Crime Scene Kitchen: TWO BOTTLES OF RELISH (1952)

Originally posted May 6, 2024.

Murder tales seem nice things sometimes for a lady to sit and read all by herself by the fire. But murder isn’t a nice thing, and when a murderer’s desperate and trying to hide his tracks he isn’t even as nice as he was before. I’ll ask you to bear that in mind. Well, I’ve warned you.

I had never heard of Lord Dunsany until the title story of Two Bottles of Relish: The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories was mentioned by mystery author Tom Mead in his list of best impossible crimes for Publisher’s Weekly. It seems like Dunsany wasn’t widely read in 1934, either: while some of his fantasy writings were very influential, according to the book’s foreword by Ellery Queen, he didn’t consider his previous stories to have been well-received by the public. Believing that this was because they were too anodyne (murder-obsessed culture, these days…) he set out to write a story that was as gruesome and horrifying as possible, and the result was ‘The Two Bottles of Relish’. Dunsany pulls a Yokomizo by informing the reader of this up front.

The narrator is Little Smethers, a humble relish salesman who acquires a roommate after being unable to afford a one-bedroom apartment of his own, instead promising the other prospective tenant to “hide in the cupboard at any hour you like.” I imagine that at the time of publication, the idea of living in the den of a one-bedroom was comical, and not the typical sardine-like reality of many modern metropolitan residents. Smethers’s roommate is a Holmesian intellectual named Linley, who is both highly educated and highly unemployed. Linley enjoys academic puzzles, and so Smethers presents him with a recent unsolved murder that has baffled the police:

‘There’s not the mystery in ten murders that there is in one game of chess,’ he answered.

‘It’s beaten Scotland Yard,’ I said.

‘Has it?’ he asked.

‘Knocked them endwise,’ I said.

‘It shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. And almost immediately after he said, ‘What are the facts?’

A young woman, Nancy Elth, has disappeared. The police suspect that Nancy has been murdered by her boyfriend Steeger, but he hasn’t left their bungalow except to visit the greengrocer and chop down numerous piles of wood in the yard. Subsequently there has been a thorough search of the house and property, but nobody has been able to determine how the body was disposed of, or the purpose of all those untouched logs.

The case is on Smethers’s mind primarily because Steeger is a buyer of his product, Numnumo relish. Smethers is a humorous narrator with a one-track mind (later stories introduce the bonkers detail that he sneaks into the readers’ homes to hide relish, but here he’s more of a Watson). But despite Linley’s apparently superior intelligence and academic credentials, it’s Smethers who finds the crucial clue to the disturbing truth.

In a post-Silence of the Lambs, post-Dexter world, I don’t feel like the nature of the reveal would be particularly scandalous to most readers these days. You might have even guessed it from the summary. But there’s still an enjoyable build-up of dread and dramatic irony–I found it notable and all the more effective that the exact nature of the solution is never directly stated, just hinted at in a wince-inducing punchline. And the significance of the woodpiles managed to catch me off-guard.

The rest of the stories in the collection are nothing to write home about; comically written but fairly derivative. Generally they solve the crime but don’t catch the killer, which really works best in that penny dreadful mode. The later ones are interesting in terms of post-WWII psychology and some genre-blending, but if you check out only one piece from the book, make it the title story.