Not To Be Taken
A review of Not to be Taken by Anthony Berkeley – 250405
Originally published in 1938 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, Anthony Berkeley’s Not to be Taken, subtitled A Puzzle in Poison, was originally serialised in the literary weekly, John O’London’s Weekly, in the form of a competition. Readers were invited to answer four examination style questions which were set before the publication of the big reveal in the final chapter.
Interestingly, the reissue includes Berkeley’s post-competition report in which he reveals, inter alia, that no entrant answered the questions completely to the satisfaction of the author and judging panel but that twenty per cent of the entrants identified the culprit correctly and that Mrs Gilruth and Mr Kastner were near enough the mark to share the top prize of £200, a not inconsiderable amount in those days.
Structuring the story for a competition has two stylistic consequences. Firstly, it has by necessity a very episodic quality about it and, secondly, it is very fairly clued. The attentive reader will pick up enough clues that through the process of elimination they have a fighting chance of identifying the culprit, as this reader did, but also some sense of the how and why the arsenical poisoning of John Waterhouse was accomplished. That said, I think, as events proved, that it would have been possible to satisfy the judges in all respects to score the maximum points in the competition.
To get to that point, though, the reader has to battle through shoals of red herrings and misdirection galore. Characters pop in and out of the narrative, designed to distract the reader, but when it all boils down there are a handful of characters we meet at the start of narrative and the truth lies somewhere in there. Berkeley seems to have fun in his attempts to mislead the reader and in putting together a tale of a murder plot that goes horribly wrong. To say more would give the game away.
As we work our way through the tragedy of John Waterhouse we are guided by an amiable fruit farmer, Douglas Sewell, who narrates the story. He also has the distinction of stumbling upon the truth of what went on and this presents him with a dilemma. Although he is certain that he has uncovered the sordid truth, nevertheless he does not have proof that would stand up in court and the culprit, when confronted, while admitting that his surmises are correct prefers to have a heavy conscience rather than hand themselves into the law. The representatives of the law, curiously, have a minor presence in the tale, only too willing to kowtow to the secret service who wish to hush up Waterhouse’s services to King and country in the Far East.
It is a story of marital frustration, wrong choices, ill luck, and the chemical properties of arsenic. It also raises the question of how much we really know about those we consider to be our boon companions, our knowledge constrained by what they are prepared to reveal or let slip. As well as exploring some of the almost eugenic theories that were prevalent at the time, Berkeley sheds some light on the anti-Nazi sentiments prevailing at the time with Waterhouse’s secretary, Mitzi Bergmann, a German who mysteriously absconds when the going gets tough and his comedic cook, an unashamed Austrian Nazi. Curiously, the action begins on September 3rd, a day that the narrator says is always ominous. A year later, of course, it saw the outbreak of World War Two.
This is an enjoyable, if somewhat light and unusual, story and is well worth a read.
