Death at Swaythling Court Read online

  Clinton Driffield returned the next year in the detective novel In Whose Dim Shadow (1935), a tale set in a recently erected English suburb, the denizens of which seem to have committed an impressive number of indiscretions, including sexual ones. The intriguing title of the British edition of the novel is drawn from a poem by the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay: ‘Those trees in whose dim shadow/The ghastly priest doth reign/The priest who slew the slayer/And shall himself be slain.’ Stewart’s puzzle plot in In Whose Dim Shadow is well clued and compelling, the kicker of a closing paragraph is a classic of its kind and, additionally, the author paints some excellent character portraits. I fully concur with the Sunday Times’ assessment of the tale: ‘Quiet domestic murder, full of the neatest detective points [. . .] These are not the detective’s stock figures, but fully realised human beings.’7

  Uncharacteristically for Stewart, nearly twenty months elapsed between the publication of In Whose Dim Shadow and his next book, A Minor Operation (1937). The reason for the author’s delay in production was the onset in 1935–36 of the afflictions of cataracts and heart disease (Stewart ultimately succumbed to heart disease in 1947). Despite these grave health complications, Stewart in late 1936 was able to complete A Minor Operation, a first-rate Clinton Driffield story of murder and a most baffling disappearance. A Times Literary Supplement reviewer found that A Minor Operation treated the reader ‘to exactly the right mixture of mystification and clue’ and that, in addition to its impressive construction, the novel boasted ‘character-drawing above the average’ for a detective novel.

  Alfred Stewart’s final eight mysteries, which appeared between 1938 and 1947, the year of the author’s death, are, on the whole, a somewhat weaker group of tales than the sixteen that appeared between 1926 and 1937, yet they are not without interest. In 1938 Stewart for the last time managed to publish two detective novels, Truth Comes Limping and For Murder Will Speak (also published as Murder Will Speak). The latter tale is much the superior of the two, having an interesting suburban setting and a bevy of female characters found to have motives when a contemptible philandering businessman meets with foul play. Sexual neurosis plays a major role in For Murder Will Speak, the ever-thorough Stewart obviously having made a study of the subject when writing the novel. The somewhat squeamish reviewer for Scribner’s Magazine considered the subject matter of For Murder Will Speak ‘rather unsavoury at times’, yet this individual conceded that the novel nevertheless made ‘first-class reading for those who enjoy a good puzzle intricately worked out’. ‘Judge Lynch’ in the Saturday Review apparently had no such moral reservations about the latest Clinton Driffield murder case, avowing simply of the novel: ‘They don’t come any better’.

  Over the next couple of years Stewart again sent Sir Clinton Driffield temporarily packing, replacing him with a new series detective, a brash radio personality named Mark Brand, in The Counsellor (1939) and The Four Defences (1940). The better of these two novels is The Four Defences, which Stewart based on another notorious British true-crime case, the Alfred Rouse blazing-car murder. (Rouse is believed to have fabricated his death by murdering an unknown man, placing the dead man’s body in his car and setting the car on fire, in the hope that the murdered man’s body would be taken for his.) Though admittedly a thinly characterised academic exercise in ratiocination, Stewart’s Four Defences surely is also one of the most complexly plotted Golden Age detective novels and should delight devotees of classical detection. Taking the Rouse blazing-car affair as his theme, Stewart composes from it a stunning set of diabolically ingenious criminal variations. ‘This is in the cold-blooded category which [. . .] excites a crossword puzzle kind of interest,’ the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement acutely noted of the novel. ‘Nothing in the Rouse case would prepare you for these complications upon complications [. . .] What they prove is that Mr Connington has the power of penetrating into the puzzle-corner of the brain. He leaves it dazedly wondering whether in the records of actual crime there can be any dark deed to equal this in its planned convolutions.’

  Sir Clinton Driffield returned to action in the remaining four detective novels in the Connington oeuvre, The Twenty-One Clues (1941), No Past is Dead (1942), Jack-in-the-Box (1944) and Commonsense is All You Need (1947), all of which were written as Stewart’s heart disease steadily worsened and reflect to some extent his diminishing physical and mental energy. Although The Twenty-One Clues was inspired by the notorious Hall-Mills double murder case – probably the most publicised murder case in the United States in the 1920s – and the American critic and novelist Anthony Boucher commended Jack-in-the-Box, I believe the best of these later mysteries is No Past Is Dead, which Stewart partly based on a bizarre French true-crime affair, the 1891 Achet-Lepine murder case.8 Besides providing an interesting background for the tale, the ailing author managed some virtuoso plot twists, of the sort most associated today with that ingenious Golden Age Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie.

  What Stewart with characteristic bluntness referred to as ‘my complete crack-up’ forced his retirement from Queen’s University in 1944. ‘I am afraid,’ Stewart wrote a friend, the chemist and forensic scientist F. Gerald Tryhorn, in August 1946, eleven months before his death, ‘that I shall never be much use again. Very stupidly, I tried for a session to combine a full course of lecturing with angina pectoris; and ended up by establishing that the two are immiscible.’ He added that since retiring in 1944, he had been physically ‘limited to my house, since even a fifty-yard crawl brings on the usual cramps’. Stewart completed his essay collection and a final novel before he died at his study desk in his Belfast home on 1 July 1947, at the age of sixty-six. When death came to the author he was busy at work, writing.

