A review by sharkybookshelf
Six Against the Yard by Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Agatha Christie, The Detection Club, Ronald Knox, Margery Allingham, George W. Cornish, Russell Thorndike, Freeman Wills Crofts

3.0

Six renowned Golden Age crime authors write “the perfect crime” and Superintendent Cornish from Scotland Yard gives his professional opinion on whether the crime would indeed have been unsolvable…

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting - I thought each story would be a mystery to be solved, and both the reader and Superintendent Cornish would attempt to solve it. However, in almost each, we know from the outset who commits the crime with the story explaining how they go about doing so and commentary at the end from Cornish about how Scotland Yard would have approached the crime and the likelihood of the murderer getting away with it.

So I didn’t get the kick out of trying to solve the murders that I thought I would, but it was actually very interesting to read Cornish’s commentary and get an insight into how Scotland Yard operated at the time and how the psychology of criminals was understood by the police. Things have certainly changed in the last 90ish years! (Thankfully!)

This edition includes a 1929 essay by Agatha Christie about a real-life unsolved case, which is interesting enough and vaguely relevant in that it remains unsolved (as far as I know), so could be considered a “perfect crime.” But since it is inconclusive and doesn’t fit the format of the rest of the book, it does feel a little shoe-horned in.

A fun idea, but the execution results in less mystery-solving and more insight into the operation of Scotland Yard at the time.