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  First published 2020 by

  The British Library

  96 Euston Road

  London NW1 2DB

  Introduction and notes copyright © 2020 Martin Edwards

  ‘The Case of the Man in the Squared Circle’ by Ernest Dudley reprinted with the permission of Cosmos Literary Agency on behalf of the Estate of Ernest Dudley.

  ‘Dangerous Sport’ by Celia Fremlin reprinted with the permission of David Higham Associates on behalf of the Estate of Celia Fremlin.

  ‘Death at the Wicket’ by Bernard Newman © 1956 The Estate of Bernard Newman. Reproduced by permission of Sheil Land Associates Ltd. The Bernard Newman Estate are currently reviving all Bernard Newman titles as eBook editions, published by Peach Publishing, available for sale online.

  ‘The Drop Shot’ by Michael Gilbert is reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the estate of Michael Gilbert. Copyright © The Estate of Michael Gilbert 1950.

  ‘Fisherman’s Luck’ by J. Jefferson Farjeon reprinted with the permission of David Higham Associates on behalf of the Estate of J. Jefferson Farjeon.

  ‘Four to One—Bar One’ by Henry Wade reprinted with the permission of the author’s Estate.

  ‘I, Said the Sparrow’ by Leo Bruce reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Leo Bruce.

  ‘The Red Golf Ball’ by Gerald Verner reprinted with the permission of Cosmos Literary Agency on behalf of the Estate of Gerald Verner.

  ‘The Swimming Gala’ by Gladys Mitchell reprinted with the permission of David Higham Associates on behalf of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell.

  ‘The Wimbledon Mystery’ by Julian Symons is reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of The Beneficiaries of the Estate of Julian Symons. Copyright © Julian Symons 1964.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be pleased to be notified of any corrections to be incorporated in reprints or future editions.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 7123 5321 2

  eISBN 978 0 7123 6750 9

  Illustration of the Tennis at Wimbledon by W. Bryce Hamilton in

  The Sphere, 12 June 1926 © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

  Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Loss of Sammy Crockett

  Arthur Morrison

  The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Double Problem

  F. A. M. Webster

  Fisherman’s Luck

  J. Jefferson Farjeon

  The Football Photograph

  H. C. Bailey

  The Red Golf Ball

  Gerald Verner

  The Boat Race Murder

  David Winser

  The Swimming Gala

  Gladys Mitchell

  The Case of the Man in the Squared Circle

  Ernest Dudley

  I, Said the Sparrow

  Leo Bruce

  Four to One—Bar One

  Henry Wade

  Death at the Wicket

  Bernard Newman

  The Wimbledon Mystery

  Julian Symons

  The Drop Shot

  Michael Gilbert

  Dangerous Sport

  Celia Fremlin

  ‌Introduction

  The detective story “is a sporting event”, said S. S. Van Dine, as long ago as 1928, when he published his twenty “rules of the game” in the American Magazine. The following year, in a famous early anthology of the genre, Best Detective Stories, Britain’s Ronald Knox expressed a similar view. According to Knox, “the detective story is a game between two players, the author… and the reader”, and laid down his own set of rules—just ten this time, the famous “Detective’s Decalogue”.

  The association of sports and games with stories of crime and detection is therefore long-established, and it isn’t too fanciful to discern various other types of connection. The most daring criminals, especially murderers who set out to commit the perfect crime, resemble gamblers who bet on the outcome of a race or sporting contest as well as those sportsmen and women who are prepared to take extraordinary risks in pursuit of a coveted prize. It is perhaps no surprise that when E. W. Hornung, Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, created one of fiction’s most legendary rogues, A. J. Raffles, “the amateur cracksman” was also a gifted cricketer.

  Sports and games can also provide an appealing background for tales of crime and detection, as many inventive novelists and short story writers have demonstrated over the years. This book gathers short mysteries set in Britain and published from the late nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth. As with other anthologies in the British Library Crime Classics series, this mysterious medley is designed to be eclectic, in the hope that it will please the most jaded palette. This collection also shines a light on the part played by sport in British life, and the way that sport, as well as wider society, has changed over the years.

  How fascinating it is, for instance, to read “The Double Problem”, a story about athletics first published almost a century ago, in an age when soccer is an industry worth billions and star players are international celebrities and multi-millionaires. Lord Rockpool suggests in the story that athletics is supplanting football in the public affections: “the exaggeration of professionalism is gradually killing the public interest in Association football… The professionals… have deprived the game of a feature of robustness… which still keeps the Rugby game healthy… the finicking exactness of the professional player has robbed the game of its goal-getting possibilities…” Suffice to say that his crystal ball suffered a serious malfunction.

  Rockpool’s inaccurate prophecy reminds us that these stories were mostly written in an age which drew a strict dividing line between amateur sportsmen, typically well-bred young men with inherited wealth, and professional players from humble backgrounds whose earnings were so modest that on occasion they were tempted into crime. Time and again, this anthology illustrates the workings and consequences of the class divisions in British society.

