The Ha-Ha Case Page 2

  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.

  Chapter One

  The Girl at the Station

  AS the train glided into the wayside station, Jim Brandon lifted his well-worn suitcase and a shabby leg-of-mutton guncase down from the rack. Through the windows he caught successive glimpses of fresh-painted white palings, trim flwer-beds dripping from a recent shower, a girl’s figure on a broad sweep of gravelled platform, a tiny station-house, a handful of waiting travellers by the overhead bridge, and a ticket-collector at the gate giving egress into the station yard. Then, with something which sounded like a sigh of relief, the engine came to a standstill, leaving him facing a bank of velvety turf bearing the name AMBLEDOWN picked out in ornamental letters.

  He stepped out of his third-class carriage and cast a glance up and down the station, the questing glance of a man who expects a friend to meet him on his arrival. Then a change in his expression betrayed that he had been disappointed.

  For a few moments he waited, as though in hope that the truant would even then put in an appearance. Carriage doors slammed; the engine emitted a diffident whistle; behind his back the train gathered way and puffed out on its farther journey. Five or six passengers who had alighted with him filtered past the ticket-collector and vanished. He found himself left on the platform with one porter and the girl in the leather golf-jacket whom he had noticed as the train came in.

  Evidently his young brother had let him down, or else his premonitory telegram had miscarried. Jim Brandon frowned at finding himself in an awkward fix. Ambledown was the station for Edgehill; but, for all he knew, the estate might be miles away. A heavy taxi-fare would bulk over-large in his meagre budget.

  He decided to consult the porter. Probably there would be some local motor-bus service which would land him in the neighbourhood of Edgehill, wherever it was. But as he picked up his luggage, the problem was solved for him. The girl came along the platform and, after a momentary doubtful inspection of him, she stepped forward and addressed him.

  “Are you Mr. Brandon? I’m sorry I didn’t recognise you straight away, but you’re not in the least like Johnnie. I had to wait till the other passengers cleared out, before I could be sure that it was you.”

  Then, seeing that he was obviously puzzled, she added a word or two in explanation.

  “I’m staying at Edgehill, you know; and when your wire came, I volunteered to meet you with my car. I couldn’t bring Johnnie with me. It’s only a two-seater and it wouldn’t have held three of us on the way back.”

  Jim Brandon’s face cleared. He was there on a delicate mission; and when his brother failed to turn up at the station, he had feared that he was being given the cold shoulder at the very start. It was a relief to find that, after all, Johnnie had not deliberately let him down. A bit off-hand, of course, sending a strange girl along, instead of meeting the train himself. Still, it didn’t necessarily prove that Johnnie resented his intrusion. That was all to the good.

  “Very kind of you to take so much trouble,” he said gratefully. “I was feeling a bit stranded when I found Johnnie hadn’t shown up at the station. You see, I haven’t a notion where Edgehill is, or how one gets to it from here.”

  “It isn’t a day’s run—just a few miles up the road. Will you bring your things along? My car’s outside, in the station yard.”

  Jim Brandon curtly refused the services of the porter, gave up his ticket at the barrier, and followed his guide off the platform. He had his own reasons for taking an interest in the cost of a girl’s clothes, and half-unconsciously he noted the fit of her leather jacket and the cut of her brown tweed skirt. One didn’t get that kind of rig-out for nothing, he reflected. One had to pay for that effective simplicity.

  A little two-seater, very spick-and-span, was standing at the kerb, and Jim Brandon noted that it was not one of the cheaper models.

  “You might strap your things on behind,” the girl suggested. “I’m afraid you’ll have to nurse my golf-bag. There isn’t much room.”

  He disposed of his luggage and took his place beside her, with the golf-bag between his knees. It was market-day in Ambledown; and the car had to crawl through the little town, avoiding frantic sheep, lethargic cows, and suicidal dogs at every turn. He forbore conversation while she threaded her way amongst the country carts and lorries which crowded the High Street. As they emerged from the town she turned to him with a smile.

  “The limit, aren’t they? ‘Grandpa parked his cart in the High Street, time o’ the Crimean War, and what was good enough for Grandpa’s good enough for me nowadays.’ I like that conservative way of looking at things, though it is a bit of a bore at times, of course.”

  Jim Brandon nodded agreement. He had admired her coolness and adroitness in meeting the emergencies of that undisciplined traffic. Evidently she was the sort of girl one could rely on in a tight corner. Not the kind to lose her head or get flustered.

  “Nice little bus,” he said, by way of making conversation. “What can you get out of her?”

  “Johnnie and I came up to Edgehill with a lot of luggage at the back, and we were doing fifty-five most of the way.”

  “Pretty good, that. Johnnie driving?”

  The girl at his elbow laughed gently and shook her head.

  “Johnnie most distinctly not driving. My nerves are fair, Mr. Brandon, but they aren’t good enough for that, I assure you. Once was enough. I’ll never trust him with my car again, after that. I wouldn’t even lend him it to meet you at the station to-day, for fear of what he might do on the road. That’s why I came myself.”

  “Johnnie always was one of the slap-crash brigade,” his brother admitted. “Careless young beggar. He’ll come to grief one of these days if he doesn’t mend his methods. You’re quite right to keep him away from the wheel if you value your car,
Miss . . .”

  “Menteith.”

  Jim Brandon made a gesture acknowledging the information. He shifted his position slightly so that he might covertly study the girl beside him. Brown wavy hair, a short clean-cut nose, a firm but rounded chin: any passable-looking girl might have all these. Her mouth puzzled him. She smiled easily, and even in repose the corners of her lips gave the impression that the smile was not far away. And yet there was nothing vapid in her expression. Jim Brandon found in it something indefinable—mockery, cynicism, a touch of the ironic—which gave her a character of her own. He guessed, easily enough, that Miss Menteith could play the fool if she chose, without ever being the fool she pretended to be.