NOT TO BE TAKEN

A deceptively low-key case of poisoning provides the basis for a remarkably twisty whodunit originally published in 1938.

At first it doesn’t even look as if retired engineer John Waterhouse has been poisoned. When his nearest neighbor, fruit farmer Douglas Sewell, responds to an urgent call from Mitzi Bergmann, secretary and companion to John’s wife, Angela, he finds John good-naturedly complaining about stomach cramps and digestive complications that the local surgeon, Dr. Glen Brougham, ascribes to a gastric ulcer both before and after John’s death. Even when John’s annoying brother, London importer/exporter Cyril Waterhouse, arrives after the funeral Angela hadn’t thought to invite him to and prevents John from being buried until an autopsy has been completed, the initial findings are negative. It isn’t until a second, more narrowly targeted examination that the cause of death is revealed to be arsenic poisoning. But how was the poison administered without arousing anyone’s suspicions, and by whom? Golden age veteran Berkeley uses an extended coroner’s inquest as the occasion to spin out a series of surprising complications, chief among them a letter from beyond the grave offering the victim’s own explanation for his demise, before prefacing his final chapter with an explicit challenge to the reader. And not just any reader, for the tale was originally serialized in John O’London’s Weekly with a prize offered for correct answers to four key questions. An entertaining postscript by the author explains why none of the many contestants got all four questions right and indicates how the prize money was ultimately divided among the closest competitors.

Will readers nearly a century later be any more successful at solving the puzzle? Not on your life.