by Tony Medawar
‘Is there any more of this scientific evidence?’
‘All the evidence which will convict those two is scientific. You recall my request to examine the false Saligny’s fingernails. Clinging to the inside of the nail on the first finger of his right hand was a bit of silk, about a sixteenth of an inch long, scratched from madame’s stocking when he fell. Of course, I could not see it; I did not know it was there. But I trusted to the laboratory to discover anything that might be there. The octopus has eyes, too …’
‘You neglect nothing, do you? … Then all that mummery of reproducing the crime was unnecessary!’
‘Oh, well, I had to have a little personal satisfaction,’ he explained, somewhat apologetically. ‘I am inherently a mountebank. It is our national weakness as constant gunplay is yours. When I can be aided by dummy tile walls, pleasing musical effects, shadowgraphs, and certain actors expertly made up (one with a wax head, which will fall at the application of a tin sword), I cannot resist the temptation to become a disciple of Hollywood. Besides, I am fond of sticking pins in my fellow-mortals to see how they will react … I studied Vautrelle, and I fancied he would break before madame. It was a test …’ He sat a long while silent in the firelight, so motionless that the ash did not fall from his cigar. ‘Examine closely, my friend,’ he said at last, ‘the extremely contained person who never cuts loose; who never indulges in a good, healthy, plebeian brawl; who affects indifference and boredom—that man is the extreme in self-consciousness. He is never sure of himself, and at the climax he will crack. Madame, on the other hand, was the opposite; you recall how she was willing to speak so freely and personally before you, a stranger. I rather imagined she would outlast him. And I was curious about both Golton and Fenelli.’ He chuckled. ‘Again I guessed correctly. The American had nothing on his mind; it scared him to a shadow, and thus he enjoyed it thoroughly. And, at least, it will furnish a better subject for conversation than Yellowstone Park. As for Fenelli, it was almost necessary to escort him home in an ambulance …
‘And now,’ he concluded, reaching over to take the champagne bottle from its cooler, ‘we have finished. I give you a wish, the conclusion of all cases—’
The broad glasses clicked together in the firelight. Then, at Bencolin’s elbow, the telephone rang. The pieces of his overturned glass lay shattered on the hearth, and, as he picked up the ’phone eagerly, the spilled champagne crawled and sizzled about the burning logs.
JOHN DICKSON CARR
John Dickson Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, on 30 November 1906. As a child, he attended Uniontown High School where he took part in several theatre productions. Fired up by his father’s extensive library and inspired by ghost stories he had been told as a boy, Carr’s first short story was published in the school magazine. More stories appeared and, despite being written by a teenager, all are immensely enjoyable. After school and in the holidays he hung around the offices of the Uniontown Daily Herald, which his father had at one time edited. He managed to secure ad hoc employment reviewing sporting events and theatre as well as what would now be styled an op-ed, in which he expressed sometimes controversial opinions on anything from politics to spiritualism, even the Darwinian theory of evolution.
Journalism and the pressure to meet deadlines gave Carr invaluable experience but his real love was storytelling. From Uniontown High School he went to the Hill, where he wrote detective stories and ghost stories, an adventure serial and essays on political themes like the value of supranational leadership through the League of Nations. On leaving the Hill, Carr went up to Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where unsurprisingly he quickly began writing for the college magazine—mysteries, historical romances, ghost stories, poetry and humorous stories, including one that advocated raising babies on a diet of beer. He was soon appointed editor of The Haverfordian and sat on the board of Snooze, the college humour magazine.
In the autumn of 1926, Carr created the character of Henri Bencolin—a French investigator who owes something to Aristide Valentin, the anti-companion of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown—who would appear in several novels and short stories. In the early 1930s, Carr created his best-known character, Dr Gideon Fell, whose intellect and physique were inspired by Chesterton himself. Over the next thirty-five years Fell would appear in short stories, radio plays and twenty-three novels confronting Carr’s hallmark mystery, the impossible crime: murder behind locked doors, in the middle of a snowy street or in plain view of spectators when no murderer can be seen; death in the centre of an unmarked tennis court, on top of an inaccessible tower or during a séance when everyone in the room is holding hands. Carr’s ingenuity was boundless.
