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.

Revenge of the Mad Hatter

Brighton, 1882. It is the height of the vacationing season, and Albert Moscorp is the protagonist of the story. While on vacation, he becomes involved with the family of Mrs. Zena Prothero, a beautiful woman married to a doctor who seems ignorant of her attractive qualities. But of course, this is a mystery, and after a bit, murder intervenes to cut someone’s holiday short… It is a grisly murder case, in which only a select few of the limbs are recovered by the police: the victim’s severed hand, as it happens, is found in the aquarium’s alligator cavern…

First off, let’s get my major problem with this book out of the way at once: I hate the character of Albert Moscorp. He is a disturbing and frankly psychotic creation: he spies on the entire beach through his various binoculars and telescopes. When he sees Zena Prothero through the lens, he takes plenty of pains to acquaint himself with the family, justifying it all in the name of science. How does he manage to introduce himself to Mrs. Prothero? Quite simple: he kidnaps their young child when they’re not paying attention only to return it. It is a frankly alarming sequence which had my jaw hanging wide open as I waited to see whether we would enter the domain of pedophilia or not. The voyeuristic delights Moscorp takes are creepy: like Drury Lane, he is an unsuccessful, unlikeable experiment, with eccentricities taken to the maximum. This is the main character, folks… The person I would estimate we waste well over half the book on… Enjoy!