The Missing Moneylender by W. Stanley Sykes Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 7)

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Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.

And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is one I'm guessing will be new to the majority of listeners, as it was to me: The Missing Moneylender by W. Stanley Sykes, Penguin 62.

This is an interesting book with which to kick off my second year of reading and discussing the green penguins. In the first year, we had some really popular and well known titles: two Agatha Christies, The Murder on the Links and The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as well as a Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case. Looking ahead to what is coming up in year two, I feel like the series goes through a patch of books and writers that have not held on to their popularity in quite the same way, so we're in for a few more surprises, and hopefully at least a couple of mystery masterpieces ripe for rediscovery.

The Missing Moneylender by W. Stanley Sykes was first published in 1931 to considerable success and critical acclaim. It was the author's first novel and he would go on to publish two more, The Ray of Doom in 1932 and The Harness of Death in 1935, before devoting the rest of his life to his professional research as a doctor and an anaesthetist. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War Two and spent four years as a prisoner of war in what is now Poland, during which time he performed anaesthesia and other medical services for his fellow inmates. Indeed, it is his medical work that has proved more lasting, compared to his crime fiction. His retirement project, a three-volume history of his specialty titled Essays on the First Hundred Years of Anaesthesia, is much more readily available to buy secondhand than the book we're discussing today, unfortunately. Our research has so far turned up no reissues of this book, nor digital versions, so I'm afraid your best chance of reading it is to do what I did — haunt ebay and your favourite secondhand bookshops until you find a copy. I wish you the best of luck in your hunting.

W. Stanley Sykes was born in 1894 in Yorkshire, and aside from doing his medical training at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London and his time serving abroad in both the first and second world wars, spent most of his life in his home county. As well as being a GP, he held various local medical government positions and, with hospital colleagues in Leeds, conducted research into different aspects of anaesthesia. He also contributed an entry to the Encyclopaedia Britannica on this topic. His medical experience is very important to the plot and structure of his first crime novel, The Missing Moneylender, which concerns an apparently unproveable murder alongside the vanishing of the titular character.

Joining me to discuss this book is Moira Redmond, journalist, blogger about clothes in books, and a regular guest on Shedunnit since the podcast's earliest days. Since this is very much a lesser known book, I very much appreciate her taking the leap of faith with me and discovering what The Missing Moneylender has to offer.

Before we get into the book, though, I'll give my usual spoiler warning here. Until you hear me say that we are "entering the spoiler zone", you can safely listen without hearing major plot details. The timestamp for that point will also be in the episode description. After that, you can expect to hear major spoilers, up to and including the full solution to the mystery. I would also like to warn listeners that at the start of the conversation we're going to talk about instances of anti-semitic language in this book — no slurs, but just be aware that's a factor here. And at the end of every episode, I ask my guest to award the book a rating, so stay tuned to the end to hear how many green penguins out of five Moira gives this one and why.

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Caroline: So, Moira, what, if anything, was your knowledge of The Missing Moneylender before I suggested that we read this book together?

Moira: Absolute zero. I'd never heard of it. I'd never heard of him. And I'd have said that I had at some time looked through the list of early green penguins, or penguins generally, and that the name would be familiar to me, but absolutely nothing. I knew nothing about it, knew nothing about him, so it was unploughed territory for me. How about you?

Caroline: Absolute same, yes. When I first started sketching out this project and looking what the first sort of dozen books would be, that was a name that stood out to me as a vacuum. I've broadly heard of all these other titles and these other writers. This one, absolutely nothing. And also, the internet is not very helpful. There's very little about Sykes or about the book online. There's a couple of blog posts that I'm going to link to in the description of bloggers who've reviewed it in the past but I think the book is very hard to obtain and therefore it's just not got that bigger digital footprint.

Moira: Yeah, indeed. I still am mystified by this, that I've never heard of it, and that so little is known about him. I did find that the National Portrait Gallery has a photograph of him in their archives. I don't think it's on show at Trafalgar Square, but and I don't quite know why they've got that. And he looks like the absolute standard crime writer of that era. He's got this pipe and his glasses and he looks like a doctor who writes crime stories. It's a bit generic really, but yes, it's a mystery really.

Caroline: It is he wrote two other crime books as far as I've been able to tell one of which has the delightful description of being about tunny fishing off Scarborough, so it's an angling mystery. And then another one that doesn't seem to have any information about it out there.

Moira: I was riveted by the idea of the dangers of tunny fishing. I felt that he just seemed like a certain kind of writer that was very common at the time, who'd read loads of detective stories and thought, I could do that. And particularly, he was a doctor, he was an anesthetist, I think. And this particular book is a medical mystery. And he thought, I can do this. And then he thought, I'll do one about fishing, presumably, because he liked fishing. He would absolutely assume he did. It was quite a common thing in those days, I think.

Caroline: Yes, especially by 1931 when this book was published. I think this style of fair play mystery was popular enough that people from disciplines other than literature were thinking I can try my hand at that. And honestly he was quite smart, I think, to use his own professional hinterland. That was his specialist knowledge and apply it rather than trying to, I don't know, write a story in a milieu that he knew nothing about.

