles Burton, Philip MacDonald, Freeman Wills Crofts and, in 1926, Agatha Christie.

Nearly all new novels in the early 1920s were hardback, usually costing 7/6 each, and the most popular titles were frequently rejacketed and reprinted in a ‘cheap edition’, still in hardcover but often smaller in size and always on cheaper paper. In fact, the idea of making cheap hardbacks out of popular copyright fiction by living authors (as opposed to nineteenth-century classics, as had been the convention) was one of Godfrey Collins’ earliest initiatives. His revolutionary ‘Books for the Million’ first went on sale in May 1907, but to Collins’ dismay rival publisher Thomas Nelson beat them into the shops with the same idea just three days earlier.

By 1928 Collins had pretty much cornered the market in this area with a rapidly growing number of different series, including Collins Classics, The Literary Press, The Novel Library, The London Book Co. and Westerns (later renamed The Wild West Club), with more than 2,500 cheap fiction titles now appearing in the Collins catalogue. It was probably therefore inevitable that Godfrey Collins would add another imprint to the growing range of sixpenny hardbacks: The Detective Story Club.

Launched in July 1929, the series included the whole panoply of crime writing: classic mystery novels from the previous century; tales of true crime; modern detective stories; and a growing publishing phenomenon, ‘the Book of the Film’, inspired by cinema’s new ‘talkies’. Twelve Detective Story Club books had been published by Christmas 1929, and another 60 or so would follow over the next five years. All had brand new colourful jacket designs with matching spines, finished off with the distinctive stamp of the masked ‘man with the gun’, an evolution of a sinister Zorro-like mask motif which had adorned 1920s Collins crime covers to distinguish them as detective novels.

Perhaps the boldest move was to change many of the book titles to make them sound more obvious: thus Bernard Capes’ The Skeleton Key became The Mystery of the Skeleton Key; Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery—the first full-length ‘locked room’ novel—became The Perfect Crime; Maurice Drake’s obscure thriller WO2 was retitled The Mystery of the Mud Flats; and J. S. Le Fanu’s classic The Room in the Dragon Volant became The Flying Dragon. Perhaps the oddest alteration was to J. S. Fletcher’s accomplished short story collection The Ravenwood Mystery, renamed The Canterbury Mystery despite there being no such story in the book.

The Daily Mirror reviewed the new series: ‘Attractively bound in black and gold, with vivid coloured jackets, these books are bound to be immensely popular’, and an advertisement for the Detective Story Club in June 1930 claimed that it was ‘The Club with a Million Members!’ with already 19 books ‘sold by booksellers & newsagents everywhere’. The advert went on to state:

The extraordinary popularity of detective stories shows no signs of diminishing. The late Prime Minister [Stanley Baldwin] has confessed that he enjoys them; eminent men and women of every branch of life find them a mental stimulus. There is room for the Detective Story Club, Limited, founded to issue stories from the best detective writers—from Gaboriau to Edgar Wallace at a uniform price of 6d. Membership of the ‘club’ is completely informal. Any member of the public can buy these books through the ordinary trade channels, and in no other way.

The Detective Story Club was a big success. It spawned its own monthly short story magazine, which also sold for sixpence, and within a year gave Collins the confidence to launch a dedicated imprint for its full-price 7/6 hardbacks. In May 1930 the Crime Club was born, publishing three new mystery books every month, again selected by a body of ‘experts’. For its logo, the masked gunman evolved into a hooded gunman, and fans were invited to register by post for a free quarterly newsletter. The Crime Club ran until 1994 and published more than 2,000 titles, adding many new famous names to Collins’ existing roster, including Anthony Gilbert, Rex Stout, Ngaio Marsh, Elizabeth Ferrars, Joan Fleming, Robert Barnard, Julian Symons, H. R. F. Keating and Reginald Hill.

The Detective Story Club continued alongside the Crime Club until 1934, eventually abandoning the classics, the true crime and the film tie-ins and becoming principally a vehicle for cheap reprints of Collins’ earliest crime novels, such as 1920s titles by Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts and Philip MacDonald.

Then in 1935 the launch by publisher Allen Lane of his popular Penguin paperbacks sounded the death knell for the cheap hardback. Within a year, Collins launched its own paperback list, ‘White Circle Crime Club’, with stylish green and black covers showing a ghostlike gunman (and a knife-wielding accomplice), whose hood had now become a full-length shroud, and the original Man with the Gun was retired.

The resurrection of the Detective Story Club today is a chance to revisit some the best and most entertaining detective novels of the last century. The editors who picked titles for the Club chose well, although ideas about what constituted a detective story were obviously quite broad. Some books didn’t even feature detectives, and many of the rules and disciplines that characterised the era that has become known as the ‘Golden Age’ had yet to be formalised. These authors were the pioneers of an emerging genre—some broke new ground by inventing new types of story like the locked room mystery, the police procedural or the serial killer, while still drawing on more old-fashioned styles of classical romance, whimsical satire or the supernatural. But these were books with thrills and spills that got under the skin of their readers, and as such offer a candid glimpse today of how people thought and behaved at the time they were written.

The Mayfair Mystery, originally published in 1907 as 2835 Mayfair, is one such example. Author Frank Richardson had become very well known both in the UK and the USA as a satirist, his recurring theme a crusade against the Edwardian fashion for facial hair. He wrote more than a dozen books in just ten years, latterly collections of his widely published stories and parodies, including Bunkum (1907), its imaginatively titled sequel More Bunkum (1909), and perhaps his most famous, Whiskers and Soda (1910). These clearly endeared him to readers and reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic: ‘Whimsical, audacious, unconnected, and discursive, irresistibly amusing’ (Daily Express); ‘A master of extravaganza: No one can take up his books without being infected by the light, careless spirit which pervades them’ (Daily Telegraph); ‘No living writer knows better how to amuse than Mr Frank Richardson’ (New York Herald); ‘One of the wittiest men in London’ (New York Evening News); and so they went on.

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