From British Library Crime Classics comes Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards (London, 2015), a collection of vintage mysteries relating to holidays.
The stories in the collection are:
“The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” by Arthur Conan Doyle;
“A Schoolmaster Abroad” by E. W. Hornung;
“Murder!” by Arnold Bennett;
“The Murder on the Golf Links” by M. McDonnell Bodkin;
“The Finger of Stone” by G. K. Chesterton;
“The Vanishing of Mrs Fraser” by Basil Thomson;
“A Mystery of the Sand-Hills” by R. Austin Freeman;
“The Hazel Ice” by H. C. Bailey;
“Razor Edge” by Anthony Berkeley;
“Holiday Task” by Leo Bruce;
“A Posteriori” by Helen Simpson;
“Where is Mr Manetot?” by Phyllis Bentley;
“The House of Screams” by Gerald Findler; &
“Cousin Once Removed” by Michael Gilbert.
“Holiday Task” by Leo Bruce is a Sgt. Beef story which begins with Beef prawning in Normandy and encountering an old colleague, Léotard of the Sûrété, who is baffled by the mysterious disappearance then death, an apparent suicide, of “the most detested man in the French Prison Service”; it is also available in Murder in Miniature: The Short Stories of Leo Bruce edited by B. A. Pike (Chicago, 1992).
Resorting to Murder is available, at a discounted price, and with free delivery, from Book Depository. It is reviewed, rather briefly, here and here, and more lengthily here:
While I enjoyed the iconic “murder on holiday” theme well before starting Resorting to Murder, I was half worried that there wasn’t a diverse enough pool of mysteries behind it to fill an entire collection. I’m glad to say that I stand corrected; I’ll try not to doubt Martin Edwards in the future. The fourteen stories in Resorting to Murder are all very good, and while some of them seem similar this is quite a diverse collection. All of the stories may deal with murders on holiday, but there’s enough kinds of mystery story here to keep the collection fresh and invigorated. Not only did Edwards pick a great batch of stories, he also continues to write excellent introductions for the British Library volumes.