Moira: I actually would love to know who at Penguin, in those early days, thought, this would be a good one, let's add this to the list. Because they were obviously very smart in choosing a lot of very successful and long lived writers, in the sense that their reputation holds. So what was the thinking behind this one? Maybe they got it cheap.

Caroline: Well, I have a bit of an idea about this because I went in the British Newspaper Archive and had a look at how much of a splash did this book make when it came out? And the answer is quite a big one. In 1931, it was at that point the only book to be selected as both a book of the month and a crime book of the month pick.

So these two very powerful book club recommendation promotional engines, marketing things that he got picked for. It was reviewed very widely and very positively. I could only find one negative review in the Illustrated London News. The rest were all, this is complicated, ingenious, well written.

One said, it's one of the best and most probable of detective stories published during recent years. People were really enthusiastic about it. And I found one reference in a paper that said that it had immediately gone into a second edition. It sold out its first printing in one go. So, I'm imagining that, from the point of view of Penguin, it came out as a Penguin in 1936. They were looking back five years and probably looking back through the lists of things like book of the month picks and so on and going, 'Well, this one did really well.' And probably they could get it relatively cheap because he wasn't a big name. We'll have it.

Moira: Yes, that all sounds very convincing and it is interesting though, isn't it, to wonder about that.

Caroline: So another thing before we open the book, as it were, that I feel speaks very loudly about this book is its title. If you are a habitué of Golden Age Detective Fiction, a book from 1931 titled The Missing Moneylender rings a very specific bell in your mind, and I know it did for you, Moira, so maybe you can explain what that was.

Moira: To me, this is the elephant in the room, that the second you hear that title... I'm intrigued to know whether this would be true of just anybody. but anybody who's read books in that time thinks this is going to be anti-semitic. I mean, it's that straightforward. The moneylender is going to be Jewish, and there are going to be quite distasteful references to that. And you would be fully expecting that. I think we'd probably agree that it's not as bad as you might have feared. Would you have missed it out if you thought it was deeply anti-semitic, or would you have gone with it anyway?

Caroline: That's an interesting question which fortunately I didn't actually have to consider because apart from some conversational antisemitism, we might call it, the plot and structure of this book is free of that, so although there is a central Jewish character, the missing moneylender, the circumstances of his disappearance and anything else has nothing to do with his being Jewish.

It could be any missing person. And he is a moneylender of great repute and standing in his community. And there's plenty of references to people finding him respectable and nice. So, structurally, it doesn't feel anti-semitic. There are some references in dialogue which we'll get onto.

If it had been, I think, irredeemably anti-semitic, yeah, I may have done a different kind of episode. Maybe talked about that and some of its context rather than giving it this full reading treatment where we're, I think, going to talk about some of the pleasures of this book as well as some of its downfalls.

Moira: Yes, and in fact for most of the book, the missing moneylender is just treated as another character might be. The anti-semitic levels of it are very much in keeping, I'm sorry to say, with other people of the time and earlier, I've just been reading Trollope, actually, and there's a moneylender in the book I've just been reading who is Jewish, and people do make these comments about him, and it's sort of taken for granted that he's probably semi criminal, which is not true in this book.

He's seen as a man, other than not paying his doctor's bills, which is obviously important to the author. He's seen as a man of trustworthy integrity, who tries to protect his clients and their privacy, for example, which makes it harder to solve the crime if they can't find his clients.

Caroline: There are a couple of things in dialogue that I think are worth pulling out as examples of that typical early 1930s casual antisemitism in that passing way. There's Doctor Osborne, who's one of the characters who opens the novel, when he's complaining of this patient Mr. Levinsky, who never pays his doctor's bills.

Which, by the way, he doesn't attribute that to his being Jewish. It's just an annoying facet that he has as a personality trait. He says, "a Jew as a Jew is alright, but a Jew who pretends he is a Gentile is a nasty bit of work". And he's almost saying this to pay Mr. Levinsky a compliment. He's saying, I like the fact that he's just called Israel Levinsky.

I don't like it when Jewish people adopt pseudonyms like, he says, Griffith Jones or Angus McAllister to try and make themselves seem less Jewish. That's a very problematic statement because why do you think people are adopting different names? It's because people have horrible attitudes about their original names. So that is a bit unsavoury.

Moira: That to me was the worst line in the book from that point of view, and it was quite dismaying and a bit depressing because the two people in conversation here were meant to be charming, delightful people and the writer obviously intended their characters to be amusing and pleasing and that was the worst of it, it was a bad moment, but go on, you, you've identified something?

Caroline: There's a couple of other bits to highlight. One is when a junior police constable is sent up to Bradford to do some investigation because that's where Mr. Levinsky comes from originally. And he says, "good heavens man, is this Bradford or Jerusalem? Collins realized for the first time that the ghettos of Leeds and Bradford are very extensive".

So that seemed to me a bit of a loaded suggestion like, goodness me, there are so many Jews here, which is an unpleasant thing to say. And then there's a description, Mr. Isaac Levinsky, who is brother of the missing moneylender, he comes to the town where the investigation is taking place to assist, and again, he's portrayed in a very positive light as a very helpful and able character.