  The authors featured range from the famous, including Doyle, to such long-forgotten (at least in the context of crime fiction) figures as F. A. M. Webster and David Winser. Webster, author of “The Double Problem”, was a prominent athletics coach and writer; there can be little doubt that Lord Rockpool’s sentiments reflected Webster’s. Winser was an accomplished oarsman before his life was cruelly cut short during the Second World War.

  People with first-hand experience of sport at the highest level have often turned to writing crime fiction, usually thrillers rather than cerebral whodunits. The outstanding example is Dick Francis, whose much-lauded books benefited from his expert understanding of the horse racing world as well as from his personal knowledge of the exciting but dangerous life of a high-profile jockey.

  The first landmark mystery set against the world of horse racing was Doyle’s “Silver Blaze”, and the sport has supplied a popular backdrop to crime fiction ever since. Another National Hunt champion jockey, John Francome, followed Dick Francis’ lead by publishing his first thriller in 1986. He continued to turn out a book a year for a quarter of a century before giving up, as he has explained, “because I simply couldn’t think of any more ways of killing anyone”. Francis died in 2010, but by then the Francis “family business” of thriller writing had been joined by his son Felix, who continues to
write bestsellers branded as “Dick Francis novels”.

  Cricket is probably the sport which has produced the most distinguished literature, and although it is (on the surface at least) a much gentler sport than horse racing, it has often featured in crime stories. Dorothy L. Sayers’ multi-talented Lord Peter Wimsey was a fine batsman, and Murder Must Advertise (1933) includes a memorable cricket scene. Among cricketers who have written crime fiction was Sayers’ friend Henry Aubrey-Fletcher, a wealthy baronet who played the game as an amateur for Buckinghamshire. Writing as Henry Wade, he featured a country house cricket match in a key scene in his finest novel, Lonely Magdalen (1940), while his familiarity with the country racing set is evident in A Dying Fall (1955).

  Ted Dexter, a charismatic figure nicknamed “Lord Ted”, was one of England’s most dashing sportsmen during the 1950s and 1960s. He captained the national cricket team and was also an accomplished golfer. In collaboration with the sports journalist Clifford Makins, he produced Testkill (1976), concerning the murder of an Australian cricketer during a Test Match at Lord’s.

  Dexter and Makins returned to sporting crime three years later with Deadly Putter, set in the world of golf. This is another sport which has given rise to a host of crime novels and short stories. Several authors have made a speciality of golfing mysteries. They include the highly collectable Golden Age writer Herbert Adams as well as, in more recent times, authors such as Keith Miles (the real name of the prolific crime novelist who has also achieved success as Edward Marston), Barry Cork, and Malcolm Hamer. In 1997, Thomas W. Taylor produced The Golf Murders, an extensive and lavishly illustrated catalogue of books and short stories featuring the sport; he pointed out that golf features in numerous mysteries by Agatha Christie, one of the few female crime writers to show a deep interest in golf. Taylor also listed the different murder methods employed in golfing mysteries, e.g. exploding ball; exploding club head; explosive charge in the cup; exploding golf course (believe it or not); speared with the flag stick; trick club; and sabotaged golf cart.

  Among famous footballers to turn to writing thrillers after hanging up their boots, perhaps the most notable is Terry Venables, who played for England and also managed the national team. He and the Scottish novelist Gordon Williams co-wrote three novels under the pen-name P. B. Yuill about the private eye James Hazell which led to a television series starring Nicholas Ball as the Cockney answer to Philip Marlowe.

  The former World Number One women’s tennis player Martina Navratilova dabbled in thriller writing during the 1990s, again working in collaboration. To this day, the overwhelming majority of sports-related crime fiction is written by male authors, and sports mysteries with female protagonists are uncommon, although this is likely to change as the media belatedly pay more attention to women’s sports.

  Of course, being a prominent sportsman or woman is not an essential qualification for writing an authentic sports-based crime story. Leonard R. Gribble, a prolific writer with a keen commercial instinct, enjoyed his greatest success with The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1939), a football whodunit in which famous players from Arsenal F.C. became characters in a mystery. The book became a popular film and has recently been republished as a British Library Crime Classic. Gribble returned to the beautiful game with a story featuring the leading English soccer star of his era, They Kidnapped Stanley Matthews (1950).

  Bernard Newman, one of whose short stories appears in this book, tried a similar approach with a novel about tennis. Victor Gollancz emblazoned the dust jacket of Centre Court Murder (1951) with words taken from the book’s opening sentence: “Gorgeous Gussie Moran made a mistake when she paraded in lace panties: and a bigger mistake when she told the world about her love affairs”. Today this serves as a reminder of some of the more bizarre sexism of the past, not only in fiction, but in real life: Moran was an American tennis star whose revealing dress prompted the All England Club to accuse her of having brought “vulgarity and sin into tennis”. After that, even Newman’s book about murder at the home of cricket, Death at Lord’s (1952), was likely to be an anti-climax.

  Peter Lovesey is today renowned as one of the world’s leading detective novelists, but he began his career as a published author with a book which grew out of his interest in the history of athletics and charted the careers of five great distance runners. This was followed by Wobble to Death (1970), a prize-winning novel about a six-day endurance race which introduced the Victorian detective Sergeant Cribb, and The Detective Wore Silk Drawers (1971), set in the world of bare-knuckle boxing. Lovesey’s body of work includes Goldengirl (1977), published under the pen-name Peter Lear and written in anticipation of the Moscow Olympics.

