Jumping Jenny
A review of Jumping Jenny by Anthony Berkeley – 241007
Originally published in 1933 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, Anthony Berkeley’s Jumping Jenny is an interesting take and, ultimately, twist on an inverted murder. If you host a party in a country house where the guests are invited to dress as murderers or their victims and to add some colour you erect a gallows on the roof and have three life-size straw dolls, one woman and two men, hanging from them, what could possibly go wrong?
The book takes its title from the slang name given to a woman who is hung, a Jumping Jenny, the male corollary is a Jumping Jack, and inevitably it is a woman, Ena Stratton, who is found by one of the guests hanging from the makeshift gallows in the place of the straw female doll. Ena Stratton is portrayed as a neurotic exhibitionist of a woman, who openly talks about taking her own life and has been drinking heavily at the party. She has also given several of the party goers reason enough to hate her and possibly killer her, not least the host Roger Stratton, whose prospects of re-marriage she threatens to scupper by passing on information to the King’s Proctor, and his brother and her husband, David, whose life she makes hell. Did Ena kill herself or was she murdered?
The story is an inverted murder in that Berkely reveals relatively early on that not only was Ena the victim of foul but also discloses the identity of her killer. The nub of the story is the reaction of the other guests to the situation and the attempts of the police, which on the whole seem fairly half-hearted, to get to the bottom of the case. One of the guests, inevitably, present is Berkeley’s series sleuth, Roger Sheringham, – this is his eight outing in a book which also went by the typically prosaic American alternative title of Dead Mrs Stratton – and we are treated to the unusual spectacle of a sleuth trying to doctor the evidence to prove that her death was the result of suicide in a misguided attempt to protect the identity of the person he believes to have been the murderer.
One of the features of Sheringham’s attempts at sleuthing is that he frequently gets the wrong end of the stick and part of this book’s appeal to the reader is that for all of his ingenuity he runs the risk of not only diverting suspicion on to himself but also others and making what to the police seems an open and shut case of suicide into something a whole lot more sinister. Much ink is spent on pontificating on the precise position of a chair close to the gallows and whether it was there at the time of the discovery of the body. With their insight, courtesy of Berkeley, the reader can enjoy the irony of what is happening.
The first part of the book sets the scene, the second is a long series of attempts by Sheringham and his would-be Dr Watson, Colin Nicolson, to make cases against some of the principal suspects and then to destroy the case, and the shorter final section unravels events both from the official perspective, in the form of the coroner’s inquest, and then in a series of informative episodes in the final chapter where what really happened is disclosed. Berkeley cleverly punctures the reader’s feeling of superiority by introducing a final and delicious twist right at the death.
An accomplished master of the form, Berkeley cannot resist the temptation to poke fun at the genre and twist and bend it to its limits. There are too many long pieces of unproductive speculation for it to be a classic, but Berkeley’s sense of fun, his humour, and playful inventiveness win through to make it an entertaining enough read.
