Jumping Jenny

Starred review from October 24, 2022
Set in post-WWI England, this outstanding 1933 mystery from Berkeley (1893–1971) opens at “a murderer-and-victim party” outside London attended by amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham. The respectable guests are garbed as prominent killers, including Dr. Crippen and Jack the Ripper. The host, Ronald Stratton, who writes detective stories “full of a rather gruesome humour,” has even decorated his flat roof with a gallows, complete with three hanging dummies. The festivities turn grim after a guest finds a woman’s corpse in place of one of the stuffed figures. Sheringham rules out suicide, since there was nothing nearby for the woman to have stood on. For a surprising reason, however, he alters the crime scene by moving a chair near the body to mislead the police into concluding that she took her own life. In doing so, Sheringham places himself in legal jeopardy as he tries to both identify the killer and conceal his own complicity in altering the crime scene. Berkely adroitly plays on readers’ expectations of genre conventions with a witty and tricky plot and a genuinely shocking conclusion. The British Library Crime Classics series does golden age fans a great service with this reissue.

December 1, 2022
Berkeley games the conventions of golden-age whodunits yet again in this ghoulish bonbon first published in 1933. At a tasteful party given by Ronald Stratton, whose guests are attired as famous murderers and their victims, Roger Sheringham finds his attention divided between a triple gallows installed on his host's roof with three stuffed corpses dangling from their nooses--two "jumping jacks" and a distaff "jumping jenny"--and the figure of Ena Stratton, the striking wife of Ronald's brother, David. Soon after he chats with Ena and finds that a little of her goes a long way, she does him the favor of focusing his attention on a single point again by getting strung up on the gallows herself after the party has ended. It hardly seems possible that she could have leaped into the noose herself without the support of a chair, whose precise location becomes the focus of the police investigation. If she had help getting into her last scene, her killer was clearly one of the party guests, and Colin Nicolson, who was dressed as the poisoner William Palmer, is convinced that that killer was Roger, whom he caught wiping the fingerprints off the chair in question. Unmoved by Roger's desire to protect someone else, Nicolson assures him that he'd never turn Roger in, since he surely had his reasons. As Roger embarks on a quest to identify the real murderer to spare himself further genteel embarrassment at Nicolson's hands, readers privy to a fateful encounter of Ena's that Roger missed will have their own very definite ideas who the culprit is. Berkeley makes his highly artificial plot consistently lively, amusing, and treasurable.

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