But the description of his physical appearance is quite stereotypical. It says that he was of unmistakably Jewish appearance, as if we're supposed to know what that means. And then there's also some other stuff about him being very emotional. That he is, most of the time he has a very smooth facade as a successful Western businessman and occasionally the East shows signs of coming to the surface.

And so basically every time he's emotional about his brother being missing, it's attributed to his being a Jew rather than his being sad because his brother's missing and possibly dead . So all of those things I just clocked, but I think those are all of the ones I wrote down. That's it for the whole book.

Moira: Yeah, and you also would say that perhaps a bit about being emotional, you can actually imagine that if it had been a French person, for example, I'm not defending it on those grounds, but British people at that time might well have thought, oh, these Frenchies, Johnny Frenchman, he's so emotional and wanting to kiss you, and that kind of thing. So it's general prejudice rather than actual antisemitism in that particular case perhaps.

Caroline: Yes. So I think what we're saying is that there is definitely some anti semitic phrases in this book. The characters use casual stereotypes, in a way that is not very pleasant, but to my surprise, given the title of the book, the whole thing is not structurally steeped in it. So the missing moneylender as a victim is not at all cast in a certain way because of his faith or anything like that which I found really interesting and I do wonder, we mentioned already and I think it's a question to consider all the way through with this book, why has it so thoroughly vanished given that it was successful upon initial publication and then it became a Penguin? Why is it so scarce?

I think the title might be why. I think people see it in a list and go, well, no, and it's been that way for a hundred years.

Moira: Right, that's a very good point. I mean, things did presumably change dramatically after the Second World War and what came out then. But yes, presumably a lot of people would have had the same reaction as we did to that title.

Caroline: Interestingly, it had a different title in the US right from the get go. It was The Man Who Was Dead in America, and I wonder if that was because right from the start maybe the American editors thought, hmm, we don't like this title or just coincidence. But  The Man Who Was Dead is not especially descriptive or distinctive.

Moira: it's not distinctive at all, it's not bad though, given various things that arise in the book, shall we say. But also, I mean, they were, definitely you find out with Agatha Christie that her American editors were way ahead of the English editors in saying, 'can you stop her saying that?' Or, 'can we take this out?'

They were very, very sharp to the antisemitism. Long before the the British editors, I think, so perhaps that's the case. That's interesting.

Caroline: We should, I think, talk a little bit about style and influences we perceived in this book. Were there any other writers that came to mind as you were reading this?

Moira: To me, it was a bit in the way of the humdrum mysteries, which isn't as insulting as it sounds. Freeman Wills Crofts and so on. One of the notes I made about the book was stodgy but stylish, which sounds like it's a contradiction, but I don't think so.

It's a proper investigation. It's what we now call a procedural. Step by step, they're busily investigating. There aren't any great moments of revelation or people being very full of character. These are solid policemen doing all this.

I mean, there's a very odd bit near the beginning, where there's a complex ruse to see somebody's handwriting instead of taking jam around to their house. And the purpose of that is so that they can identify a letter in a mailbag and read that letter, which can and probably will contain a clue.

And I'm thinking, gosh, this is really unusual. It's really weird, this whole step by step thing. It is almost as if he's making it up as he goes along. Although, he must have had a very clear idea, I think, given the nature of the plot, of what was happening. But he suddenly thinks, oh, perhaps we could do something about how they found this letter, and so on.

Caroline: That very much had the feel, to me, of something that was put in afterwards because I do this thing when I read books for this series where after I finished reading it, almost immediately, I write myself quite a detailed summary of the plot because otherwise I will not be able to remember it when I actually come to record about it.

And I found, with this one, it was very easy to write the summary of because it is, as you say, just a very much an and then and then and then, this clue leads to this clue. But in doing that exercise, a few things stood out to me very glaringly as this is given disproportionate weight.

They spend two whole chapters doing this stuff with the letter and you think it's going to be really important and then it isn't very. So it feels inserted after the fact to me. Like he needed a way for them to see that letter because there wasn't another way around it and so he had to come up with the elaborate explanation.

Moira: Yes, and there are various diversions, which actually I didn't find. Sometimes I found that annoying in a book. I did not particularly find it annoying here. There's a long discussion of séances, isn't actually relevant. It's to do with him being able to see what's in the letter. But it's not really important.

There's the discussion of rugby league football. There's an article from the local paper, reprinted, but for no particular reason I could see. There's a very atmospheric and creepy description of the exhumation.

And that, fair enough, but yeah, it's a series of set pieces, almost. Which actually isn't typical of a humdrum, in a way. And as I say, sometimes those things annoy me, but it didn't particularly, I just thought, where is he going now?

Caroline: I agreed. I very strongly felt Freeman Wills Crofts vibes. I just read one actually over Christmas. And so it lined up very well in my mind, the two styles. And then I also think there's a bit of Dr. Thorndyke about this. Some of the DIY chemistry medical stuff, the medico-legal stuff feels very of his oeuvre.

Moira: Yes, I'd agree with that. There were details of that that I found really, really interesting. What I did love is the top scientist, Sir James, doing a vital test for the police, who lit his pipe from the Bunsen burner in the lab while he's doing this. And that definitely had the feel of something that he'd witnessed that he, this had really happened.

