The Big Bow Mystery (Dover Mystery Classics) - Softcover

Zangwill, Israel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0486814858 ISBN 13: 9780486814858

Publisher: Dover, 2017

Synopsis

On a chilly December morning in Bow, a working-class area in London's East End, a landlady unsuccessfully attempts to rouse a tenant whose door is locked and bolted from the inside. The alarmed landlady calls upon her neighbor, a retired Scotland Yard detective, who breaks down the door to reveal the tenant with his throat cut and no weapon in sight. "It seems clear that the deceased did not commit suicide," the coroner declares at the inquest, adding, "It seems equally clear that the deceased was not murdered."
So begins Israel Zangwill's darkly humorous mystery, which marked a turning point in detective fiction. Sealed-room mysteries had appeared before, but this inventive tale offered a novel exploitation of the genre's puzzling possibilities. The 1891 publication was serialized in the London Star, a tabloid notorious for its sensational coverage of the Jack the Ripper murders. Between installments, Zangwill engaged in a lively dialogue with his readers, who proposed solutions to the crime (none of them correct). As Publishers Weekly noted, "With a sardonic style and vivid, Dickensian characterizations of Victorian-era London, Zangwill still appeals to contemporary readers."

About this title

About the Author:

Novelist, short story writer, and playwright Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was a political activist and known as "the Dickens of the ghetto" for his stories of life in London's immigrant Jewish community. His play The Melting Pot gave rise to the metaphor of America as a crucible for the melding of nationalities.

From Publishers Weekly:

Whodunit fans who prefer their murders mysteriously committed behind locked doors will appreciate this reissue of the first impossible crime novel, penned by the unlikely Zangwill (1864-1926)-better known during his lifetime as an ardent British Zionist-in the late 1890s. Widowed landlady Mrs. Drabdump and retired Scotland Yarder Grodman batter down a secured and bolted bedroom door to find Arthur Constant, a hero of the working classes, dead from a cut throat. After suicide is quickly ruled out, the puzzle captures the city's imagination, with theory after theory (some poking fun at Poe's solution to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") floated in the press, until Grodman himself returns to the lists to try to clear the man condemned to death for the crime. The plot device has been used many times since, but Zangwill deserves credit for inventing it and enlisting it in an entertaining and timeless plot. With a sardonic style and vivid, Dickensian characterizations of Victoria-era London, Zangwill still appeals to contemporary readers.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Dover
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0486814858
• ISBN 13: 9780486814858
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112
• Editor: Bleiler E. F.