Only seven were hanged

About the book

The Clue Club gathers on Christmas Eve to discuss crime in agreeable surroundings. Its members treat trials as sources of professional interest, conversation, and even artistic material, while their chairman brings the authority of a criminal-court judge. When a substitute waiter challenges a resolution supporting executions, the evening's assumptions become the subject of a much less comfortable debate. Alternating accounts from judge and waiter ask the listeners to reconsider cases they might otherwise regard as settled. Martin builds a linked sequence of crime narratives around the difference between delivering a verdict and knowing the whole truth. The club's fascination with murder is tested against the consequences of judgment, and the social distance between those who discuss punishment and those who bear it.

• Fallible judgment
• Crime as spectacle
• Power and punishment

Why read it

The waiter and judge's alternating cases turn a familiar club-story format into a sustained challenge to easy certainty.

English Harper & Brothers edition of 1929