Settling Scores

Starred review from July 13, 2020
Edwards (The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories) scores again with this outstanding reprint anthology of 15 short stories set in the world of sports and games. F.A.M. Webster, who won Britain’s national javelin championship twice, demonstrates his writing skill with “The Double Problem,” in which his Sherlockian sleuth, Ebbie Entwistle, who travels to Oxford to look into a bad check presented by someone posing as a student, ends up probing a theft related to a hammer-throwing competition. Conan Doyle fans will appreciate an academic’s reaction to Entwistle’s deductions (“It all sounds very simple as you explain it,” said the dean, “but I must confess that I had overlooked all those little details which you make to appear so painfully simple and obvious”), and sports followers will enjoy the discussion of the impact of betting on college athletics a century ago. Other highlights include Arthur Morrison’s “The Loss of Sammy Crockett,” about a runner who disappears before a big race, and Michael Gilbert’s “The Drop Shot,” in which a county squash championship is connected to a perfect murder committed “under the blaze of electric lamps in front of a gallery full of spectators.” The British Library Crime Classics series has produced another winner.