Just Finished Reading: The Measure of Malice – Scientific Detective Stories edited by Martin Edwards (FP: 2020) [321pp] 

As always with any collection of stories from various authors – even Classic ones – books like these tend to be a bit of a roller-coaster in quality. Styles change over a century or more and such changes don’t always translate too well for a more modern reader. That said this was in no way a bad collection of stories. It wasn’t. 

Things started out strong with (inevitably) a Sherlock Holmes tale The Boscombe Valley Mystery (1891) where a young man is accused of murder based on circumstantial evidence. As Holmes investigates a number of pieces of physical evidence acquired at the scene points towards his innocence. The next story, The Horror of Studley Grange (1894) by L T Meade and Clifford Halifax, whilst interesting (or weird depending on your PoV) rested too much on two of my particular bugbears where ‘thrillers’ are concerned: the unreliable narrator or liar as I prefer to call them and the fact that strange things/occurrences are taken at face value – even when they’re clearly irrational/unreasonable - until the detective (in this case a doctor) decides that things don’t make sense and starts to actually INVESTIGATE things! I can only imagine that in that age the author didn’t expect his readership to think scientifically or forensically about the case being presented to them.  

Doctors seemed to be a regular stand-in for detectives for a considerable time and appeared at least as subject matter experts (SMEs) in a number of tales in this collection including a fun little one called The Cyprian Bees (1924) by Anthony Wynne. As you might expect the murder ‘weapon’ was a rather unusual one. I’m not 100% sure that the science would work as advertised in the story, but it was definitely an interesting way to do the deed! Along with the medical profession a classic detective substitute is the insurance company investigator. A very good example of this was The Contents of a Mare’s Nest (1927) by R Austin Freeman where a claim is questioned despite (or rather because of) the body of the deceased being rather hastily cremated to avoid forensic examination. Or so the perpetrator thought! 

I’ll just mention two more. The Broken Toad (1934) by H C Bailey had a convoluted plot and a very nice piece of misdirection which kept me guessing right to the end and In the Teeth of the Evidence (1939) by Dorothy L Sayers which revolved around the expert evidence of a local dentist after an apparent suicide turns out to be something far more sinister. 

Overall, despite a few wobbles and niggles, this was a solid collection of detective shorts with a definite science bias – although the ‘science’ involved was at least once on very dodgy ground! As always with such things this is an excellent way to get into classic crime or to find new authors to try out in future novels. Recommended.