I mean, it was obviously, we were just shocked by that now. Also, there's a doctor didn't necessarily have to have seen the corpse before signing the death certificate. If I read that elsewhere, I'd have thought, well, this wouldn't be true, but obviously the guy's a doctor, he knows, and he goes into it in some detail, says, no, you don't, if you've, he'd seen him as an ill man the night before.

But I'd have assumed that he had to kind of attest to the death, which you can't do if you haven't seen him. But basically his wife, said yeah, he died last night, just as you predicted. And he said, all right, fine, and he signs the death certificate, doesn't see the body. Which is I love, I love getting details like that, which I think it almost certainly is true. But how would you possibly know that in any other way?

Caroline: Yeah, that's exactly the kind of little contemporary social history detail that I love from this kind of thing. So I think we have now arrived at the spoiler zone. We will now be talking about the plot in full detail. So please stop here and come back when you've read it.

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So, one of the things that really struck me when I was reading reviews of this book from the 1930s is lots of them mention that Stanley Sykes has come up with the perfect crime and I wanted to put this to you. Do you think this is a perfect crime or anything approaching it?

Moira: I am fascinated, I would love to know if it is really as easy to murder somebody in this way as is explained in the book. It seems incredibly unlikely. It seems too easy. So somebody has insulin injected into him and if you inject someone with insulin when they don't need it then they will die, or they could easily die, or they could become very, very ill. And I kind of knew that, but I also didn't think it would be that easy to do it. And also that the insulin disappears, that it's not detectable if you couldn't have a sufficient gap. Is that a fair description of the medical side of it?

Caroline: Yes, again, this is where it being a medical mystery written by a medical doctor, it's both a blessing and a curse. It means that I think he came up with an unusual murder method. It also means it's not necessarily that comprehensible to a layperson. My understanding is that if you are diabetic, you don't produce enough of your own insulin.

Insulin is the thing that stops your blood sugar from getting really, really high or really, really low. I think it just helps you regulate it in a normal range. So if you inject a non diabetic person with too much insulin, I think their blood sugar drops way too low and they die. I think that's what happens.

Why you wouldn't be able to then test the body after death and see that well this person's got way too much insulin in their system. I think this is what all of that sleight of hand towards the end with him injecting sugar into the body after death is about. He's trying to balance it out in the corpse so that then on the tests it will seem normal. I think that's what that's about.

Moira: Right, yes, that's fair enough. I'd sort of forgotten that. That whole extra thing about going off to the place where they mislabeled the sugar completely irrelevantly, really, but you can see that if you read that in 1931, you'd be thinking, wow, that's quite a story, wouldn't you? It was a relatively recent discovery, the whole insulin thing, which had changed lives dramatically for the better. You can see where a reviewer would be much struck by the murder method, let's say that.

Caroline: That was my feeling on it, is I think a lot of, call it scientific mysteries, don't age well because I think science moves on past them and things that seemed magical and wonderful, like aren't there some very early 20th century mysteries, where the answer is just electricity, and it was sufficiently bizarre and unusual that someone would have electricity in their home, that that's a really surprising thing.

Moira: And they get it wrong as well, they don't really understand it, like they, there's an Edgar Wallace one, I think, where you get electrocuted by the phone, which isn't really going to happen, I don't think.

Caroline: Exactly. But it will have seemed marvellous and wonderful and very original in 1931 when insulin had only been successfully isolated not even ten years before. I think it was done in 1922 . The people involved won the Nobel Prize in 1923 and also they didn't yet have means of making insulin synthetically.

They describe it as the by product of the abattoir, it was an animal extract. So it's still not, now, for people who are diabetic, it's a very ordinary thing that you can get your insulin from the doctors or from the chemists, etc. It was still quite a rare, and probably expensive, thing.

So, not widespread enough knowledge. So it would have seemed very interesting. I think, as a plot though, it does suffer a little from overcomplication. But it is, at heart, you can say there is a simple kernel to it, you know, this is an insurance fraud plus murder. Where the murderer has decided he's going to kill two birds with one stone, as it were.

He's going to kill the moneylender to which he owes a lot of money and he's going to use this body to fake his own death so that his wife can claim on his life insurance and then they're going to move abroad and live happily ever after. Neither of those things is complicated or unusual in detective fiction.

It's the means of inducing your moneylender to sit on a booby trapped chair, which will then shoot insulin into his thigh, then altering his appearance after death, evening out his sugar levels, and then allowing an undertaker to bury him as you. That's the part where it all gets very elaborate.

Moira: Yes, yes, you think this is a bit outrageous. And also, you have to consider that he ends up stealing money from the moneylender's safe, doesn't he, as well? I mean, this is a triple whammy when the crime is concerned. It's very complicated. And yes, the changing of the appearance actually was quite clever.

That really puzzled me. Why did they not recognize the corpse when it turned up? My instant reaction in detective stories, when they go into these kind of quite obscure medical or scientific bits is I tend to skim over them, whereas I feel that there was an audience for that of people who would think, oh, right, I'm going to read this and really learn something from it, or yes, feel they've got somewhere by reading this section. So I think it was probably quite popular with some of the readers.

