Yeah, I decided I was done having integrity in the eyes of the mystery community…
Anthony Berkeley is one the most widely-sung maestros of the Golden Age of Detection, whose output is well known for its meta-reflexive, bordering on post-modern, discussions on the genre. The novel perennially touted as Berekely’s unrivaled masterpiece is the eternal The Poisoned Chocolates Case.
The Poisoned Chocolates Case deals with a small group of theoretical criminologists known as “The Crime Club”, a circle of people who love discussing, ruminating, and speculating on all things criminal, hosted by none other than Berkeley’s beloved bastard Roger Sheringham. The very same beloved bastard has on this day brought to the club a proposition:
They will endeavor to solve to the club’s satisfaction the case of the murder of Mrs. Bendix, who received poisoned chocolates from her husband, who received the chocolates from a friend named Mr. Eustace Pennefather, who received the chocolates at his gentleman’s club from an anonymous sender pretending to represent the Mason’s chocolate company.
Naturally, the police’s understanding of the case is that a demented opportunity killer wanted to kill Eustance for sick kicks, but upon running up against the problem that this means quite literally anyone in the world could be a viable suspect, realized they were entirely without a means to arrest a murderer.
Enter, the Crime Club.
Over the course of six days, the six members of the Crime Club will present the fruits of their investigations and theories pertaining to the truth of the Bendix case, with the understanding that if one of them manages to unearth the unsavory truth, the police will be immediately alerted.
With this, The Poisoned Chocolates Case has established its structure: broadly speaking, aside from a handful of “intermissions”, the entire novel is a protracted series of detective novel denouement scenes in which each of the amateur sleuths spend two chapters presenting their solutions, only for the following chapter or two to be dedicated to the other five members dismantling their cases piece-by-piece, often times pointing out fallacies and biases, sticking wedges into gaps in evidence, or revealing hitherto unknown, shocking information.
Until (hopefully?) the “truth” is revealed…
What can said in The Poisoned Chocolate Case’s favor is already on record from all the praise that gets heaped onto this landmark novel from all angles. The prose is, as is apparently par for the course of Anthony Berkeley, extraordinarily well-written. There’s a dry but nonetheless salient wit running through every other paragraph. Better yet, the characters are crisply written and deftly portrayed. Golden Age mystery novels often struggle with the unique characteristics of their cast being drowned out by the similarly affected voice of 20th century British aristocracy being shared generously between every actor in the story. The Poisoned Chocolates Case, however, does very well at giving every character fully-realized personalities, presented so clearly through body language and voice that I feel like, were I more artistically inclined, if I drew a scene from the book in memory, one could easily pick out each character from nothing less than the ways they’re sitting in the chairs! The rivalry between the melodramatic thespian Mabel Fielder-Flemming and persnickety defense attorney Sir Charles Wildman, the affected, effeminate rapture of Mr. Morton Harrogate Bradley at his clubmates’ theories, the detached intellectualism of Alicia Dammers, and the self-effacing, pity-inducing humbleness of Ambrose Chitterwick shine through the dialogue as clear and as authentically as if I were watching a group of six real people bicker about murders and crimes and other such entertaining insignificances.
The structure, it can also be said, is conceptually quite fascinating. The idea of the entire novel essentially being one long, segmented denouement scene is quite unique, and an idea I’ve only seen explored again in the blog’s omnipresent Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series. Every central member of the cast has their moment to be in the spotlight, which enhances the already solid characterization. Furthermore, Anthony Berkeley does a very good pacing the plot within the confines of this structure, expertly making sure there are no anticlimaxes by arranging all of the false solutions in order of least ingenious to most ingenious. In a way, the members are constantly one-upping each other, with the explanations slowly expanding in complexity as new information is brought to light, and this assures that the plot never has moments where it feels, perhaps, a bit deflated after a heavy moment — you know a heavier one is coming soon!
Yes, indeed, in every sense from character to structure to prose, The Poisoned Chocolates Case is an engrossing and expertly composed novel..
