Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case is an absolute delight. It focuses almost entirely on summation, but manages within its artificial boundaries to accomplish everything we want in detective fiction. I’ll try and explain.
The Problem: Sir Eustace receives a sample box of Masons chocolate liquors in the mail. Uninterested in acting as a Masons guinea pig, he gives them to fellow club member Graham Bendix who, in turn, takes them to his wife. After eating the chocolates, Mrs. Bendix dies and her husband is taken ill, both of them having been poisoned with nitrobenzene.
The Investigation: The police are at a loss, eventually settling on the unsatisfying conclusion that a madman must’ve dunnit. Enter the Crimes Circle, an exclusive club of murder enthusiasts determined to solve the case–not necessarily for justice, but rather their own fascination with crime and bragging rights…mostly bragging rights. And it is here where TPCC appears to diverge from the standards of detective fiction. We do not follow the not-quite-sleuths as they question suspects and bribe witnesses–no, instead we follow six summations with six solutions to the problem.
How is this fair play?
Deftly, Berkeley manages to present clues (scant at first) inside of each summation. This allows us to construct the crime if we are clever enough to choose which parts of each summation are important. This allows the narrative to slyly function as a normal murder mystery.
It helps that the characters are well-drawn, witty, and wonderfully competitive. Every solution is different and constructed with its creator’s specific brand of logic. Moreover, the angles of deduction show how this simple bit of poisoning can be twisted into a properly entertaining puzzle before being twisted again into an altogether different one.
The Solution: It may sound strange, but I was happy to solve this by Chapter 16. I’m not bragging — I rarely solve murder mysteries. There’s a specific passage that got me thinking (or is it guessing?) about a certain aspect, and, like our final orator, Mr. Chitterwick, it took the entirety of all the solutions to allow me to do so. Whether you get the solution or not, TPCC is a joyously-good read.
James Scott Byrnside 
I don’t recall the specific chapter layout, but I do love how the solution to this one slowly emerges as an inevitability. Overall, its a fun fascinating read and is even more successful than Five Little Pigs at rehashing the same set of events in a thoroughly enjoyable way. I only wish I could read it again for the first time.
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I have a few books I wish I could read again for the first time. It’s fascinating how this one is able to skip the ‘novelistic’ aspects (scenes, dialogue) to focus on the problems and solution, and yet still satisfy with the investigation.
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You were ahead of me. Actually, I solved this early on—sort of; I had two highly satisfactory good solutions, my only uncertainty being which would be #5 and which #6. Instead, they were #4 and #5, so at the end of Chapter XVI, I was completely stumped. Instead of reading Chapter XVII, I started over with Chapter I… and after rereading the beginning I finally realized what had been going on in front of my nose. I’d fallen right into Anthony Berkeley’s trap.
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“I started over with Chapter 1”
I’ve never tried this. Perhaps, I’ll pick one of my unread Carr’s on the shelf and see if it helps. I doubt it will, but it would be fun to find out.
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