Caroline: I think so, yes, and I think as well we're at a point, what was retrospectively called the golden age of detective fiction is sort of over halfway through at this point and I think maybe readers are desperate for novelty. They've read enough books set in country houses where someone slips arsenic into the coffee or whatever.

Especially reviewers who maybe were having to read a lot of this stuff, I actually see this even now in the way people respond to new books, is that it's very heavily weighted in favour of novelty just because it gives you something to write about. So I think the book might have benefited a bit from that, but probably from readers as well, you know, they wanted something new and exciting.

Moira: Though I would just like to say that you have the novelty and then a lot of people write the same book as you wrote for ten years afterwards and then something else comes up. But going back to the point, I wanted to ask you a question, which is that this is a medical mystery.

Without a shadow of a doubt, lots of doctors, lots of medical interest. Now, I happen to know, of course, that you've written a book about hypochondria, and I wondered if you were particularly interested in medical mysteries for that reason or any other reason?

Caroline: I am, because one of the ways in which I justify a hyper fixation on medical matters is I make it quasi-academic. I love to learn about it. So whenever I'm having to have any kind of test I research it, to the point where some doctors find me deeply annoying, and some of them quite like it. I'm not saying, of course I don't know as much as them, but I'm able to a little bit like meet them where they're like, no, no, you can explain this, you can use words like endocrine, and I will know what that means.

So yes, I think, I did like his digging into the different kinds of sugar and so on, just because I like that kind of stuff, definitely. But actually speaking of hypochondria and real life medical stuff, you brought this to my attention. I didn't know about this. There is at least one real life case where someone was found dead having had insulin injected. Can you tell us a bit about that? Because I'd never heard of this before.

Moira: This is the von Bülow case, not dead and also nobody ever convicted. So we need to be clear about that. It was a massive scandal amongst very rich people in America. Where someone called Claus von Bülow was married to a very, very wealthy woman called Sunny von Bülow.

And she was injected with an overdose of insulin and went into a coma from which she never recovered. She was in a persistent vegetative state, I think for, I'm going to say 15 years, something like that.

Caroline: Wow.

Moira: Everybody assumed that he had done this, and he was arrested, and he was tried, and he was acquitted. And kind of nobody quite knows why. There was a film made of this, with Jeremy Irons playing him, as you can imagine, absolutely perfect. Now, as I say, both these people are now dead and he didn't sue. Obviously, people said all the time, well, he obviously did it. He didn't tend to sue people.

I think, I think he didn't want it to go further than that. And we were all riveted by it. I can tell you, the news stories and it going on and then this trial and then this unbelievable thing that he was not found guilty. Very memorably the opening of the film, Jeremy Irons film, just was what would now be called a drone shot, but wasn't then, a shot of all those very, very expensive houses, probably on Long Island, I think, you know, along, so you've got the sea at the bottom of the shot, and then there's just these incredible houses, like this was the world that they lived in. He was obviously a bit of a playboy, didn't have money of his own, hadn't got lucky with Sonny, and then the general assumption is he decided to get rid of her. And of course, at the time, we all became absolute experts on this resisting the insulin and why this would be overloaded. But she never recovered, you know, and she was in a coma for a very long time.

Caroline: I did find one reference in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner from December 1957. I'll just read it to you. "A male nurse was sentenced to life imprisonment at Leeds Assizes yesterday for the murder of his wife. He's described as the first man in Britain ever to have been found guilty of murder by insulin."

Moira: Oh really? Oh, great find.

Caroline: I then couldn't find anything else about it. I couldn't find any proper trial reports and I did not have time to go to Leeds and look in the court archive or anything. But that was interesting to me as well, you know, we've just been saying, oh, this plot feels a bit overcomplicated and so on, and here are two examples of crimes or alleged crimes that use this method. So maybe Sykes was a bit more on the ball than we're willing to give him credit.

Moira: Maybe if it is hard to detect, it was one of those things where he knew it went on, but nobody was caught for it.

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I was struck when reading it, I immediately thought, oh, there's two more crime stories that deal with this. Quite convinced. But of course when I went to look them up, they weren't at all.

But I think they're interesting and worth mentioning because they're similar. So there's a short story called "The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey", which I think it's safe to spoiler this really, I mean it's an absolutely horrendous horrible story about a woman who has a thyroid deficiency and her husband becomes angry with her and jealous and he takes her away to the middle of nowhere in Spain and withholds the thyroid from her, so she turns into, and Sayers does not hold back on describing this, into a virtually subhuman character.

And then arranges for the person that he suspects to be her lover to see this as a punishment for them both. I mean, it's an absolutely very cruel and horrible story. And, of course, Lord Peter steps in and manages to resolve that. But that's thyroid rather than insulin, but a similar kind of thing. And then in A Murder is Announced the Agatha Christie book from the late 40s, early 50s. There's a character whose backstory is explained. And this young woman had a goitre, which is a massive swelling on the neck. I'm sure you know much more about the medical side of this than me, Caroline. Massive goitre. But because her father was very old fashioned and puritanical and didn't believe in these things, she wasn't allowed to have medical help which would have solved this.

