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A review by hannahstohelit
The Anatomy of Murder by The Detection Club
4.25
Unlike a lot of the other reviewers, I really really enjoyed this one! I agree with others that Helen Simpson's coverage of her case was a bit dull, and I kind of feel like the only real justification for Rhode's piece at all was him gloating that he got a tell all letter from Constance Kent herself, but like... if I had, I'd have done the same, because obviously. (I had already read enough about the case to know that the letter was genuine and almost definitely from Constance, as Rhode deduced.)
One interesting thing for me was the way in which different writers with their own stories or their own way of thinking about things a) chose which stories to write about and b) approached how they did so. Margaret Cole and Anthony Berkeley wrote about stories which were quite similar (woman in love triangle is arrested for the murder of her husband but acquitted), which I don't know was exactly the best choice for a collection like this but it did allow the unique features of each case to come out as well as the unique voices and opinions of each writer to shine through. For Cole, who had her own pretty unconventional and apparently sexually unusual marriage to a somewhat odd man, her approach of sympathy to a trio in a similarly unorthodox relationship is very sympathetic- a bit academically snobbish but otherwise very human and realistic. For Berkeley, a man who had his own affairs with married women, he attacks a case where he can't help but sympathize with both the straying wife and the (to the modern eye, shockingly age-gapped) affair partner in terms of humanizing their connection, even if not the actual murder of the husband, while also unleashing his apparently inexorable misogyny. I was curious if Jumping Jenny was written after this because his description of Alma Rattenbury's character felt a bit like a more sympathetic version of his murder victim in that book, but it turns out Jumping Jenny was written two years before the Rattenbury murder ever took place, so apparently that's just the natural twist of his mind.
Punshon's description of the Landru case was great, and as it was a case I was totally unfamiliar with I do wish it had described the scope and details of the crimes a bit better, but I guess in the 30s it would have been still fresh in people's minds. Sayers's write up of the Julia Wallace case was characteristically excellent, I appreciated it being told "from the POV of a mystery writer/expert" as was at that point something of her wont, and I agree with her (as I'd read previously) that the story as told fits better with a third party murderer than Wallace himself. (That said, Sayers makes one logical error when she supposes that there's no reason for Wallace to wear a raincoat over his naked body while killing his own wife- if the raincoat would be left with the body anyway, then it would minimize the mess that Wallace would need to clean up from himself before quickly dressing and heading out on a quick timeline.) I'd have found Crofts's description of the farm murder in New Zealand a bit dry had the actual crime not been completely fascinating in its own right, completely redeeming it.
All in all, super enjoyable!
One interesting thing for me was the way in which different writers with their own stories or their own way of thinking about things a) chose which stories to write about and b) approached how they did so. Margaret Cole and Anthony Berkeley wrote about stories which were quite similar (woman in love triangle is arrested for the murder of her husband but acquitted), which I don't know was exactly the best choice for a collection like this but it did allow the unique features of each case to come out as well as the unique voices and opinions of each writer to shine through. For Cole, who had her own pretty unconventional and apparently sexually unusual marriage to a somewhat odd man, her approach of sympathy to a trio in a similarly unorthodox relationship is very sympathetic- a bit academically snobbish but otherwise very human and realistic. For Berkeley, a man who had his own affairs with married women, he attacks a case where he can't help but sympathize with both the straying wife and the (to the modern eye, shockingly age-gapped) affair partner in terms of humanizing their connection, even if not the actual murder of the husband, while also unleashing his apparently inexorable misogyny. I was curious if Jumping Jenny was written after this because his description of Alma Rattenbury's character felt a bit like a more sympathetic version of his murder victim in that book, but it turns out Jumping Jenny was written two years before the Rattenbury murder ever took place, so apparently that's just the natural twist of his mind.
Punshon's description of the Landru case was great, and as it was a case I was totally unfamiliar with I do wish it had described the scope and details of the crimes a bit better, but I guess in the 30s it would have been still fresh in people's minds. Sayers's write up of the Julia Wallace case was characteristically excellent, I appreciated it being told "from the POV of a mystery writer/expert" as was at that point something of her wont, and I agree with her (as I'd read previously) that the story as told fits better with a third party murderer than Wallace himself. (That said, Sayers makes one logical error when she supposes that there's no reason for Wallace to wear a raincoat over his naked body while killing his own wife- if the raincoat would be left with the body anyway, then it would minimize the mess that Wallace would need to clean up from himself before quickly dressing and heading out on a quick timeline.) I'd have found Crofts's description of the farm murder in New Zealand a bit dry had the actual crime not been completely fascinating in its own right, completely redeeming it.
All in all, super enjoyable!