The Big Bow Mystery
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
In the very first locked-room mystery, a wealthy man dedicated to helping London’s working classes is brutally murdered
On a gloomy December morning in the East End, a landlady asks former police inspector George Grodman to help rouse her unresponsive tenant, Arthur Constant. Forced to break down the labor activist’s door, Grodman discovers Constant’s body, his throat gruesomely slit. With every window securely latched and the front door locked from the inside, no one could have entered or exited the room. But the instrument that did the bloody deed is nowhere to be found. Reluctantly joining forces with his rival, Edward Wimp of Scotland Yard, Grodman quickly becomes tangled in a sticky mess of lies, betrayals, and political chicanery.
The Big Bow Mystery’s conclusion is shockingly unexpected and fiendishly clever, and it served as an inspiration to such masters of the locked-room mystery as Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whodunit fans who prefer their murders mysteriously committed behind locked doors will appreciate this reissue of the first impossible crime novel, penned by the unlikely Zangwill (1864-1926)-better known during his lifetime as an ardent British Zionist-in the late 1890s. Widowed landlady Mrs. Drabdump and retired Scotland Yarder Grodman batter down a secured and bolted bedroom door to find Arthur Constant, a hero of the working classes, dead from a cut throat. After suicide is quickly ruled out, the puzzle captures the city's imagination, with theory after theory (some poking fun at Poe's solution to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") floated in the press, until Grodman himself returns to the lists to try to clear the man condemned to death for the crime. The plot device has been used many times since, but Zangwill deserves credit for inventing it and enlisting it in an entertaining and timeless plot. With a sardonic style and vivid, Dickensian characterizations of Victoria-era London, Zangwill still appeals to contemporary readers.
