The Big Bow Mystery

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“It seems clear that the deceased did not commit suicide. It seems equally clear that the deceased was not murdered…”
Bow is a working-class district in the East End of London. It’s a cold December morning, and a London pea-souper swirls around the dark streets. At 11 Grover Street, a rooming house, Mrs. Drabdump the landlady is unconcerned and goes “about her work quite as cheerlessly as usual”. Then she trudges upstairs to wake one of the lodgers – Arthur Constant is an idealist, and a campaigner for workers’ rights. Not getting a response she tries again but the door is firmly locked from within. She summons her neighbour, the well-known retired detective George Grodman who batters down the door, only to be confronted with a corpse… and the first ever locked door mystery.

Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) was a British writer. Born in London, Zangwill was raised in a family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Alongside his brother Louis, a novelist, Zangwill was educated at the Jews¿ Free School in Spitalfields, where he studied secular and religious subjects. He excelled early on and was made a teacher in his teens before studying for his BA at the University of London. After graduating in 1884, Zangwill began publishing under various pseudonyms, finding editing work with Ariel and The London Puck to support himself. His first novel, Children of the Ghetto: A Study of Peculiar People (1892), was published to popular and critical acclaim, earning praise from prominent Victorian novelist George Gissing. His play The Melting Pot (1908) was a resounding success in the United States and was regarded by Theodore Roosevelt as ¿among the very strong and real influences upon [his] thought and [his] life.¿ He spent his life in dedication to various political and social causes. An early Zionist and follower of Theodor Herzl, he later withdrew his support in favor of territorialism after he discovered that ¿Palestine proper has already its inhabitants.¿ Despite distancing himself from the Zionist community, he continued to advocate on behalf of the Jewish people and to promote the ideals of feminism alongside his wife Edith Ayrton, a prominent author and activist.