I think she probably could have had surgery and then taken the iodine, which would have resolved it. And so she knew she had this allegedly hideous growth, and so she wouldn't go out, she didn't see people, which is slightly relevant to the plot as we go along. And obviously as it turned out, both these, I was completely wrong, both these cases were thyroid deficiencies, but I thought interestingly comparable.

Caroline: Definitely, I think, and this is referenced in The Missing Moneylender, by this point, detective novelists are chasing this idea of the untraceable poison. It's referenced jokingly in various Detection Club things, the rare alkaloid from South America that no one's ever seen or heard of.

Just because people have become so familiar with arsenic and cyanide and so on, and they're both seeking novelty and they're seeking a way to hoodwink the reader that they won't already know about. And so I think this idea of doing a crime with a substance that's naturally occurring in the body, or should be naturally occurring, like the thyroid hormone or insulin, I think those related.

I think they are very interesting. I also found there's a story from 1936 by J. J. Connington called "Before Insulin", which takes us a different lens on the insulin idea. The insulin is not actually the murder weapon, but an unscrupulous doctor allows a young man suffering from diabetes to die and gets him to write a fraudulent will and so on, so that he can inherit his money because before the discovery of insulin, it was quite normal for diabetics to just unfortunately pass away from their condition because there was no cure, no kind of ongoing thing you could do to support. Connington was also a scientist in his day job. And I found it interesting that he was obviously intrigued by this same idea, although he was not using it actually as a murder weapon. It was more the sort of withholding and the, uh, the lack of treatment, neglect. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I think there, there's a, there is a little vein of these stories of people trying this out in the thirties.

Moira: There's another Dorothy L. Sayers story which revolves around blood transfusion, I think. Again, as a modern day reader, it's not quite the jeopardy that we that has something got mixed up. And this whole idea that It has to be the right kind of blood, and the wrong kind of blood will be worse than disastrous.

I think we should actually make a collection of all these medical stories. As our knowledge of medicine grew up, the way that the crime stories went along side by side.

Caroline: Yes, I do think it's interesting the way that science and medicine interacts with detective fiction in that way. The Documents in the Case by Sayers and Eustace is another one where I feel like she thought she'd hit on some really clever bit of science to do with mushrooms

Moira: And wrote the most boring book ever!

Caroline: I think at this point it might be worth discussing how much we enjoyed this book, or otherwise. Was it enjoyable to you to read?

Moira: I did enjoy it, actually. More than I might have expected. I liked those weird diversions. I didn't know where it was going. I certainly wasn't guessing what was happening here, and I was utterly mystified by a few things, even when I thought I had things like the changed face. Ah, we're very clever. I do like that picture of life that is presented there.

I would say this, that if you were to tell me W. Stanley Sykes was a pseudonym, and it was actually a woman, I would be very, very surprised. It was such a male book, and there are virtually no women characters in it. There's a quite intriguing person who could have been intriguing, who's the wife of the man who appears to be dead in the beginning, but she just never becomes a character at all.

And there is a delightful young locum doctor, who I would have thought was quite unlikely in 1931 who's described as "short skirted, silk stocking, and fur gloved". Which I was very taken with, obviously clothes and books is my thing, but and she takes an enthusiastic part in their discussions when they're trying to solve the crime.

And a bit more of that wouldn't have done any harm. He obviously didn't think women shouldn't be doctors or anything like that, but the complete lack of any female air in it, I thought was a slight shortcoming, but I did enjoy it. Even the diversions into rugby league and so on. How about you?

Caroline: I agree, I loved that doctor character and really regretted that she was so short lived and equally thought it was very strange, he's gone out of his way to, as you say, in a somewhat unlikely sense, introduce a very competent, highly qualified, fully operational female doctor in 1931. And then he gives her almost no plot and she's off in about three pages. I also was surprised at how much I enjoyed reading this book. Inspectors Ridley and Drury, they're not realistic. Such, such competent and deeply thoughtful policemen don't exist. But so I enjoyed them. But the other thing I enjoyed was and I don't really know the proper name for this if there is one, but in my head, I was calling them almost like lock gates.

If you imagine the plot is a canal and it's got various locks along the way and every time you get to a lock you think oh, we're at the end now, this is the solution and then no it opens and there's more canal to go down. For instance, you mentioned the evidence of identification. I decided about a quarter of the way through that, oh, obviously this man's faked his own death, and this body that's been buried is that of Isaac Levinsky, this moneylender he owed money to. Occam's Razor, that seems too unlikely for those two things not to be the same. And then they call in Levinsky's brother and his clerk to identify the body, and they can't.

And you're like, oh, hang on. Oh, we're through the gate into a different thing and that happens over and over again in the book. Even right at the end when you're so sure that the insulin theory is definitely the one And then the specialist does the test and it's like actually the insulin levels in this body are really normal. So sorry, it's a good idea, but I don't think this is it and then they have to go that extra lap with the he was sent the wrong kind of sugar and that's why it's not showing up on the test and all this kind of stuff. So I found that really tickled my brain in a pleasant way. This constant opening of new avenues.

Moira: I absolutely agree with you. It was full of surprises. And I love the lock gates canal metaphor. I think you should definitely introduce that. Yes, you think something's finished and it isn't. And yes, it did really puzzle me at times. Like, how are they going to get around this?

