A Short List of Great Stories

What better way to end this unofficial week of Crippen than with a return to Peter Lovesey? Better still— a return to Peter Lovesey via a short story collection published by Crippen & Landru! Since there are a few of these collections, it took me a while to decide which one to read—and finally, I decided on Murder on the Short List.

However, as my readers can testify, I’m infernally lazy. There’s quite a few short stories to be found in this collection, but they can be rather short, and it’s difficult to describe them in detail without giving something major away. So instead, I’ll vaguely describe some of the situations that this short story collection will throw at you. Are you ready? Here goes:

A harp heist gone wrong. A parade of elephants that leads to murder. A hearing aid heist planned and executed by a group of geriatrics. An attempt to seduce Adolf Hitler. A woman about to commit suicide discovers a memorial dedicated to her. Bertie, Prince of Wales, solves a Christmastime murder. Sergeant Cribb catches a Jack-the-Ripper-like murderer. Cold War tensions explode in a high-intensity tennis match at Wimbledon.

Make way for the prince!

Getting involved in a murder investigation is serious business, especially if one happens to be heir to the throne. Yet that is precisely what Albert Edward, Prince of Wales – Bertie to his friends – does. Moreover, he approaches the challenge of detective work as marvellous fun, though the events he investigates are far from jovial. In fact, they are rather grim, as a famous jockey named Fred Archer (aka the Tinman) suddenly takes his own life with a revolver in the presence of his sister. The man’s final, frantic words were: “Are they coming???”

This mysterious allusion to some mysterious “they” is taken by everyone as part of the dead man’s delusions brought on by typhoid. After all, the poor man had been severely ill that weekend, and it isn’t inconceivable that the malady was typhoid. Yet Bertie is unconvinced—he himself suffered from typhoid, and Archer’s symptoms—or rather, lack of symptoms— seem most unusual. Bertie suspects that the whole thing is a well-intentioned cover-up in order to spare the family further grief.