Carr also started writing under other names. As ‘Carter Dickson’, the best known of his pseudonyms, he created the ebullient and eccentric British peer Sir Henry Merrivale, known to one and all as ‘H.M.’, who was based on Carr’s father but also has something in common with Sherlock Holmes’ brother, the intelligent if indolent Mycroft Holmes. The Merrivale mysteries are also concerned with impossible crimes, although the problems are, if anything, even more incredible than those encountered by Dr Fell: in one book someone disappears after diving into a swimming pool; in another, a man is apparently ejected from a roof by invisible hands; victims are shot or stabbed within locked rooms or found clubbed to death within a building that is surrounded by unbroken snow. ‘H.M.’ appears in twenty novels and a few Merrivale short stories.
As well as several standalone novels, Carr collaborated on one mystery with his friend John Street, who wrote as ‘John Rhode’, whom Carr used as the basis for another detective, Colonel March of The Department of Queer Complaints (1940). Carr was passionate about history, which led to The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) in which he investigated a crime that had taken place almost 300 years earlier, the mysterious stabbing of a magistrate close to Carr’s London home.
In 1939, Carr joined the British Broadcasting Corporation, primarily to write morale-boosting propaganda plays for the radio like Britain Shall Not Burn and Gun-site Girl, to highlight bad behaviour at home in docu-dramas such as Black Market or to expose Nazi atrocities in thrilling dramas like Starvation in Greece. Of course he also wrote mysteries, including one with an extraordinary ‘least likely suspect’ solution that Agatha Christie herself would have envied. Carr loved writing for radio and he has a good claim to be the most important author of Golden Age radio mysteries. He is certainly the only person to do so on both sides of the Atlantic, with plays in two major, long-running series—Suspense in the US and Appointment with Fear in the UK. Carr also created the series Cabin B-13, scripts from which are to be published by Crippen and Landru. While working for the BBC, as well as writing original plays and adapting his own short stories, Carr adapted the work of some of the writers who had most influenced him, including that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (whose biography he wrote in later years), along with a series of pastiche adventures, The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954), co-authored with Conan Doyle’s son Adrian.
After the Second World War, Carr turned to historical mysteries as a means of escaping post-war austerity, including the excellent The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Fire, Burn! (1957). In 1958 Carr and his wife left Britain for America, where they set up home near Fred Dannay—half of the ‘Ellery Queen’ partnership—and the magician Clayton Rawson. Both were luminaries of the Mystery Writers of America, of which Carr had been made President in 1949 and was the only person to hold that position as well as Secretary of the Detection Club in Britain. Carr continued to write and he also undertook a lecture tour, but his health was beginning to decline and in the spring of 1963 he suffered a stroke, which paralysed his left side. Even after this he did not stop writing, now using only one hand, although his later novels do not compare well to the superbly plotted mysteries he produced in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. For several years Carr also reviewed books for Harper’s and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He died of lung cancer on 27 February 1977.
Grand Guignol, the only uncollected novella to feature Henri Bencolin, was first published in The Haverfordian in March and April 1929. It was expanded by Carr into his first novel It Walks by Night (1930).
A KNOTTY PROBLEM
Ngaio Marsh
CHARACTERS
DR BURNLEY … President of the Auckland Society of Arts.
HAROLD TILLET … businessman and philanthropist.
LADY RUBY KERR-BATES … an art lover.
BEATRICE PAGE … an art teacher.
BOB HEMMINGS … an artist.
DENNIS RAYBURN … an artist.
VIOLET CROSS … an art lover.
BRADLEY CREWES … Director of the Harold Tillet Gallery.
BIDDY THORNTON … secretary to Mr Crewes.
JILL WALKER … an art student.
MRS BURNLEY … the president’s wife.
NZBC TELEVISION PRESENTER.
NZBC TELEVISION INTERVIEWER.
A BARMAN.
A WAITER.
Police:
SUPERINTENDENT RODERICK ALLEYN … Scotland Yard.
SUPERINTENDENT DAWSON … Auckland Police.
INSPECTOR FRAMPTON … Auckland Police.
