‘A classic Golden Age crime novel, and one of the first to feature a serial killer.
Investigating the disappearance of a vicar’s daughter in London, the popular novelist and amateur detective Roger Sheringham is shocked to discover that the girl is already dead, found hanging from a screw by her own silk stocking. Reports of similar deaths across the capital strengthen his conviction that this is no suicide cult but the work of a homicidal maniac out for vengeance – a desperate situation requiring desperate measures.
Having established Roger Sheringham as a brilliant but headstrong young sleuth who frequently made mistakes, trusted the wrong people and imbibed considerable liquid refreshment, Anthony Berkeley took his controversial character into much darker territory with The Silk Stocking Murders, a sensational novel about gruesome serial killings by an apparent psychopath bent on targeting vulnerable young women.’
Blurb from the 2017 Collins Crime Club edition
A young woman, having left home to take up a career as an actress, is found dead. She apparently committed suicide by hanging herself from a door with one of her own silk stockings.
Roger Sheringham, a noted novelist, columnist and private investigator, had already been contacted by her father, a country clergyman, who was worried for her safety having become concerned when her regular letters home stopped arriving.
When another suicide victim is found in identical circumstances, Sheringham at first dismisses it as a ‘copycat’ suicide, but soon begins to suspect that a homicidal maniac (the Nineteen Twenties term for serial killer) is on the loose, driven by lust to hang women with their own stockings.
He teams up informally (as he has previously) with Inspector Moresby of Scotland Yard and the Jewish millionaire Pleydell whose fiancee is one of the victims.
As there aren’t an enormous amount of suspects it’s not difficult to spot the murderer fairly early on, but that’s not really an issue since this isn’t so much a Whodunnit as rather a Howdunnit and a Whydunnit.
The Jewish character is treated a little oddly, since it seems that Sheringham finds Pleydell acceptable in polite society because he is a pure Israeli Jew as opposed to those diluted German and East European Jews who seemingly can’t be trusted. It’s a bit of a chilling passage given subsequent events in Europe and leaves a bit of a nasty taste in the mouth. Thankfully the rest of the narrative avoids any major anti-semitism. I’m resigned to accepting that this was written some ninety years ago in a different time with different attitudes.
Apart from that it’s an enjoyable romp in which an innocent man is accused and Sheringham has a race against time in which to identify the real killer before his friend faces the noose.
It hasn’t dated too badly and – if one can forgive or skip over the mercifully brief anti-semitic issues – is well worth a read.
Bodies In The Library 