Forgotten Book - Panic Party

My choice for today's Forgotten Book is a 1934 title from the pen of Anthony Berkeley. Panic Party, aka Mr Pidgeon's Island, was the last novel to feature Roger Sheringham - one of the great Golden Age amateur sleuths, even though his career lasted less than ten years.

The book begins with Berkeley’s riposte to the challenge Milward Kennedy set him in Death to the Rescuea and which I mentioned last week:

“You once challenged me, in public print, to write a book in which the only interest should be the detection. I have no hesitation in refusing to do anything so tedious, and instead take the greatest pleasure in dedicating to you a book which is precisely the opposite, which breaks every rule of the austere Club to which we both belong, and which will probably earn my expulsion from its membership.”

In fact, the novel does not break all the Club’s rules by a long stretch. Sheringham joins a yachting party organised by Guy Pidgeon, an Oxford don who has come into the money. The group finds itself marooned on a desert island, and Pidgeon announces that their party includes a murderer. His 'murder game' has a predictable outcome – soon he is found dead.

When I first read this book years ago, I felt rather dissatisfied with it. On a second reading, I was more sympathetic. It's an interesting experiment. almost a forerunner of Lord of the Flies. And, as usual with this author, there are some witty passages as well as several darker ones.

Forgotten Book - Death to the Rescue

I've told the story already of how Milward Kennedy was sued for libel over his 1931 novel Death to the Rescue, but I've chosen the novel as today's Forgotten Book because I found his dedication to Anthony Berkeley very interesting. Here it is:

'"We have sometimes discussed the future of the Detective Novel. We know only too well ourselves-imposed difficulties; our oaths to play fair, to conceal from the reader no clue of which are detective is aware, to eschew Death Rays and Unknown Poisons and over-use of Chinamen. We know, too, our other difficulty – the character of our Detective.

Our public grows sophisticated… It knows that in the investigation there is no place for the talented amateur or the private practitioner… So we are driven to make him a Priest, or Insurance Agent, or Lawyer, or Journalist… These professions grow overcrowded. Worst of all, we make him a policeman – super-eccentric or super-efficient, which ever seems more likely to add a taste piquant enough to hide the smell of machinery. We aim at even greater ingenuity in the ways of murder…

You, I believe, discern a new road – the "inner history" of the murder itself. You and Miss Sayers and others have given us masterly glimpses of that new road. But – will it not lead you away from Detection?

Here is a novel of Detection and little more; with a Detective who is wholly amateur, and has no knowledge of Shellfish or Finger-Prints or Cigar Ash; with no excitement of chase or of lunacy or of the shadow of the gallows spreading across the path of the innocent…

But, since I am the author, the novel does not answer the question, 'can Detection in itself be the whole motive of a Story?" I suggest that you can write a novel which will prove that the answer is 'yes'.'

I rather like the idea of writers setting each other challenges like this. It doesn't happen today in the same way. Sure enough, Berkeley responded with a book dedicated to Kennedy three years later. But he didn't exactly take up the challenge...