Forgotten Book - The Gold Star Line

The Gold Star Line, first published in 1899, is a collection of six stories written in collaboration by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace. Their names appear together on the title page, though only Meade's name appears on the front cover and the spine.I don't know if the book ever had a dust jacket. My copy is one that I managed to acquire from a dealer, and its great point of interest is that it has the Detection Club bookplate, and a label pasted into it indicating that Eustace presented it to the Club's library in October 1933. (The library was auctioned off years ago, before I was involved with the Club.)

So Eustace was evidently pleased to be associated with the book, and I'm as sure as I can be that his role was as ideas man. There are at least two stories in the book which have plots turning on points involving medical or scientific expertise, and it's a safe assumption that these were contributed by Eustace. I'd imagine that Meade did all the writing; she was a big name in her day, and a prolific and versatile novelist.

The stories are all narrated by George Conway, purser employed by the Gold Star Line. Conway recounts a series of adventures in which he played a part; much, but by no means all, of the action takes place either on board ship or while the ship has landed somewhere in the course of a voyage. The range of international locations gives the book a cosmopolitan feel, which would have been a good selling point at the time.

Conway is a likeable fellow, but we learn very little about his personal life. For Meade and Eustace, the action is the thing. I found the stories agreeable light (very light) entertainment, and the scientific plot twists in "The Rice-Paper Chart" and "The Yellow Flag" were quite clever. They offer a pleasing glimpse into a vanished world, as well as an example of lively crime fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. Eustace would, of course, go on to further collaborative success more than twenty years later, on that famous short story "The Tea Leaf" (with Edgar Jepson) and on The Documents in the Case with Dorothy L. Sayers.

Capital Crimes - publication day!

Today sees the official publication of Capital Crimes, my anthology of London Mysteries for the British Library's series of Crime Classics. The book was scheduled for publication in March, but the amazing success of the Crime Classics series has led to...early release by popular demand! As I understand it, getting towards 5000 copies of the print edition had been bought already in advance of publication. Having edited more than 20 anthologies over the past twenty-odd years, books featuring some of the world's great contemporary writers (Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin, P.D. James, Colin Dexter, Lawrence Block et al) I can only say that I've never encountered pre-publication sales figures like this for an anthology previously.

If you define "the Golden Age of Murder" as the period between the two world wars, then the timespan of this collection extends beyond the Golden Age, in both directions. We begin with Conan Doyle (but his entry is not a Sherlock Holmes story) and continue until reaching a post-war story by Anthony Gilbert.

The connecting theme is the London setting of the stories, but my aim has been to go for variety. There is an obvious difficulty with putting together a collection of short stories from the past. Some if not all of the contents will be familiar to die-hard fans. It would be wildly optimistic to hope for over a dozen completely forgotten gems. And the need to trace copyright owners for stories that are still in copyright adds a further level of complexity.

All the same, with this anthology, and with others I've been working on for the British Library, I've endeavoured to include at least a couple of stories that I don't think will be familiar to most connoisseurs. In this book, I felt it would be folly to resist the temptation to include such classics as "The Tea Leaf" and "The Avenging Chance", even though they have been anthologised numerous times, because many enthusiastic fans of the Crime Classics series have come quite fresh to traditional detective fiction.

But hands up how many people have read such stories as "They Don't Wear Labels", "Cheese", and "You Can't Hang Twice"...I'm hoping that even many of the well-read followers of this blog will not have come across some or all of this trio of stories before. I've also included a Victorian serial killer story by John Oxenham, and abridged it slightly so that it could be fitted in - a slightly different version of the story has been anthologised in the past, but it's still quite obscure. All in all, I hope that this is a book which will entertain readers who, like me, are fascinated by London life -and by mysterious crimes.