Because when you've read an awful lot of these books, you think, Oh, okay, it's going to turn out. But I will say, yes, it was full of surprises. And, yes, the moment when they said, 'No, the tests are showing that's not the case.' And you're thinking, ooh, ooh, interesting. So, good for him. He was using his knowledge to a good degree.

Caroline: There were a few things that I chalked down as lucky coincidences that I felt stuck out a bit in the plot. Tell me what you think of these. The first one is that the inspector is so quickly able to connect Levinsky to the house where the Laidlaws, the fraudulent doctor and his wife are staging this death for insurance purposes.

And he does it by testing Levinsky's car, the speedometer, and then correlating it with where are their roadworks because there's some tar splattered on the car. That was all just very helpful and happened very quickly.

Moira: I thought that was great. I loved that. It's almost like Sherlock Holmes or something. I could see him almost drawing a circle around the map. It's 3.2 miles, so it's around here, but it can't be here or here. It must be here. And then he phones someone up and says, where are the roadworks? That was all right. That's completely unrealistic, completely unlikely coincidence, but I'm okay with that.

Caroline: Yes, no, I liked it, I enjoyed it, but I felt that in comparison to the great efforts he's gone to in other things to try and make them blend into reality, that one really stuck out to me. Then the second of my three was that the note that summoned Levinsky to Laidlaw's house that evening, that fatal evening.

He requests in a PS like, please destroy this note, and Levinsky doesn't. He does, I think, what the quite natural human thing to do would be, just sort of drops it in the car and it then gets discovered much later. That all seems perfectly realistic behavior. It's the moment at which it resurfaces that feels a bit contrived, because I think the chauffeur probably would have discovered it before then if they were doing a thorough search of the car and so on.

Moira: Yes, we'll give you that one. That is, a bit unlikely, yes.

Caroline: Because the note also comes in, it partly helps them, you know, confirm that Levinsky was there and why, but it also gives a very important bit of evidence that it combines the two aliases. It proves, I think, that Laidlaw is Derrington or whatever the name that he's going by is. And then the last is, you mentioned it already, as striking you as quite funny, is that chapter that's brilliantly titled "The Revenge of the Office Boy", which is about, at the end, the sugar being substituted is not glucose, it's fructose that they get sent, and that's why the tests have to be done differently. That to me just, at that point I felt like, Sykes is just, he's having fun now.

Moira: It was an unnecessary thing, and that someone had done it deliberately, it wasn't even a mistake, but in a random way, the office boy being sacked, and so he decides to switch some labels for no reason, is that? Which you also thought, well that could be a very, very bad idea, office boy.

Caroline: Yes. Don't mess up people's drugs at a medical supplies company.

Moira: Yes, as they go, this was a fairly benign result of that. Yes, he couldn't resist it, could he? He was just putting in stuff here, there and everywhere.

Caroline: That also actually makes me think your theory about, he was a great fan of detective fiction who then decided to try and write one. I think this is a point in favour of that because it very much has the feeling of, I've got so many ideas, I must cram them all in. Whereas maybe a more professional and experienced writer would be like, I'm going to have to discard some of these things because I can just tell that the pacing's not right. Which is like, no, put them all in.

Moira: But I think that's often true. I'm presuming this was his first and I think that's often true of first books, that they put in everything they've ever thought and all the jokes they've ever been saving up and so on which is quite charming in a way. But they're not thinking, oh, I need to keep these, that would be a short story or that would be the basis of a whole other plot. He's just throwing it all in.

I would have said that he was, if I had to pick something, that he was the opposite. He was the opposite of Anthony Berkeley. You know, with those kind of utterly bizarre goings-on in the Berkeley books. Just a completely different way of approaching it, I think. This is the complete anti Berkeley.

Caroline: Yes, I would agree with that. I think that's a good comparison, actually, because there's not much that Sykes is like, I think. Crofts is the nearest for me. But it's not perfect, because Crofts doesn't go in for quite so many Baroque medical flourishes as Sykes does in this. Crofts is just quite calm all the way through.

I think we should tackle our penultimate point here is, do we feel that this mystery plays fair? Something I like to think about with all the penguins.

Moira: Good question. Do you know, I think it does, more or less. It's not something that obsesses me, so I'm quite open. I'll often think, oh, that was fine, and then somebody will point something out, as you may be about to do, and say, but what about this? And I'll think, oh, okay, it's not my top thing that I'm looking for. But I would say that it was a good traditional play-fair mystery in that sense. What do you think?

Caroline: I agree, I'm also not obsessed by it, but I do think it's just interesting to think about it at the point when that was at its zenith in terms of preoccupying authors. And I tend to notice it only in the negative, as it were. I notice if someone strides in in the last but one chapter and suddenly starts spewing facts that we didn't know. But I'm not one of those people that notices things in chapter three. And goes, huh, we should have been told what was in that note, you know.

Moira: Exactly, yes, yeah.

Caroline: But given my approach to these things, I did feel like it played fair. At no point did anyone read a letter and then not tell us the contents, or go on a trip and not tell us the results, or anything like that, I think it was quite satisfactory in that regard. And then the final duty we must discharge here, is to decide how many green penguins out of five are we giving The Missing Moneylender?

