“Two Bottles of Relish” (1932)

I know this Lord Dunsany story is a murder mystery because it was another I found in the 65 Great Murder Mysteries anthology edited by Mary Danby, which is chock-full of murder mysteries however offbeat. In 1932 Lord Dunsany was reportedly trying to break into the murder mystery story market, but I prefer to think of “Two Bottles of Relish” as a parody of Sherlock Holmes, tacking on a gruesome and somewhat obvious twist. Dunsany is otherwise doing his basic witty, whimsical, droll, fantastic, weird thing. The story is told by Smithers (or Smethers), a traveling salesman who “pushes” Num-numo, “a relish for meats and savouries.” He needs to get his sales numbers up. Dunsany always did like a traveling salesman. (Later Smithers will mention he has no idea what savouries are.) “Two Bottles of Relish” is not exactly a locked-room situation but something like it, with the disappearance of a young woman that is probably a murder. But there is no corpse and so no evidence. Smithers tells it with a lot of digressions, with the prolix bonhomie of the salesman at his ease over cigars and brandy. There’s a long preamble about renting an apartment with the Sherlock Holmes character, an Oxford scholar. Smethers is apparently the Dr. Watson around here. The suspect, Steeger, was living with the woman at the time she disappeared along with all her money. Around that time Steeger came into an unusually large amount of money. Other seemingly random clues include that Steeger was a vegetarian—extremely suspicious in this story—and also that he chopped down all the trees on the property apparently for firewood. That seemed to me to be more suspicious than being a vegetarian but what do I know. Smethers does the investigatory footwork for his genius roommate and sleuths out this information, including that Steeger bought an unusually large supply of Num-numo relish shortly before the woman’s disappearance. The twist—I’m going to give it away now!—is that he disposed of the body by eating it. He used the trees as an excuse for purchasing an ax. He only bought vegetables from the grocer because he had a supply of meat at home, which is why he needed the extra relish. I mean, this is all patently absurd as murder mysteries go, hardly the stuff of some ultrarational detective using scientific deduction methods. But it’s a pretty good Lord Dunsany story.

65 Great Murder Mysteries, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Listen to story online.