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In her (never completed) biography of Wilkie Collins, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote:

How easily the will to believe may be shattered and dispersed is shown by the indignation with which readers of any modern detective story will pounce upon the most trifling inaccuracy. Arnold Bennett declared that he was unable to put any faith in Mr. J. J. Connington’s story The Case with Nine Solutions, because his confidence was destroyed at the start by an unimportant technical slip about a telephone-bell.

Dorothy L. Sayers (1977). Wilkie Collins: a Critical and Biographical Study, pages 82–83. Friends of the University of Toledo Libraries.

What was the slip about the telephone-bell?

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    The word "modern" used there is funny now, because most readers in the last I don't know how many decades wouldn't even understand what was supposed to be the problem with the telephone error. Commented Nov 23 at 19:31

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This is the passage from The Case With Nine Solutions:

Shenstone drew a small table to Dr. Ringwood’s elbow and placed the coffee on it; then, retiring for a moment, he returned with the telephone, which he plugged to a connection in the room.

“Bring it over here, Shenstone. I want to be sure that the bell will wake me if I happen to doze.”

J. J. Connington (1928). The Case With Nine Solutions, chapter 1. London: Gollancz.

Arnold Bennett commented:

As early as page 8 Mr. Connington impaired my respect for his knowledge of the world by the strange assumption that in moving a telephone-receiver nearer to you, you also move the telephone-bell nearer to you! A detail, but disquieting.

Arnold Bennett (1929). ‘I Take up the Challenge of Detective Fiction Lovers’. Evening Standard (17 January 1929), page 7. Reprinted in Andrew Mylett, editor (1974). Arnold Bennett: the Evening Standard Years, page 234. London: Chatto & Windus.

Bennett had assumed that Dr Ringwood had a telephone installation where the telephone bell was in the “bellset” (a box on the wall), not in the handset, so that moving the latter could have no effect on the former.

The photo below shows a GPO (General Post Office) bellset no. 1 (left, introduced 1908) and a “candlestick”-style telephone no. 150 (right, introduced 1924).

This configuration, with separate bellset and handset, was very common in the 1920s, but it was not universal, so it seems likely that in the passage from The Case with Nine Solutions, Connington was imagining a configuration with a combined bellset and handset, as in telephone no. 20, but didn’t realise that some readers would require this to be explained.

Small wooden box with two bells at top, connected by braided electric cord to a telephone handset in the form of a vertical cylinder with microphone at top, detachable speaker on a hook at left, and rotary dial at the base.

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  • But as the telephone box is portable from one room to another, you could clearly place it on a table if you wished (assuming sufficient slack in the line is available). Commented Nov 25 at 15:37
  • Ironically, current telephones have made this error reality. Commented Nov 26 at 4:04
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    Glad to know That Guy didn't spring into existence with the development of the PC. Commented Nov 26 at 7:27
  • I guess that it is a modern phone in the picture, right? Because it has an integrated dial pad, instead of a single paddle - which one would hit repeatedly, frantically, for waking up the operator :) Commented Nov 26 at 11:42
  • @virolino The rotary dial is original, I believe. The GPO started to introduce automatic telephone switching in the 1910s, though it took decades to cover the whole country. See the early history of GPO automatic switching, especially the table of automated exchanges by 1922. Commented Nov 26 at 12:22

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