In the Fog

by Richard Davis

Overview

A cleverly atmospheric story-within-a-story with a twist, wherein four members of an exclusive London Gentleman's Club take turns weaving a tale of a double murder.

On the evening following the great fog of 1897, four strangers are dining at an exclusive gentleman's club, while a fifth, Sir Andrew, is just finishing the last few pages of a pulp mystery novel. As Sir Andrew rises to leave, a visiting American diplomat announces that the previous evening, he stumbled upon the scene of a double murder which has left Scotland Yard detectives baffled.

Sir Andrew listens raptly as each diner in turn each adds his own bits of background and theories about who could have killed the Russian princess and the young British adventurer. Two clever twists will have readers themselves feeling as though they, too, have been wandering in the fog.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781728296234
Publisher:	Sourcebooks
Publication date:	03/05/2024
Series:	Library of Congress Crime Classics
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	370,061
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Richard Harding Davis was a best-selling novelist and playwright, but is most famous for being the first American war correspondent during the Spanish-American War. His reporting helped create the legend of the Rough Riders, which boosted the reputation and political career of Theodore Roosevelt. Davis was instrumental in the evolution of the American magazine, and his clean-shaven good looks were the model for the Gibson Man, created by artist Charles Dana Gibson at the turn of the twentieth century. At one point, he had three plays running simultaneously on Broadway, and two of his books were made into films.

Editorial Reviews

2023-12-16
American journalist Davis (1864-1916) returns to the news with a long out-of-print crime novella emerging from the London fog in 1901, together with a much more straightforward story published 10 years earlier.

Davis’ sendup of contemporaneous crime fiction begins as Lt. Ripley Sears, the U.S. naval attaché to Russia, entertains the gentlemen he’s met in London’s exclusive Grill Club with an anecdote about getting so lost and confused in a recent pea-souper that he stumbled into a flat containing the dead bodies of the Earl of Chetney and his ladylove, Russian czarina Princess Zichy. Since the Earl’s brother, Lord Arthur Chetney, was spotted fleeing from the scene, and since that chronic debtor would have profited immensely from the Earl’s death, everyone assumes he’s the killer. But a Queen’s Messenger who serves as a courier for the Foreign Office begins a second story about a diamond necklace that Queen Victoria had intended to give as a gift to Princess Zichy, who stole it from him as they traveled together in the same railway compartment, and his frantic efforts to recover the treasure before anyone realized it had been stolen. And Chudleigh, a junior solicitor, tells a third story about Inspector Lyle’s attempt to identify the Earl’s murderer after Lord Arthur, confined in hospital after an accident, denies all responsibility. Just when it seems that these three tales are foggier than London, Davis pulls a surprisingly postmodern rabbit from his hat. Readers who find his ending too meta may still enjoy “Gallegher: A Newspaper Story,” which recounts the sleuthing adventures of a remarkably resourceful office boy who works, like Davis did, for the Philadelphia Press.

Dated, dusty, but well worth reading.

Kirkus Reviews