Golden Age of Detective Fiction

I’m crossing off another square, Death By Strangulation, of my British Crime Classics BINGO which is the brainchild of Rehka at The Book Decoder. My previous square: Setting Outside the UK, was checked off with Christianna Brand’s Tour De Force which you can read here. The Silk Stocking Murders has four strangulation deaths as Roger Sheringham and Inspector Moresby hunt a serial killer from London to Monte Carlo.

Parson A. E. Manners is very concerned about the health and whereabouts of his eldest daughter Janet Manners who months earlier left home to find work in the city. Janet has fastidiously been writing home to her parents and sending a little money back to her family to help support her four younger sisters. Still, lately, the Manners family has heard nothing from Janet. Anxiously, A. E. Manners writes an impassioned letter to Roger Sheringham, whose amateur detective successes he has read about in the newspaper, imploring him to find Janet.

Sheringham is moved by the plight of the Manners family and traces Janet to a seedy revue company where she is working as a dancer under the name Unity Ransom. Janet’s roommate Moira Carruthers explains that Janet has recently committed suicide by hanging herself with one of her silk stockings. Moira isn’t convinced it was a suicide but has no proof of an alternative theory. Moira believes there is something suspicious about Janet taking off one stocking to hang herself while leaving the other stocking on. She is also confused by the slow, brutal manner in which Janet took her life when she was happy and making plans for the future.

Sheringham delivers the unhappy news of Janet’s death to her family. Anne Manners, Janet’s sister, is convinced she was murdered and decides to work with Sheringham to uncover what happened. Anne’s first move is to get hired at the same revue her sister was working and see if any shady characters had an undue interest in Janet.

While Anne is infiltrating the dance company, two more suicides with identical modus operandi happen quickly to a prostitute Elsie Benham and to socialite Ursula Graeme. Inspector Moresby is called in to investigate this death and to determine if they are copycat suicides or if a serial killer is on the loose.

Soon after Inspector Moresby and Roger Sheringham begin working together, another identical suicide is reported to the police, this time in Monte Carlo. The police in Monte Carlo pass along a list of three male friends of the victim, Dorothy Fielder, George Fielder, Arnold Beverly, and Gerald Newsome, who also have connections with the previous three victims.

Roger Sheringham friends with one of the suspects, Gerald Newsome, and realizes that there is a tremendous amount of evidence being put up against his friend and tries to convince Inspector Moresby of his innocence which fails and leads Inspector Moresby to ice Roger Sheringham out of the police investigation entirely.

Desperate to save his friend, Gerald Newsome, from being hanged as a serial killer, Sheringham begs Anne Manners to do the unthinkable, to let Sheringham hang her in a gruesome and deadly re-enactment of the crime in front of the police and draw out the actual killer.

The Review

Trigger Warning: The Silk Stocking Murders is heavily marred by antisemitism sexism and has several gruesome depictions of death by hanging/strangulation, and may not be suitable for all readers.

I’ll be honest there’s a lot to dislike about The Silk Stocking Murders, including wildly offensive descriptions of Jewish people, Anthony Berkeley’s morbid fascination with slowly strangling women, and Roger Sheringham’s brash and overconfident belief in his own deductive powers so can understand why many readers will not like this book.

Despite the flaws, I think the structure, pacing of the deaths and plotting of clues in the book are excellent, especially in accurately portraying the escalation of serial killers during their spree. Berkeley shows the killer becoming bold, careless, and compulsive as time passes. The ritualistic nature of the crimes or the killer’s signature is detailed in The Silk Stocking Murders to an almost nauseating degree. Still, again, I think this is because Berkeley wants to show an accurate representation of serial killers.

Serial killers, who kill for enjoyment, aren’t featured too heavily in Golden Age mysteries. They favor a killer who commits murders to remove someone who presents an unmovable obstacle to their aims. Subsequent murders are usually done to cover up the first crime or pursue their nefarious goal. In Roger Sheringham’s fourth outing, Anthony Berkeley is once again trying to incorporate new elements into the crime fiction genre and explore the emerging psychological philosophies regarding serial killers, which are beginning to be reported regularly in newspapers.

Roger Sheringham, a student of psychology, is pretty cutting edge for his time in his analysis of what motivates a serial killer, and that’s a really intriguing aspect of the story that I wish was explored further in The Silk Stocking Murders, instead Sheringham is incredibly brash, and makes several costly mistakes due to his own hubris, alienating his police allies. His blundering, while probably more realistic, bogs the story down unnecessarily.

Anne Manners, who initially allies herself with Sheringham, is a courageous and determined young woman. She and Sheringham have an intense flirtation during the book and good banter, which again is cut short by Berkeley shunting her away from the action in the dance revue company for a good portion of the book and appearing for a clutch role at the end.

The mock hanging of Anne Manners is brutal, and I am not sure that outside of a story, police would stand for such a rogue plan cooked up by an amateur, but despite that, it’s absolutely gripping to watch. I am unsure if it would draw out a serial killer like in the book. I think it would undoubtedly illicit attract and excite the killer like photographs and trophies are known to illicit emotional responses from serial killers in real life.

The identity of the killer, I latched on to very quickly, but how the murders were committed is undeniably hauntingly clever and the best part of the book and the reason I ultimately enjoyed the book. There is so much tension built up and such a feeling of triumph when the killer is caught that The Silk Stocking Murders ends on a high note.

Overall, The Silk Stocking Murders is a mixed bag with some compelling characters and a exciting exploration of the psychological nature of serial killers a genuinely brilliant howdunit, dragged down by rampant antisemitism and sexism.

The Silk Stocking Murders Reviews

Crime Review

My Reader’s Block

My Anthony Berkeley Reviews