  More than six decades after Alfred Walter Stewart’s death, his J. J. Connington fiction is again available to a wider audience of classic-mystery fans, rather than strictly limited to a select company of rare-book collectors with deep pockets. This is fitting for an individual who was one of the finest writers of British genre fiction between the two world wars. ‘Heaven forfend that you should imagine I take myself for anything out of the common in the tec yarn stuff,’ Stewart once self-deprecatingly declared in a letter to Rupert Gould. Yet, as contemporary critics recognised, as a writer of detective and science fiction Stewart indeed was something out of the common. Now more modern readers can find this out for themselves. They have much good sleuthing in store.

  Introduction Notes

  1. For more on Street, Crofts and particularly Stewart, see Curtis Evans, Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920–1961 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012). On the academic career of Alfred Walter Stewart, see his entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 52, 627–628.

  2. The Gould–Stewart correspondence is discussed in considerable detail in Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery. For more on the life of the fascinating Rupert Thomas Gould, see Jonathan Betts, Time Restored: The Harrison Timekeepers and R. T. Gould, the Man Who Knew (Almost) Everything (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Longitude, the 2000 British film adaptation of Dava Sobel’s book Longitude:The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (London: Harper Collins, 1995), which details Gould’s restoration of the marine chronometers built by in the eighteenth century by the clockmaker John Harrison.

  3. Potential purchasers of Murder in the Maze should keep in mind that $2 in 1927 is worth over $26 today.

  4. In a 1920 article in The Strand Magazine, Arthur Conan Doyle endorsed as real prank photographs of purported fairies taken by two English girls in the garden of a house in the village of Cottingley. In the aftermath of the Great War Doyle had become a fervent believer in Spiritualism and other paranormal phenomena. Especially embarrassing to Doyle’s admirers today, he also published The Coming of t
he Faeries (1922), wherein he argued that these mystical creatures genuinely existed. ‘When the spirits came in, the common sense oozed out,’ Stewart once wrote bluntly to his friend Rupert Gould of the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Like Gould, however, Stewart had an intense interest in the subject of the Loch Ness Monster, believing that he, his wife and daughter had sighted a large marine creature of some sort in Loch Ness in 1935. A year earlier Gould had authored The Loch Ness Monster and Others, and it was this book that led Stewart, after he made his ‘Nessie’ sighting, to initiate correspondence with Gould.

  5. A tontine is a financial arrangement wherein shareowners in a common fund receive annuities that increase in value with the death of each participant, with the entire amount of the fund going to the last survivor. The impetus that the tontine provided to the deadly creative imaginations of Golden Age mystery writers should be sufficiently obvious.

  6. At Ardlamont, a large country estate in Argyll, Cecil Hambrough died from a gunshot wound while hunting. Cecil’s tutor, Alfred John Monson, and another man, both of whom were out hunting with Cecil, claimed that Cecil had accidentally shot himself, but Monson was arrested and tried for Cecil’s murder. The verdict delivered was ‘not proven’, but Monson was then – and is today – considered almost certain to have been guilty of the murder. On the Ardlamont case, see William Roughead, Classic Crimes (1951; repr., New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2000), 378–464.

  7. For the genesis of the title, see Macaulay’s ‘The Battle of the Lake Regillus’, from his narrative poem collection Lays of Ancient Rome. In this poem Macaulay alludes to the ancient cult of Diana Nemorensis, which elevated its priests through trial by combat. Study of the practices of the Diana Nemorensis cult influenced Sir James George Frazer’s cultural interpretation of religion in his most renowned work, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. As with Tom Tiddler’s Island and The Ha-Ha Case the title In Whose Dim Shadow proved too esoteric for Connington’s American publishers, Little, Brown and Co., who altered it to the more prosaic The Tau Cross Mystery.

  8. Stewart analysed the Achet-Lepine case in detail in ‘The Mystery of Chantelle’, one of the best essays in his 1947 collection Alias J. J. Connington.

  Author’s Note

  A READER beginning a detective story has two methods open to him in following the narrative. He may regard it simply as a tale and not trouble his head about the solution of the mystery until he reaches it in due course at the final chapter. Or he may treat the book as an exercise in reasoning and pit himself against the author in an attempt to work out the mystery for himself.

  Unfortunately in many cases his labour is made futile because the author allows his detective to pick up some undescribed clue of supreme importance; and this generally happens in the middle of the book, after the reader has expended much mental energy in working his way through the tangle of incidents.

  In the present book I have tried to play quite fair by my readers; and I believe that they will have a full knowledge of every essential fact before they reach the last chapter. They may therefore, if they so choose, embark light-heartedly on the task of detection with the assurance that they will at least know as much as the character who is attempting to solve the problem.