Were that I could end the review on that unambiguously positive note and avoid the condemnation that is sure to follow the publication of this post…
The Poisoned Chocolates Case, for all that can be said of it as a wonderfully contrived novel, unfortunately falls flat on its face in one critical — in my mind, the absolutely most critical — element: the novel’s themes on truth in detective fiction, the nature of the “artistic proof”, the ability of a person to assemble enough convincing evidence to satisfy an audience of even the most outrageously incorrect claims imaginable. In what “truth” can we believe if even these seemingly airtight cases are dismantled, disassembled, and their entrails proudly presented for all to see? If even the final, “correct”, solution is merely an implication in afterthought, a thick but entirely unconfirmed coat of suspicion and nothing more?
A possibly intriguing question to tackle if it wasn’t answered with the same biases against which Berkeley charges his characters.
The most essential aspect upon which its themes of the transience of truth are erected is the premise that every single one of the false solutions should be thoroughly convincing bordering on the apparently airtight to the satisfaction of the mystery-reading public, only to be revealed to be riddled with fallacy, confusion, misapprehension, bias, oversight… That, Berkeley indirectly posits, would discredit the infallibility of the solutions brought forth by his fellow mystery writers’ favorite detectives.
In other words, the operative bit of information here is that the theories must be convincing, else the argument that “seemingly airtight cases can still be false” isn’t well-substantiated. Right?
…Oh, dear, well… this certainly is awkward, now isn’t it..?
They really aren’t all that convincing.
The book’s themes on the fallibility of seemingly airtight solutions are themselves an ostensibly convincing argument with holes large enough to drive a Navy legion through them, and the holes nearly all come in the form of the book’s many false theories neither being convincing, nor approaching the level of logical that often goes into the better of mystery novels.
Whether or not I agree with the premise is immaterial: this book does not make the case well.
It was immediately apparent that Berkeley himself was not being fair to his contemporaries. While the solutions start with the so-mundane-it’s-impossible-to-be-the-truth and slowly ramp up to the level of complexity that you’d believe in a relatively skilled second-stringer’s detective novel, the nature of the solutions are not the issue. From theory 1 to theory 6 — the supposedly correct one — no matter how convincing the nature of the solution was, the clues and reasoning were never convincingly airtight. Not a single one of the theories is erected on greater evidence with more conclusiveness than you’d expect to find from the unsubstantiated suspicions of the witness official policeman in any other mystery novel.
Following, I will break down the issues with the six theories in as general, un-spoiling terms as I can mustered, but if you wish to avoid reading these specific criticisms, feel free to skip ahead to the section marked SPOILERS OVER.
The first and second theories’ faults should be plainly apparent to anyone engaging with the novel. Both solutions suffer from the very plainly obvious issue that the two amateurs don’t even pretend to have any evidence beyond parallels with an old case and very vague notions of possible motives and slightly suspicious behavior. It is immediately and flatly obvious that not a single ounce of logical rigor went into the detection or summation of these crimes, and in fact the book immediately acknowledges this issue. However, the fact it’s nearly impossible to miss for even the most cursory of readings does render the first two theories inert in terms of the novel’s critique of the mystery genre. In fact, I’d say it goes doubly for the fact that neither solution even approaches the level of rigor you’d expect from a proper mystery novel solution, so unless you’re reading awful mystery novels I don’t find these two theories very accurate, damning caricatures of the type of reasoning you’re liable to find therein.
The third and third-and-a-half theory suffers from what I often refer to as “generalized psychological clues”. Such arguments as “a public-schooler would never do this because they demand more direct confrontation”, “all men would discriminate between men and women when selecting murder methods”, so on and so forth. It isn’t just a single instance of it, however, and in fact features incredibly prominently in both the solutions presented here.
The natural issue with these clues, as is brought up by one character, is that they’re impossible to substantiate, and for that matter pretty short-sighted. Not a single group of people on the planet is a monolith. There’s no such thing as a definitively “Anglo-Saxon method to stab someone” or a “feminine manner of theft”; Anglo-Saxons and women are, believe it or not, deeply varied, complex, individual groups of people. To present any clue in the language of “All X would Y” or “No X would Y” is obnoxious, on top of unconvincing.
I’ve criticized this style of cluing multiple times on the blog, once in my post detailing my personal 10 rules for writing detective fiction and quite frequently in my reviews of James Yaffe’s Mom short stories, so I am aware this sort of thing occurs quite often. Unlike the first two theories, I am unable to claim this is an unfair criticism to bring up against a certain class of mystery novels.
