The Big Bow Mystery

On a freezing December morning in the Bow district of East London, the landlady Mrs. Drabdump cannot wake her lodger. His door is locked and bolted from the inside; no knocking rouses him. She fetches her famous neighbour, the retired detective George Grodman, who breaks the door down — and they find the young idealist and labour reformer Arthur Constant lying on his bed with his throat cut. There is no weapon in the room. The window is fastened. The door was bolted from within. By every law of reason the murder cannot have happened.

The impossibility seizes all London. The popular press christens it the "Big Bow Mystery"; theories multiply, a reward is posted, and public hysteria mounts. Two detectives take up the case as rivals: Grodman himself, vain and brilliant and eager to prove the old hand still has it, and his cold, methodical successor at Scotland Yard, Edward Wimp, who builds a damning case against the dead man's fellow lodger, the labour leader Tom Mortlake. As they race each other toward the truth, Zangwill spins a glittering satire of journalism, politics, and the public appetite for sensation — and drives toward one of the most audacious solutions in all of detective fiction.

First serialised in 1891 and published as a book in 1892, The Big Bow Mystery is generally recognised as the first full-length locked-room novel — the founding work of the "impossible-crime" tradition that runs through Chesterton and John Dickson Carr to the present day. In his own preface Zangwill laid down the "fair play" law that still governs the genre: a good mystery must be both "able and unable to be solved by the reader." Witty, ingenious, and unexpectedly modern in its satire, it is the book where the locked-room mystery began.

This edition presents the complete novel in clean, modern typesetting, with an editor's foreword on the book's place in the history of detective fiction, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.