The Man Who Knew How (1932)

by Dorothy L. Sayers

This isn’t usually the kind of mystery story that I like to read, but I recently acquired The Complete Stories of Dorothy Sayers and thought I would delve into it. I decided to begin with some of her stand-alone stories rather than those featuring Lord Peter Wimsey or Montague Egg. “The Man Who Knew How” was first published in Harper’s Bazaar in February of 1932. It’s something of an amateur sleuth mystery that begins on a train with a Mr. Pender who is trying to read a mystery novel but is distracted by a man sitting across from him. No matter what he does, he can’t seem to concentrate because of the way the man is looking at him, so he puts the book up directly in his face to avoid giving him the satisfaction of knowing he’s disturbed his concentration. “He gained the impression that the man saw through the maneuver and was secretly entertained by it. He wanted to fidget, but felt obscurely that his doing so would in some way constitute a victory for the other man. In his self-consciousness he held himself so rigid that attention to his book became a sheer physical impossibility.” It’s this kind of moment that let’s the reader know this is a British story.

Eventually Pender can no longer keep up the charade and finally asks the man if he wants to read his book. “‘Thanks very much,’ he said, ‘but I never read detective stories. They’re so--inadequate, don’t you think so?’” The man is not talking about their literary merit, however, and it takes Pender a few moments to realize that the stranger is discussing real murders. Eventually he finds out the stranger believes he knows how to commit the perfect murder. Pender is completely taken aback by this, and presses him to divulge his secret, certain that the other man isn’t serious. At first he plays it coy, but in their conversation he comes out with the name of a drug, sulphate of thanatol, and how it is delivered by putting it in the victim’s bath water. “It’s the action of the hot water that brings on the effect of the stuff, you see. Any time from a few hours to a few days after administration. It’s quite a simple chemical reaction and it couldn’t possibly be detected by analysis. It would just look like heart failure.” A moment later he muses, “It’s very odd how often one seems to read of people being found dead in their baths,” the implication being that they must actually be murders. As they reach the stop at Rugby, however, he says he has an appointment and leaves the train before Pender can question him further.

Back at home, when Pender reads of a man who died in his bath in Rugby, he wonders offhandedly if his friend from the train was aware of it. But that’s just the beginning of what gradually becomes an obsession. As he reads through his daily paper, the word bath begins to jump out at him, “at once relieved and vaguely disappointed if a week passed without a hot-bath tragedy.” When one of these bath tragedies happens in his own neighborhood, however, Pender suddenly finds himself face to face with his friend as he’s out for a walk. Again, the man says he has business here, and that his business takes him all over the country. As they reach Pender’s house he invites him inside on a whim and during their conversation Pender suddenly realizes his whisky glass is full, but he didn’t refill it himself. “Now Pender came to think of it, it had been a very stiff whiskey. Was it imagination, or had there been something about the flavor of it? A cold sweat broke out on Pender’s forehead.” From that moment Pender begins to suspect the man--Smith he called himself--of somehow trying to kill him, but the only reason he would have to kill him is because he knows his secret: that Smith is somehow responsible for the bathing deaths.

It’s here that the true obsession begins. Pender attends the coroner’s inquisitions in all of these deaths, looking for Smith. When he finds him, he immediately calls a policeman over and tries to have Smith arrested. But Smith shows the cop a card and he winds up taking Pender to the police station, where they all think he’s gone a little nuts. This only leads to an increased fixation on what Smith is doing, and to the wonderfully twisted ending. Sayer’s story is a popular one and was reprinted on several occasions through the years. The first was in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1942, and a couple decades later it was selected for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s anthologies, Spellbinders in Suspense in 1967. In fact, the ending is perfect for the kind of story Hitchcock liked. It was collected in Sayers’ own book of short stories, Hangman’s Holiday, which was published in 1933. “The Man Who Knew How” is an amusing story, something of a black comedy, that demonstrates Sayers’ gift for British humor and an ability to develop character in a minimum of space while plotting a nice little mystery.