Only, however, the irony here is that the idea of “psychological impossibilities” is NOT being criticized as unsubstantiated, speculating nonsense. One character expresses disdain, and is immediately shot down by the rest of the Crime Club. In fact, quite a few characters are vindicated in their “general psychology” being absolutely, 100% correct!
The hole that is poked in this man’s theories isn’t that the “All X would Y” psychology is wildly speculating on baseless grounds, but rather that he simply made the wrong over-arching, generalized, unsubstantiated conclusions, and the characters who follow actually made the correct over-arching, generalized, unsubstantiated conclusions.
So, ironically, the one point in the novel I felt could’ve been a worthwhile criticism of Berkeley’s contemporaries, he fails to follow-up on meaningfully.
The fourth theory is the closest approaching convincing. While the character still induces quite a lot of details from, again, overly generalized psychology, they do substantiate quite a lot of their conclusions by focusing on the specific psychology of the characters and finding seemingly credible eyewitness testimony. However, the information discrediting the theory is a bit of a cheat, but nonetheless a very funny one that criticizes amateur detection in a very human, natural way.
The fifth theory is quite complex and ingenious (but also, I feel, obvious for the seasoned armchair sleuth) compared to the previous ones, but has quite a lot of the same obvious issues as the earlier theories. The circumstantial evidence and the logic that follows have very major, easily-seen alternative explanations. The logical rigor displayed here feels like the sort of thing you’d see in the early pages of a detective novel, when the official police officers give their almost-barely-convincing cases that the detective can quite easily explain away.
The final theory is nearly the worst of the lot. The amateur claims to have assembled the “correct” pieces of everyone’s theories into one , ultimate, “true” solution, but the methodology by which he achieved this is invisible to the reader, and quite a lot of what he selected as “given truths” and “conclusively proven facts” I certainly disagree with being particularly convincing explanations… Quite a few of the elements he selected fall into the very same holes I’ve already outlined, and therefore make his chimeric solution come off as arbitrary.
SPOILERS OVER
The recurrent throughline here, though, is not only are the solutions not convincing– an essential point for the novel to establish for its themes of “even seemingly conclusive arguments can be easily disproven” — the solutions aren’t even convincing recreations of Golden Age mystery denouements — also an essential point on which the novel needs to succeed to complete its critique of the genre.
These solutions are not just unconvincing, they’re so artificially and transparently unconvincing that it wraps around into reflecting poorly on Berkeley’s fairness towards the works he critiques. Whatever case you want to make about mystery novels and their solutions and the nature of the puzzle and the infallibility or otherwise of the truth, the fact remains that the best of the works do hold themselves to a certain standard of at least attempted logical rigor. Mere circumstantial evidence is rarely enough to Christie or Queen or Carr; counter-theories, possible alternative explanations, are considered, explored, and to a certain level of satisfaction discredited on usually solid-enough grounds, even if not to the degree of 100% certain conclusiveness. The novels attempt to bring forth evidence — actual evidence — and flagrant guesswork is often, ideally, avoided.
In order to make a critique of the genre, Berkeley, just like his characters, cheated. He twisted tropes to fit his case, and presented flaws that don’t truly exist, and to a major degree avoided acknowledging a lot of the work authors go to in order to avoid just the very same pitfalls outlined in The Poisoned Chocolates Case. I will not comment on whether or not I agree with the premise of the novel, but merely that the method by which it goes about establishing it is slanted, skewed, and biased in the extreme, often requiring outright unflattering, dishonest depictions of the work done by authors of the genre.
In short? I do not agree with the popular view that The Poisoned Chocolates Case is either a brilliant or even a damning critique of the genre at large. While it is a brilliantly written novel, the (anti-)mystery plot at the heart of it fails on the grounds of being so preoccupied depicting the perceived negatives in the genre that it winds up dragging down the rest of the work with it. The false solutions are unconvincing, and ultimately, unfortunately, fail to bring its themes on the transience of truth to fruition. As much as I enjoyed the reading of this novel, I did not walk away holding it in very high esteem as a post-modern take on the genre. It is a seemingly-convincing argument, filled with holes and bias — just like the ones it wished to write for its characters.
Solving the Mystery of Murder 