The Castleford Conundrum Read online

  In newspaper reviews both Dorothy L. Sayers and ‘Francis Iles’ (crime novelist Anthony Berkeley Cox) highly praised this latest mystery by ‘The Clever Mr Connington’, as he was now dubbed on book jackets by his new English publisher, Hodder & Stoughton. Sayers particularly noted the effective characterisation in The Ha-Ha Case: ‘There is no need to say that Mr Connington has given us a sound and interesting plot, very carefully and ingeniously worked out. In addition, there are the three portraits of the three brothers, cleverly and rather subtly characterised, of the [governess], and of Inspector Hinton, whose admirable qualities are counteracted by that besetting sin of the man who has made his own way: a jealousy of delegating responsibility.’ The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement detected signs that the sardonic Sir Clinton Driffield had begun mellowing with age: ‘Those who have never really liked Sir Clinton’s perhaps excessively soldierly manner will be surprised to find that he makes his discovery not only by the pure light of intelligence, but partly as a reward for amiability and tact, qualities in which the Inspector [Hinton] was strikingly deficient.’ This is true enough, although the classic Sir Clinton emerges a number of times in the novel, as in his subtly sarcastic recurrent backhanded praise of Inspector Hinton: ‘He writes a first class report.’

  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: McFarla
nd, 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 the 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.

  Chapter One

  The First Camp

  As Philip Castleford came down the broad stairs, a faint burst of laughter reached him through the closed door of the drawing room. At the sound of his wife’s shrill titter rising above the bass of the two men’s voices, he winced and gave vent to his spleen in an ejaculation, all the more vehement because it was uttered under his breath.

  “Damn those people!”

  In that concise imprecation he included his wife, the two brothers of her first husband, and her companion, Constance Lindfield. He hesitated for a moment at the foot of the stair, trying to brace himself to face that hostile group; but his mental conflict was a pure make-believe, like a stage-fight with its foregone conclusion. In a weak attempt to keep up his self-respect he pretended that he was considering whether to join the others or not, though all the while he knew that he could not force himself to enter the drawing-room that night.

  The Glencaple brothers’ visits were never pleasant to him, but that night’s dinner had been even worse than usual. He had sat at the head of the table, nominally the master of the house but almost totally ignored by everybody. When he tried to join in the general talk, a cool glance and a monosyllabic reply was the best he got; someone else cut in with a fresh topic; and he was left out in the cold. Without being definitely offensive, they had made it quite plain that they weren’t interested in anything he had to say. A child forcing itself into a conversation between adults might have been disposed of in much the same manner. It wasn’t exactly snubbing, but it came to much the same thing in its results.

  His daughter had come off rather better, which was always something to be thankful for. Kenneth Glencaple, turning his red face and stolid eyes upon her from time to time, had flung isolated sentences across the table, enough to recognise Hilary’s existence without encouraging her to talk freely. Laurence Glencaple had been a shade more considerate. In his faintly cynical way he had made some attempt to draw her out; but whenever she spoke more than a sentence or two, her stepmother or Constance Lindfield had skilfully edged her out of the talk and turned the current into some fresh channel.

  Most galling of all to Castleford, during that dinner, was the knowledge that the very bread he ate was paid for with Glencaple money and that the two brothers never forgot the fact. His wife had been the widow of the third Glencaple, the rich one, and now enjoyed his whole fortune. Naturally enough, a country doctor like Laurence or a struggling business man like Kenneth would be jealous of a stranger—“and one of these damned out-at-elbows artists, too, of all things”—established in their brother’s stead and sharing in the income which he had left.

  He might have got over that, if there had been any common ground between him and them; but they seemed to take pains to prove that there was none. Over their coffee that night, after the women had left the room, the two brothers had discussed bridge (which he detested), stock exchange quotations (in which he took no interest), and some acquaintances of theirs (whom he had never met). Tacitly he was shut out from their confabulation. In their eyes he was not the host, though he sat at the head of the table; and they took no pains to hide their view of his position.

  When they rose to pass into the drawing-room, he had left them and gone upstairs, making the feeble excuse that he had forgotten something or other that he needed. They hadn’t waited for him—just as he expected. He could take refuge in his study, if he chose, for no one would miss him.

  While he was still hesitating over that foregone conclusion, with his eyes fixed on the closed door of the drawing-room, he heard a light step on the stairs above. A graceful, fair-haired girl came down, carrying some sewing in her hands. Castleford moved aside to let her pass.

  “Are you going into the drawing-room, Hilary?” he asked as she reached his side.

  His daughter’s tone, in her reply, was that of one discussing a purely impersonal question.

  “I don’t think I’m wanted there.”

  Castleford could well believe that. Hilary, at twenty, was apt to draw men’s attention away from her stepmother. On her side, the rivalry was quite unconscious; but Winifred, fifteen years older, preferred not to risk comparisons when they could be avoided. Nothing definite was ever said, but Hilary knew very well that her stepmother was best pleased if she slipped away on some pretext when male visitors were about. Winifred wanted men to talk to her, not to waste time on her stepdaughter.

  The interruption had given Castleford time to find the excuse which was
to salve his self-esteem. After all, his wife and the Glencaples were a sort of family party. It was reasonable enough to leave them to themselves, in case they might want to discuss any Glencaple affairs.

  In turning towards the study, Hilary caught sight of something lying on the hall table.

  “That’s Dr. Glencaple’s bag, isn’t it?” she asked carelessly as she passed. “He might have taken it with him to the cloak-room when he came in.”

  “I suppose he wanted to have it handy,” her father suggested. “I expect he’s brought a fresh supply of insulin tonight. The last lot’s almost exhausted.”

  Laurence Glencaple had certainly made a success of Winifred’s case with that stuff, he reflected. He had got her practically back to normal, apparently, barring the strict dieting and the substitution of saccharin for sugar in her tea and coffee. It was hardly surprising that she swore by him. That gave him a pull with her. Castleford made a wry face as he thought of it. He could guess well enough how that pull was being exerted, just then. His wife had no knack of concealing her thoughts; and from remarks which she dropped now and again, it was easy to divine the sapping and mining which the Glencaple brothers were doing in order to induce her to alter her will.

  Castleford wondered how much his daughter saw of these things. There was nothing of the sphinx about Hilary; and yet he could never be sure what she was thinking about or how much she noticed. She had an air of watchful reserve, always, when her stepmother was present. He had shirked telling his daughter what his exact position was. Occasionally she rebelled against some edict of her stepmother’s, and for the sake of peace he had to make an appeal to her on personal grounds. “Do it on my account, please. I don’t want a row.” Hilary was fond of him and had hitherto given in without difficulty; but sooner or later, now she was grown up, that explanation would have to come.