Initially, L. J. Hurst worked in the backrooms of the media industry. He now divides his time between work for an international scientific publisher and a rather more British independent bookseller. In years past he was a regular attendee at the Shots on the Page Festivals from whence Shots Mag sprung
For a crime novel published in 1930 The Shop Window Murders offers some fascinating
similarities to the present day.
As the shop windows are those of a giant London department store, very
similar to one recently recreated on TV, envisaging the crime scene should be
no problem; and as the owner of said
store was not the provider of the funds that bought it, there’ll be another
modern echo; and, finally, as one motive for murder is a dispute over the
creation and patents of a best-seller, there’ll be yet another bell ringing for
readers who stop and look about themselves.
Nigel Moss provides a fascinating introduction to the book, but two of
those points above are, I think, not mentioned. That’s probably because there
is so much within this one work. As Moss says it is intricately plotted with
many false leads, cover-ups, and crimes within crimes with similarities to
works by John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen in the murder method.
The combination of crime and grotesquerie is also worth mentioning as
the blinds are drawn back one morning from the window display of the great
department store to reveal two corpses. One is Manders, the nominal owner of
the store, and the other is an employee, later discovered to be – if not his
mistress then – his intended mistress.
As police forensics go to work it
becomes clear that neither was killed in situ, though the location of the real
killings takes some research, as it is discovered that not only were the pair
not killed in their final resting place, but did not die together either. I
wonder if “red herrings and different angles”, as Nigel Moss calls them, is a
phrase designed to help the reader think more widely about the solution.
There are unhappy family members, embittered lovers, a blackmailer,
various ex-servicemen who may have brought back weapons from France, struggling
inventors on one side, and a functional police force with access to forensics on
the other. All will have their part to play but the solution – guessed at by
Inspector Devenish but only confirmed by a confession – fits the period
exactly, and also looks forward to Raymond Chandler’s proposed ending for The
Blue Dahlia (1946) fifteen years later and written after another World War.
It makes The Shop Window Murders, which is both a golden age crime novel
and a novel of abnormal psychology, well worth re-printing today.
