John Curran – The Perfect Crime: The Big Bow Mystery (страница 1)

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Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain as The Big Bow Mystery by Henry & Co. 1892

Published as The Perfect Crime by The Detective Story Club Ltd

for Wm Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1929

‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’

first published by Graham’s Magazine 1841

Introductions © John Curran 2015

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1929, 2015

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008137281

Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008137298

Version: 2015-07-06

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

The Big Bow Mystery: BY ISRAEL ZANGWILL

Preface of Murders and Mysteries

The Murders in the Rue Morgue: BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

Introduction

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

WHEN a corpse is found, with its throat cut and no sign of a weapon, in a room locked and bolted from the inside, both murder and suicide must be discarded as impossible. But writers of detective fiction, and their readers, are more circumspect. For them these fascinating conditions pose the questions: Whodunit? and, even more intriguingly, How?

Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) was not only the first detective story, but also the first locked-room detective story; and The Big Bow Mystery (1892) by Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was the first book-length example of the form. As such, it occupies an important place in the history of detective fiction.

The story first appeared in 1891 as a serial in the London daily Star newspaper, for which Zangwill worked at the time; it was published in book form the following year and collected in Zangwill’s The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes in 1903. In a preface, written for an 1895 edition of his book, the author perceptively acknowledged what is, in essence, the ‘fair-play’ rule of detective fiction (as adopted many years later by the Detection Club) when he wrote:

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