The biggest
criticism is that too many of the exhibits are modern and unexciting
paperbacks even though the British Library must have original copies of first
editions of all crime books, which are of greater interest.
The entrance to
the exhibition (just above the escalator) has a quotation from Monsignor Knox
and his famous
Decalogue, which laid down all the rules that good detective writers
(especially Agatha Christie) proceeded to break.
What of the
actual alphabet? It is quite remarkably eccentric. The curator or curators who
put it together seem to have been at a loss occasionally as to what to put for
some letters.
A is for Agatha
Christie, which is understandable. Only two authors merit a letter of their
own: she and Wilkie Collins under W. Presumably, they could not be both put
under C. Curiously enough only two detectives merit a letter of their own as
well, also under their first names, which is somewhat inappropriate in the case
of Holmes, who comes under S for Sherlock. Nobody, apart from Mycroft called
him that. The other detective, though, is picked for some mysterious reason: D
is for Dave Robicheaux,
James Lee Burke’s series character, who is fairly well known but hardly in the
same category of fame and importance as Sherlock Holmes.
The Dave
Robicheaux exhibit also carried a most irritating comment:
The Tin Roof Blowdown (2007), set against the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, was described as the best fictional response to the catastrophe and a work which completely transcended the limitations of the genre.
Tory Historian
feels that if the genre’s limitations are so easily transcended then they
cannot possibly be all that stringent. Also, this is an exhibition about the
genre and its many possibilities. Why bother with those who “transcend” it? Do
they produce better literature or just worse detective stories?
B is a somewhat random choice - Better Known As – and it lists various people like Gipsy Rose Lee,
who were better known as something else but wrote detective stories as well.
C gives us Clues
and D has been described above. E is Ecclesiastica, an adequate but, naturally
enough, not exhaustive list of detective stories written by or about religious
personalities. One could have a whole exhibition devoted just to that aspect of
the subject.
F is for
Forensic and G for Golden Age that displays a copy of Trent’s Last Case,
published 100 years ago, Dorothy L. Sayers’s The
Nine Tailors, Ronald Knox’s Still Dead for some reason,
as it is neither particularly good or particularly important, and Ellery
Queen’s The
Egyptian Cross Mystery.
H is,
inevitably, for Hardboiled, with Chandler 
K is for Kidnap
and it concentrated on Josephine Tey’s The
Franchise Affair and the original crime that it was loosely based on,
the disappearance and reappearance of Elizabeth Canning in the mid-eighteenth
century.
L is for Locked
Room Mysteries, displaying The Mystery
of the Yellow Room by Gaston LeRoux, The
Hollow Man by John
Dickson Carr, the novel that includes a long lecture by Dr Fell on the
different types of locked room mysteries and a book about the Great Merlini
by Claude Rawson, an unexpected and welcome addition.
M is for Mayhem
Parva that rather whimsical description of the supposedly cosy English village
where endless murders are committed, coined by Colin Watson. Curiously enough,
the example put up is The
Killings at Badger’s Drift by Caroline Graham, a deeply uncomfortable
novel, the very opposite of cosy.
Then we go on to
some of the obvious themes: N for Nordic Noir (though where is the Italian
crime wave, the trend that overwhelmed us all just before the Nordic one?) and
O for Oxford
Q had to be
Queens of Crime though the selection is necessarily random and dependent on
somebody’s taste or lack of any real knowledge. Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case is
followed by Margery Allingham’s Mystery
Mile and P. D. James’s Cover her Face. The
first and third make perfect sense, the middle one less so. Why that one of
Allingham’s? And where is Dame Ngaio Marsh?
R is for
Railways, taken up almost entirely by Murder
on the Orient Express and the star-studded film.
Whatever happened to all the other, less well known railway mysteries? S has
already been mentioned, T is for True Crime and U is for Unsuitable Job, that
is professional female detectives: The Female Detective
by Andrew Forrester, the first of a long line, Revelations
of a Lady Detective by William Stephens Hayward, published six months
later, Baroness Orczy’s Lady Molly
of Scotland Yard, an improbable but very clever series of yarns, and a
couple of books about V.
I. Warshawski (though there is also a mention of the Victorian lady
detective Loveday Brooke).
V is for
Villains, gentlemanly like Raffles and
psychopathic like Tom Ripley.
W, as mentioned before, is Wilkie Collins, X is Xenophobia with many examples
of the villainous Dr Fu Manchu
and an obvious explanation for the 5th item in Knox’s Decalogue:
No Chinaman must figure in the story.
Y is an entertaining selection of Young
Detectives such as Erich Kästner’s Emil,
Enid Blyton’s Five
Find-Outers (a new one for Tory Historian) and Siobhan Dowd’s Ted, the boy
with Asperger’s Syndrome. Z is for Zodiac with just one book displayed and that
is The
Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada. 