Moira: This has cost me, you know, a sleepless night. What I need to know is, I think if I was, am I allowed a half penguin?

Caroline: Yes, you may have a half penguin.

Moira: Okay, I would say three and a half.

Caroline: Explain your workings.

Moira: Right but it's definitely not up in the top. You're not thinking, oh my goodness, this is an undiscovered masterpiece. Which would be five, presumably. And it's not quite four. I think just because it's just almost there, but not quite, that's not very helpful, is it? Do you know what I mean?

Caroline: No, I do, I do know what you mean.

Moira: But it's better than three.

Caroline: yeah, it's better than average. It's not middling. I'd say it's above average, but I would personally put a four is a book I would reread for pleasure, and I don't think I would reread this.

Moira: Very good point. Yes, yes, yes. And that's very good. So what would you say is your Penguins?

Caroline: No, I think 3. 5 is right. I was hovering between 3 and 3.5, but it is better than 3. It is better than 3 because of its surprisingness. It's got very nice, smooth, even prose as well. There's nothing to snag your brain on.

Moira: Exactly as you say, I don't think I would read it, but I think I will remember it. I won't be looking at that title in a year and thinking, what was that one about? I think, oh yes, that's the one with the insulin and the doubles and the fake burial and so on.

Caroline: Yeah. I will also keep an eye out in secondhand bookshops for other W. Stanley Sykes, because maybe I want to read the tuna fishing one, who knows?

Moira: Well, let me know.

Caroline: Well, thank you very much for on The Missing Moneylender with me. It's been great fun.

Moira: I really enjoyed that. I'm very glad to have read a book that I seriously doubt that I would ever have read in other circumstances, because I wouldn't have known of its existence. So thank you!

Caroline: Wonderful.

Music

And now, we have reached the postbag section, where I catch you up on the correspondence I've received since our last Green Penguin Book Club episode. I had a couple of really interesting responses to the discussion of chemicals and dispensing with Dr Kathryn Harkup in last episode, which was about The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Lesley got in touch to share some memories about health and safety in laboratories over the decades, saying:

"I had a student job in an NHS hospital pathology laboratory in the late 1960s and one hot day we shared ice cream brought in by one of the more senior lab workers, eaten from unused petrie dishes with unused tongue depressors, sitting in the laboratory. Later in my career Good Laboratory Practice Standard Operating Procedures and Health and Safety made keeping protective clothing for the lab, not bringing equipment out and doing paperwork in a separate office as far as possible became mandatory (and not misusing work equipment became verboten). That ice cream did revive the workforce, though, or I wouldn't have such a clear memory of it. Temperature control in laboratories improved over the years, too, fortunately."

I think that makes me feel slightly better about Cynthia having friends to tea in the hospital dispensary in 1917, honestly!

Elizabeth also got in touch to make an interesting literary comparison. She writes:

"It was interesting to hear Kathryn Harkup talking about poison in the 'Styles' edition of Shedunnit, especially as I have just finished The Count of Monte Cristo, in which Heloise de Villefort uses brucine (apparently a form of strychnine) to poison the grandparents of her stepdaughter Valentine. She then tries to poison Valentine's other grandfather but gets his manservant by mistake; a second attempt fails because the old man has been taking a medicinal form of brucine and is therefore immune. Suspicious, he starts giving Valentine the same medicine so that she too is immune when Heloise tries to poison her. I would be interested to know if this would work, and whether Dorothy Sayers got her idea for the plot of Strong Poison from reading 'Monte Cristo'!"

I've never read The Count of Monte Cristo myself, but it sounds like it's as full of deadly poisons as any golden age crime novel.

Finally, Hannah got in touch about an earlier edition of Green Penguin Book Club, in which Dolores Gordon-Smith and I read Mr Fortune, Please by H.C. Bailey. One of the stories in that book is about a so-called "lion party", in which a hostess gathers a collection of famous or notorious people together for a social event in the hope that the combination of guests will produce a thrilling evening. Hannah made an interesting connection between this story and an Agatha Christie novel from 1936:

"Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table has a lion party as the murder scene. Christie never uses that phrase, but it is a group of people collected together for their notoriety, which seems to me to be the same concept. They guests are described as dangerous animals in places."

The "lions" in that book are four well-known crime professionals, including Hercule Poirot, and four people the host suspects of having got away with murder. Big game, indeed.

Thanks very much to everyone who got in touch — please do email caroline@shedunnitshow.com if you have a comment you'd like to submit for inclusion in a future episode, it's so interesting to hear your reactions to these books as you make your own way through the Penguin crime series.

The next book under consideration for Green Penguin Book Club will be Raffles by E.W. Hornung, Penguin Number 63, and that will be coming your way at the start of April. Enjoy your penguin reading until then!

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This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. My guest was Moira Redmond. You can find out more about her and read her blog at clothesinbooks.blogspot.com.

If you'd like more from the podcast, including extra interviews, behind the scenes commentaries and the chance to read a book each month with a community of other mystery lovers, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.

You can find a full list of the books we mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/themissingmoneylender. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.

Thanks for listening.