  This statement may perhaps excuse my breach of literary etiquette in putting a prefatory note in front of a mere detective yarn.

  J. J. C.

  Chapter One

  The Green Devil of Fernhurst

  COLONEL SANDERSTEAD looked gloomily at his wrist-watch for the third time. Punctual to a second himself, he expected an equal clockwork precision from others; and even his long series of disappointments in the matter had failed to reconcile him to humanity’s slipshod methods. He gave another glance down the empty avenue which fell away from the terrace of the Manor towards the gates on the Fernhurst Parva road; then he addressed the dog at his side:

  “If that young man doesn’t put in an appearance soon, old boy, we shan’t get our two rounds before lunch. I can’t think what this generation’s coming to.”

  The dog, gathering from the tone of the remark that the Colonel was wounded but courageous in the face of adversity, wagged his tail mournfully through a small arc. Suddenly, however, he pricked up his ears and gave a short bark. From far down the avenue came the ascending roar of an engine; a motor-cycle, furiously driven, flashed from behind the trees at the turn, skimmed up the slope and stopped beside the terrace.

  “Hullo! Hullo! Colonel,” the rider remarked breezily, “I must apologize for being late and all that; but I forgot to ring up a man before I left home, and I had to swoop into the grocery emporium and ask old man Swaffham to let me breathe a few words through his wire. Hope I haven’t kept you waiting for the golf-bag parade?”

  “No harm done, Jimmy,” his host reassured him.

  With young Leigh’s arrival, the Colonel had forgotten his previous fidgetings. He liked the younger generation, even if, as he regretfully admitted, he did not altogether understand them. Although only in his early fifties, the Colonel in some mysterious way left the impression upon strangers that he was a belated Edwardian who had survived into the Georgian era with all his mild prejudices intact. His social psychology seemed to have become truncated in the early years of the century. When motor-cars came in, he had been abreast of the times and had become a keen driver; but the high-powered motor-cycle appeared too late to secure his approval.

  Golf had come into favour early enough to catch him in its net; and he had laid out in his park a private nine-hole course. He took golf, like everything else, very seriously. Once on the links, his conversation was confined to the putting-greens; and even there it was not abundant. It was, in fact, restricted to two words: “My hole,” if he had been successful; “Your hole,” if fortune went against him. At the eighteenth green he was accustomed to vary this by saying: “Your game,” or “My game,” as the case might be.

  “Come along, Jimmy; we’ve just time for a couple of rounds,” said the Colonel, moving towards the path which led down to the first tee. Then, noticing that his dog was following them, he invited it, in the most friendly tone but with unmistakable firmness, to remain behind.

  “Towser has never learned to be anything but a nuisance on the putting-green,” he explained, half-apologetically.

  “Towser?” mused Jimmy Leigh aloud, “Towser? What sort of a name’s that? I never heard of any dogs called Towser.”

  The Colonel rose to the bait.

  “One of the dogs at Fernhurst Manor has always been called Towser,” he explained with dignity.

  “Oh, I see.” Jimmy assumed the expression of one who suddenly fathoms a mystery. “Just as one of our family has always been called Leigh, eh? A positively coruscating idea. Saves confusion and wear and tear on the brain-cells. When you call for Towser in extremity, you get Towser. Perhaps not the same Towser as you had yesterday, but a sound reliable article with the identical label on the bottle.”

  “You young scoundrels have no respect for tradition,” said the Colonel, with a faint grin. “Your forefathers, Jimmy, were decent country gentlemen; and now you come along—a black-faced mechanic, spending your time in that grubby laboratory you’ve fitted up at the Bungalow, down there. If you dug up the churchyard you’d find most of your ancestors turned in their graves by the thought. . . . By the way, I’ve got one of your new sound-boxes fitted to my gramophone. My congratulations; it’s a wonderful improvement. Voices sound less like Punch and Judy with your fitting.”

  “Overwhelming applause and sound of boots in the gallery. Don’t all shake hands at once. As a matter of fact, it’s not a patch on a new affair I’ve just finished.”

  “Is that the thing I heard about the other day, something like a ray that kills without leaving any marks?”

  Jimmy Leigh assumed a disconcerted expression.

  “Somebody’s been talking. The Secret Out or the Inventor Betrayed, tragedy in one fit. Who can it have been? Concentrate your atten
tion on the name; and without apparatus of any kind or even the assistance of a confederate, I shall now proceed to divulge the artist’s cognomen. . . . It’s coming. . . . I have it! . . . The Reverend Peter Flitterwick, Vicar of Fernhurst Parva. . . . How’s that for mind-reading? The collection will not be taken.”

  “It was Flitterwick, of course,” the Colonel admitted. “But I thought you were pulling his leg, to check his enthusiasm for gossip.”

  “Dear! Dear! Terrible wave of scepticism extending from Iceland to the west coast of Ireland. Indications of secondary doubts farther east. Local patches of disbelief in Lethal Rays will be found in Southern England. Direct by wireless from the Psychological Bureau. I tell you what, sir. I’m giving a practical demonstration tomorrow morning: come along yourself and see what science can do.”