F
or #ReadIndies month, I had to pick up one of the many unread British Library Crime Classics I have on my shelf. Or, more precisely, piled high on top of a bookcase. Quite a lot of people have recommended The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) by Anthony Berkeley as one of the best ones, and I’ve had it for yonks.
It’s a great premise for a detective novel. Roger Sheringham, who apparently appears in other Berkeley novels, has assembled a group of people to help him solve a murder. I did have to make notes about who they all were, because he does a slightly unhelpful thing of telling you about them before he tells you their names – but it includes a dramatist, a detective novelist, an avant-garde writer, a solicitor, and a sort of timorous nobody.
The police have given up the case as lost. Can the Crime Club help? The dead person is Joan Bendix – poisoned, as the title suggests, by chocolates. The chocolates in question were given to her by her husband, but only because he bumped into Sir Eustace. He received them in the post, purporting to be from the chocolatiers, looking for a sponser. He rejects them – handing them to Graham Bendix. Later that night, both Bendixes – Bendices? – eat some chocolates, but Joan eats more. By the end of the evening, she is dead.
The brilliant thing about The Poisoned Chocolates Case is that each chapter gives a different solution, as the group take it in turns to present their detection and their conclusion. And, of course, the person they’re accusing of murder.
A couple of pretty unlikely solutions are given in the first chapters – but I have to admit that the third culprit/solution was the one I’d guessed from the outset. Oops! In the later chapters, Berkeley is very good at giving extremely convincing deductions – and then, in the next chapter, revealing why they were false conclusions and how the characters take false steps. Berkeley is clearly enjoying teasing the genre and exposing the tricks that detective novelists play. How often they use false syllogisms to make the denouement convincing. All of that.
Which does mean that the novel’s final solution is arguably no more convincing than any of the others – and the two extras at the end, contributing in the 70s by Christianna Brand and for this edition by Martin Edwards, are certainly not the most convincing – but it’s one of those rare detective novels where the satisfaction doesn’t come from the solution. It comes from seeing behind the curtain, at the construction of detection.