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Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
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.
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Source ISBN: 9780008137281
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008137298
Version: 2015-07-06
Contents
The Big Bow Mystery: BY ISRAEL ZANGWILL
Preface of Murders and Mysteries
The Murders in the Rue Morgue: BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
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:
‘The indispensable condition of a good mystery is that it should be able and unable to be solved by the reader, and that that the writer’s solution should satisfy. And not only must the solution be adequate, but all its data must be given in the body of the story.’
Zangwill had long suspected, he explained, that ‘no mystery-monger had ever murdered a man in a room to which there was no possible access’ and that, although he had devised such a solution, it lay dormant until the editor of ‘a popular London evening newspaper’ asked him ‘to provide…a more original piece of fiction’. As the story unfolded—written in a fortnight ‘day by day’, according to the author—readers of the serial submitted ‘unsolicited testimonials in the shape of solutions’, although they ‘had failed,