A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: Z Is For Israel Zangwill

 

Today is my final post for 2025, apart from the afterthoughts I’ll be writing tomorrow.

I seem to have discovered a number of familiar writers who aren’t best known for writing mysteries, but have done it anyway. Today’s is Victorian/Edwardian era British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, who wrote as a journalist and playwright and, among other things, popularised the term “melting pot” with his play of the same name, which was about America’s absorption of immigrants, and was performed there in 1910. Former US President Theodore Roosevelt loved it and wrote to him to say so after he had seen it.

Zangwill was born in London in 1864, the son of Jewish immigrants from Latvia(his father) and Poland(his mother). He attended the Jews’ Free School(it’s still around and one of its houses is named for him). He taught there for a while and got a degree from the University of London. It was a family thing, as his brother, Louis Zangwill, was also a writer.

Eventually he became involved in various Jewish movements and women’s suffrage.

He was known as “the Dickens of the Ghetto”.

However, the reason he has made it into this post is his novel The Big Bow Mystery, first published in The Star newspaper before being published as a novel in 1892. It is one of the first locked room mysteries. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, it refers to a mystery in which the victim is killed in a locked room, with no immediate way of working out how it could have happened. Of course, it is eventually worked out. The novel was filmed three times in 1928, 1934 and 1946. 

There is an introduction to the novel in which he says that readers who had read it in The Star kept writing to him to give him their idea of who was the murderer, including one who must be seven feet high, judging by the illustration! In the end, he had to choose a character who was the last one left after he had decided the others were not guilty. And then he admitted he’d been joking. 

He complained that you weren’t supposed to write humour in a mystery novel, and he did. Like Agatha Christie and her movement, he made rules for whodunnit, as in it had to be a character you had already met, and readers had to have a chance to work it out. 

If this is of interest to you, it’s available free on Project Gutenberg, along with a lot of his other works.

And here we go! I hope you have enjoyed my A to Z this year. I’ve enjoyed yours, where you wrote them. 

Tomorrow I’ll post some thoughts on what I’ve done this year.