OTHER POLICE OFFICERS.
PART ONE
TEASER: THE GALLERY
(In this preview of Scene 14, the opening of the exhibition at the Harold Tillet Gallery is underway. The gallery is orderly. All the pictures are in place and a crowd of 25 people is listening to DR BURNLEY’s speech. During his speech we see HAROLD TILLET, a big aggressive businessman, looking very tense; RUBY, an infinitely well-dressed social lady, looking worried; BEATRICE PAGE, cool middle-aged and rather antiseptic; BOB HEMMINGS with long hair and a dour air of uncooperation; DENNIS RAYBURN, the artist on show, nervous, and JILL WALKER, concerned about Dennis; VIOLET CROSS, overdressed and vacantly pixilated is listening with a rapt attention. During the speech we cut to a female hand that slips into a masculine hand and squeezes it, then the masculine hand withdraws and we pan up to see that it was Dennis who did not respond and Jill who made the gesture.
DR BURNLEY: This building will be a magnificent addition to the Auckland art world and the man behind it deserves nothing but praise for his foresight, understanding and generosity. Mr Tillet, we are all extremely indebted to you.
(Applause)
I know only a little about the artist whose work has been chosen to open this gallery. But a glance has shown that he—er—has a talent worthy of careful study. Mr Rayburn, young as he is, is a painter of great promise.
(Applause)
He has in fact completed a portrait of Mr Tillet which will hang in the foyer of this gallery as a reminder of the man who made it all possible and which I have much pleasure in unveiling.
(Applause. He takes the string and pulls. It doesn’t work. He pulls again. There is an awkward laugh and giggle. Bradley bounds forward and tries to pull the string)
Oh dear, what do you do at a launching when the champagne bottle doesn’t break?
(General light laughter. Bradley takes out a knife and cuts the string leaving the knot intact. Burnley takes hold of the cut strings)
BRADLEY: I can’t understand it. It worked perfectly last night. It’s most embarrassing.
BURNLEY: Our thanks to Mr Tillet and best wishes for the gallery’s success.
(Burnley lets the cloth drop. We do not see the picture but we see the horrified reactions of Dennis, Jill, Ruby, Violet, Bradley, the ‘set’ look of Beatrice, Bob’s laughter, climaxing in:)
HAROLD: My God!
(Fade to black. Main credits.)
SCENE 1: FILMED INSERT
(On a TV screen, Alleyn is being interviewed at Mangere Airport, Auckland. for ‘Town and Around’[1])
INTERVIEWER: This is not the first time you’ve been to New Zealand is it, Mr Alleyn?
ALLEYN: No. I’ve been here twice before.
INTERVIEWER: And on each occasion you were caught up in cases?
ALLEYN: As it happened—yes.
INTERVIEWER: And this time?
ALLEYN: This time it’s strictly a holiday. I’m staying with friends and am hoping for a little fishing at Taupo. That’s all.
FRONTMAN: That was my colleague talking to Detective-Superintendent Roderick Alleyn at Mangere Airport this morning.
(Pull back from the screen to reveal:)
SCENE 2: DRAWING-ROOM
(Lady Ruby Kerr-Bates’ house, evening. Ruby turns off the TV set. Her drawing-room is expensively designed, vogue, modern, with elegant furniture, mostly reproductions. The pictures on the wall are ‘acceptable’—representational. Alleyn, Dr Burnley, his wife and Harold Tillet are having pre-dinner drinks. Ruby has a ‘Bloody Mary’)
RUBY: Isn’t it exciting having a celebrity to dinner?
DR BURNLEY: I thought you’d enjoy meeting Mr Alleyn, Ruby.
RUBY: Indeed, yes. Do you often go on television, Mr Alleyn?
ALLEYN: Thank the Lord, no. A terrifying experience.
RUBY: Oh, but you were so good—so natural. You’ll have to give Harold a few tips.
HAROLD: Me! Why?
RUBY: I’m sure they’ll want to interview you. It’s not every day somebody builds a new art gallery.
HAROLD: I’d break the cameras.
