Murder most wet... A review of "Deep Waters - Murder on the Waves" edited by Martin Edwards

Murder most wet...

"Deep Waters - Murder on the Waves" (edited by Martin Edwards - British Library Crime Classics)

The British Library Crime Classics series (published and marketed in the US by Poisoned Pen Press) is growing into a veritable library spanning the “Golden Age” of crime fiction.  Since 2012, the series has presented to the public forgotten gems of the genre. 

Martin Edwards, who is himself an award-winning crime writer and Chairperson of the Crime Writers’ Association, deserves much of the credit for the success of this venture.  Besides acting as series consultant, he has also edited several of its “themed anthologies”.      I must admit that although I enjoy some crime fiction now and then, it is not the genre I typically read.  I guess that for persons like me, these multi-author anthologies are an ideal entry point to the Crime Classics series.  Edwards is an erudite and intelligent editor, who knows how to keep a reader interested through the variety of the chosen stories.

“Deep Waters”, the thirteenth anthology to appear in the series, is an excellent example. It features a total of sixteen stories which all bear some relation to water.  Edwards casts his net wide, and the watery settings to the chosen tales range from cruise liners sailing the oceans, to river boats, canals and even ponds and swimming pools.   The stories are spread over a century or so, starting in 1893 with the very first piece in the Sherlock Holmes canon (Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott”) and ending with “Death by Water” by Michael Innes (the pen-name of Edinburgh-born academic John Innes Mackintosh Stewart), first published in the 1975 collection “The Appleby File”.

Along the way, we meet examples of works by leading representatives of the “Golden Age” crime fiction, such as E.W. Hornung and Edmund Crispin, alongside lesser-known authors such as Kem Bennett.  Crime fiction is often dismissed as being too formulaic – this selection shows that nothing can be further from the truth and that the best authors find ingenious ways of presenting, reinterpreting and in some cases subverting the expectations of the genre.  The protagonists range from professional to amateur or even ‘accidental’ investigators and there’s an appearance by  E.W. Hornung’s amiable rogue ‘Raffles’.  There are also some excellent examples of crime sub-genres such as the ‘locked-room mystery’ (as in “Bullion”, by William Hope Hodgson, possibly better-known as the author of creepy ghost stories) and the “inverted mystery”, where the solution to the mystery is presented to the reader at the outset and the pleasure lies in discovering how the puzzle will be unravelled.

Although the style of some of featured pieces feels rather dated, there is much enjoyment to be had from these watery tales.  As a bonus, Martin Edwards provides a foreword to the anthology, as well as an introduction to each story, with biographical and bibliographical details.  

Paperback, 352 pages

Expected publication: September 3rd 2019 by Poisoned Pen Press

Original publication: June 10th 2019 by British Library Publishing