anglais

« David Stuart Davies has edited four other immensely popular anthologies for the Collector’s Library, and this one includes some of the greatest classic crime short stories ever written.

It contains , all kinds of illicit acts including murders, thefts and strange disappearances written by masters of the genre: R Austin Freeman, Edgar Wallace, John Dickson Carr and Arnold Bennett among others. The Reverend Wilfred Bohun is pleading with his wanton brother, the colonel, to leave the blacksmith’s wife alone while the blacksmith is away.

Angry at his brother, the curate warns him that God may strike him dead and runs into the church to pray.

Half an hour later, the village cobbler enters into the church to tell the curate that his brother is dead.

They run out to find Colonel Bohun’s corpse stretched out in the courtyard of the smithy, his head smashed in by a small hammer.

The local police inspector and doctor are already trying to reconstruct the crime.

At first it seems obvious: The blow was so powerful, that only the smith could have delivered it but the smith, however, is soon cleared on the list of witnesses because he was in the next town at the time of the crime. The hammer’s smallness moves the doctor to guess that the smith’s wife killed the colonel.

This theory is rejected, however, because the fatal blow was too powerful for her.

The curate suggests that the village idiot, Mad Joe, might be capable of such a blow.

He remembers seeing Mad Joe, the smith’s nephew, praying in the chapel just before the murder, and seeing his brother, the colonel, mercilessly teasing the poor soul as he left the chapel. The only one who does not seem content with the curate’s solution to the mystery is Father Brown, who suddenly becomes noticeable in the crowd.

When he is alone with Reverend Bohun in the spire of the church, he offers his own solution to the mystery: The murderer is Bohun himself, and the mysterious force that crushed his brother’s metal helmet with such a small hammer is a natural one: gravity.

Having picked up a hammer while pleading with the colonel at the smithy, Bohun threw it from the top of the belfry onto his brother ’s head, the acceleration giving the tiny tool tremendous force.

Father Brown swears that he will not reveal Bohun’s secret but urges him to give himself up, which the curate does immediately. In the story the author take care to put more details on the "crime story", on what is happening at the moment than in the description of the caracters or of the settings because he wants to focus on the suspense and emotions of the reader.

This book was also easy to read and very captivating, and all the stories were well wrote as well.. »