Review: The Sleuth of St. James's Square

The Sleuth of St. James's Square by Melville Davisson Post
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A difficult collection to rate, because it has a combination of flaws (for me, predominating) and strengths.

The biggest flaw for a 21st-century audience is the author's evident disgust at the existence of Asian people. Though he's not a big fan of anyone who's not a well-off WASP, actually; anyone who's poor or foreign (or a villain, but that's often a subset of the other two categories) gets called a "creature" or, sometimes, a "human creature," and the implication is not a positive one.

This is the case even when the narrator is theoretically a diarist from the American colonial period; the voice is always the same, even though we have multiple (theoretical) narrators in the various stories, often first-person but sometimes third-person. The sleuth of the title provides a common thread, but often quite a slender one, and rarely does any sleuthing. A good many of the stories are recounted to him, or by him, about crimes that were committed somewhere else or even in a different time, and in the investigation of which he had no involvement. In one story, the only connection to him is that he's briefly mentioned as having given directions to the person who's informing the central character of the circumstances of her father's death. This doesn't help to develop him as a character, and I didn't feel like I knew him at all by the end, because I'd hardly seen him do anything, and most of what he said was reading out the writings of other people.

Not all of the stories are mystery stories as such, either, though most have a twist at the end which changes the reader's perspective on the preceding events. The twists are often quite clever, though of course some are weaker than others.

The Gutenberg edition has quite a few uncorrected scan errors. I'll send them in at some stage as errata.

Overall, a miss for me, and I don't see quite where the enthusiasm for the author from his contemporaries came from. It doesn't quite make it to my 2025 recommendation list, even in the lowest tier.

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