  The links between sport and fictional crime were celebrated in Ellery Queen’s landmark anthology Sporting Blood (1942), although that book also included such activities as poker, chess, and the collecting of coins and butterflies. There has been at least one anthology of horse racing stories, and also a book of chess mysteries. This collection is, as far as I know, the first major attempt in the UK to gather together short mystery stories, each of which features a different sport and a different author. Putting it together has been a pleasure enhanced by the help and encouragement of classic crime experts Nigel Moss, Jamie Sturgeon, and John Cooper, as well as by information supplied by Philip Harbottle and the support of the team in the Publishing Department at the British Library.

  And now it’s time to fire the starting pistol…

  Martin Edwards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  ‌The Loss of Sammy Crockett

  ‌Arthur Morrison

  Arthur Morrison (1863–1945) was a journalist, author, and nineteenth century EastEnder who was born in Poplar, the son of an engine fitter. He made good use of his knowledge of the East End of London in books such as Tales of Mean Streets (1894)—yes, he wrote about the mean streets long before Raymond Chandler—and A Child of the Jago (1906). In his youth, he was an enthusiastic cyclist and boxer; in later years, as his literary fame grew, he could afford to indulge in his artistic tastes, and he assembled a valuable collection of Japanese works of art, many of which are now held in the British Museum.

  When Sherlock Holmes’ apparent demise in the Reichenbach Falls in 1894 created a vacancy for a popular detective, Morrison was commercially astute enough to seize the opportunity. That year saw the first appearance of his series investigator Martin Hewitt, an amiable but shrewd private enquiry agent, and the stories were snapped up by the Strand Magazine; Sidney Paget, famous for illustrating the Holmes stories, also supplied illustrations for Hewitt’s case-book. The series continued for a decade and the American author and critic Ellery Queen went so far as to describe Hewitt as the only important contemporary of Holmes among private detectives. In the early 1970s, Hewitt was played on television in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes by a well-cast Peter Barkworth. This story, which first appeared in the Strand in April 1894, has occasionally been reprinted under an alternative title, “The Loss of Sammy Throckett”; the reasons for the change are themselves a mystery.

  It was, of course, always a part of Martin Hewitt’s business to be thoroughly at home among any and every class of people, and to be able to interest himself intelligently, or to appear to do so, in their various pursuits. In one of the most important cases ever placed in his hands, he could have gone but a short way toward success had he not displayed some knowledge of the more sordid aspects of professional sport, and a great interest in the undertakings of a certain dealer therein. The great case itself had nothing to do with sport, and, indeed, from a narrative point of view, was somewhat uninteresting, but the man who alone held the one piece of information wanted was a keeper, backer, or “gaffer” of professional pedestrians, and it was through the medium of his pecuniary interest in such matters that Hewitt was enabled to strike a bargain with him.

  The man was a publican on the outskirts of Padfield, a northern town pretty famous for its sporting tastes, and to Padfield, therefore, Hewit
t betook himself, and, arrayed in a way to indicate some inclination of his own toward sport, he began to frequent the bar of the “Hare and Hounds.” Kentish, the landlord, was a stout, bull-necked man, of no great communicativeness at first; but after a little acquaintance he opened out wonderfully, became quite a jolly (and rather intelligent) companion, and came out with innumerable anecdotes of his sporting adventures. He could put a very decent dinner on the table, too, at the “Hare and Hounds,” and Hewitt’s frequent invitation to him to join therein and divide a bottle of the best in the cellar soon put the two on the very best of terms. Good terms with Mr. Kentish was Hewitt’s great desire, for the information he wanted was of a sort that could never be extracted by casual questioning, but must be a matter of open communication by the publican, extracted in what way it might be.

  “Look here,” said Kentish one day, “I’ll put you on to a good thing, my boy—a real good thing. Of course, you know all about the Padfield 135 Yards Handicap being run off now?”

  “Well, I haven’t looked into it much,” Hewitt replied. “Ran the first round of heats last Saturday and Monday, didn’t they?”

  “They did. Well”—Kentish spoke in a stage whisper as he leaned over and rapped the table—“I’ve got the final winner in this house.” He nodded his head, took a puff at his cigar, and added, in his ordinary voice, “Don’t say nothing.”

  “No, of course not. Got something on, of course?”

  “Rather—what do you think? Got any price I liked. Been saving him up for this. Why, he’s got twenty-one yards, and he can do even time all the way! Fact! Why, he could win runnin’ back’ards. He won his heat on Monday like—like—like that!” The gaffer snapped his fingers, in default of a better illustration, and went on. “He might ha’ took it a little easier, I think—it’s shortened his price, of course, him jumpin’ in by two yards. But you can get decent odds now, if you go about it right. You take my tip—back him for his heat next Saturday, in the second round, and for the final. You’ll get a good price for the final, if you pop it down at once. But don’t go makin’ a song of it, will you, now? I’m givin’ you a tip I wouldn’t give anybody else.”