RUBY: (laughing) Oh, go on. (To Alleyn) It’s quite a new departure for Harold. There was an article in the paper the other day—‘Christmas Card King Turns Art Patron’. Harold didn’t like it at all, did you dear?
HAROLD: Young reporter with hair like seaweed wanted to know what I thought about pop art and spatial conflicts, for God’s sake. I told him straight—I might have built an art gallery but that didn’t mean I was going Bohemian. Not that it means much. Everybody knows Ruby bullied me into it.
RUBY: Bullied indeed. You make me sound like an ogre—or is it ogress?
HAROLD: Would you believe witch?
RUBY: (uncertain how to interpret Harold’s remark) Oh dear. (To Alleyn) The opening’s tomorrow. You must come. Everybody will be there. Doctor Burnley’s doing the honours.
DR BURNLEY: Yes, and I haven’t prepared a word. I hope it’ll come as a nice surprise—to all of us!
RUBY: I’m sure you’ll do it beautifully. And you’ll have plenty to talk about. It’s a lovely gallery. Harold never does anything by halves. He’s even brought a director over from Sydney to run it.
SCENE 3: THE GALLERY
(The Harold Tillet Gallery is new, fresh, well designed, with attractive textured walls and a number of wooden ‘sculptures’ designed to be permanent features. Quite a lot of bustle—pictures being hung, piles of packing, etc. There are two or three young people working who don’t interest us personally. The main people are the director, BRADLEY CREWES, a neat young man, precise to the point of being finicky. At the moment his striped shirt-sleeves are rolled up and he is wearing a patterned waistcoat and well-pressed suit trousers. We also see his neat, efficient young secretary, BIDDY THORNTON, and BOB HEMMINGS who is wearing jeans and a scruffy jersey and has his hair long. Bob and Biddy are helping to hang the pictures. Bradley is sorting through a small pile of canvasses. The work is almost finished)
BRADLEY: (looking at a very ordinary landscape) What the hell’s this? It’s not even numbered.
BOB: It’s new. I brought it from the flat. Dennis wants it hung.
BRADLEY: Where, for God’s sake?
BIDDY: With the other landscapes?
BRADLEY: What the hell does he think he’s doing? A new gallery—the full opening champagne jazz and what are we offering? A first exhibition by an unknown artist who doesn’t know the difference between pale puce and clockwork orange. He’s got something, I’ll give him that, but can you see it for the junk?
BOB: Could you say he’s changed his style?
BRADLEY: Changed his style! Bob, look at that. It’s fine—a first class piece of work. When I saw it I took it for granted they’d all be at that level. But look at that! It’s not even Kandy Krunch! Thi
s is not an exhibition—it’s a rag bag.
BOB: Yeah. Ruby Kerr-Bates can be very persuasive. As I well know.
BRADLEY: You mean she’s behind the Pretty Peep?
BOB: Well, Dennis didn’t do any pop stuff until Ruby started raving on about exhibitions.
BRADLEY: My God! The critics’ll crucify us.
BIDDY: I don’t know. They could say it’s promising.
BRADLEY: And they could say it’s crap. What possessed me to take this job? Don’t answer—money! Why is my life so full of wrong decisions? (He looks back at the landscape) And now this: It’s too much! I give up! He can supervise his own hanging. (Realises) What a delicious thought! Bob, where the hell is Dennis? You’d think an artist would take some interest in his first exhibition.
SCENE 4: THE STUDIO
(Dennis Rayburn lives in a scruffy old house converted to flats. A large window makes the room useful as a studio. The furniture is pretty threadbare and the wall is littered with unframed sketches and paintings. A major picture—the portrait—is propped on an easel. The door opens. Jill Walker comes in. She is young, attractive, an art student. She is surprised to see Dennis)
JILL: Hullo.
DENNIS: Jill! How marvellous!
JILL: (still at doorway holding up a wrapped bottle with a card on it) It’s a good luck present. I was going to leave it. I thought you’d be at the gallery.
DENNIS: No. Leave it to the experts. (He kisses her, takes the bottle) Thanks. Come in.
JILL: Why the glad rags? (They move into the room)
DENNIS: Going to Ruby’s for dinner. I’m late already.
JILL: I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a dinner suit.
