The Big Bow Mystery

Israel Zangwill

4 ideas

1. The Glover Street locked-room killing

   In a Bow lodging house, landlady Mrs. Drabdump cannot wake her lodger Arthur Constant, a young idealist who champions the working class. She fetches her neighbour George Grodman, a famous retired detective, who breaks down the bolted door; inside, Constant lies with his throat cut and no weapon or exit. After the labour leader Tom Mortlake is convicted, Grodman confesses that Constant had only been drugged asleep, and that Grodman cut his throat himself in the seconds after forcing the door, before the landlady could see.

2. The first-in murder: relocating the moment

   An impossible crime is impossible only under an unstated assumption about when it happened. If the murder occurs after the room is opened rather than before, the locks and bolts are irrelevant. The person who opens the room and 'discovers' the body is often the one person no one suspects, because the discovery is treated as the end of the crime rather than as part of it.

3. Expert vanity as a motive for crime

   Grodman kills a man he has no grudge against so he can prove that a perfect crime is possible. The novel holds that an expert's need to demonstrate mastery, and to show up rivals and a public he thinks are dull, can be strong enough to drive the very act the expertise exists to prevent.

4. Coherent circumstantial cases convict the wrong man

   The rival detective Edward Wimp starts from a plausible suspect and assembles scattered facts into a tidy story. The story is persuasive enough to convict an innocent man. A narrative's internal coherence is not evidence that it is true, and investigators who start from a suspect will find facts that fit.

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