“O.K., O.K., if that’s how you want it,” Cy said, and faced the big man, knife in hand.
By this time Bobby was not much more than a hundred yards away, running quickly, but with caution. He knew the odds against him were heavy; and that his best, perhaps his only, chance was to take the other two unawares. They, intent upon each other, were still unconscious of his approach. Now Tiny rushed and Cy’s knife flashed, flashed and failed. For, either by good luck or skill, or possibly because Cy’s nerve faltered under the threat and menace of that tremendous onslaught, and thus the thrust of the knife came less swiftly and less surely than usual, Tiny managed to catch it on the sleeve of his coat, and so by a sudden twist, wrench the weapon from Cy’s grasp.
Next moment Cy was taken in Tiny’s huge grip, and he screamed as he felt himself lifted bodily high into the air, held there helpless.
Bobby was quite close now. He shouted:
“Stop that, Tiny! Stop it.”
Tiny heard. He turned his head, staring from his wild and blood-shot eyes. He said loudly, surprised, still holding Cy helpless above his head:
“Oh, you,” he said, and flung Cy sprawling down. “Now I can swing for you, as well,” he said and made a rush.
Bobby, who had no intention of letting himself be caught in that huge and bear-like grip, stepped swiftly to one side, and twice hit out with all his force as Tiny went lumbering by. They were good blows, well aimed, well timed. Before them, most men would have gone down, but Tiny seemed hardly to notice them. He turned and came running back, and this time Bobby could not quite avoid him, but did check him with a blow that had all his weight behind it, and that landed full on Tiny’s chin. It brought him to a standstill for the moment, so that again Bobby had time to step aside, and, from the corner of his eye, to see that Cy was on his feet once more and again had his knife in his hand.
Equal odds, Bobby thought, grimly enough, on which of them Cy chose to use it first. Or would he simply try to make his escape while the other two fought it out? But escape was a thing Bobby did not mean should happen; and, with a sudden sideways leap, he brought himself face to face with Cy, leaving the slow-thinking Tiny bewildered by his sudden disappearance. Again Cy’s knife flashed, again it failed, for that quick sideways leap had surprised Cy, too, taking him unawares, and allowing Bobby, by some tiny fraction of a second, to get his blow in first, though a blow too hasty, neither well timed nor well aimed. Yet it was sufficient to make Cy’s thrust ineffectual, and now upon the two of them came Tiny, running and roaring. His great arms were swinging, his tongue hung out and on his lips specks of foam had gathered. From a little distance came the sound of a man shouting, and then, incongruously, came flying through the air a rolled umbrella. It struck Tiny full in the face, but he took no notice, impervious in his massive strength to any but the most massive blows. Yet possibly it did serve to halt his rush for some imperceptible moment of time. Bobby was intent on Cy, anticipating a fresh knife-thrust or, it might be, the deadly trick of the thrown knife. Cy was intent on Bobby, watching him, hesitating between thrust and throw. Before he could decide—for all this was so nearly simultaneous it was quite impossible to distinguish the sequence of events—Tiny was upon him, towering above them both, above Bobby’s clear six foot as over Cy’s smaller, lighter form. Bobby had just time to leap aside, hitting out as he did so, but with no apparent effect, though afterwards he found his knuckles bruised and bleeding. Cy, less alert, less ready, failed to avoid Tiny’s grip. Once again he felt himself caught in it, once again he felt himself swung high in the air, as though a father in play were lifting his laughing child high up above the ground.
For a moment, for less than a moment, for less than the tenth of a second, though to Bobby, as he reeled backwards and steadied himself, it seemed like the passage of interminable time, they remained thus—Cy held up high in the air, head down, legs sprawling upwards; Bobby the yard or two away that he had leaped aside to avoid that final, elephantine rush of Tiny’s; farther off, Ford stopping in his run towards them to stare at that tremendous effort of Tiny’s strength, holding Cy up there in mid air at the full stretch of his arms.
Then Tiny shouted aloud, in wild, fierce exultation, and, lifting Cy even higher, tossed him away, as you might a discarded cigarette packet.
Cy crashed against a tree by the roadside and fell and lay huddled at its foot. Ford began to run again. Bobby stood still, alert and watching. He was not sure, but he thought that once more he had seen Cy’s knife, helpless in mid air as Cy had seemed, flash and fall, and this time not in vain. Tiny stood very still, utterly motionless. Then very slowly, while Bobby still watched, while Ford still ran, Tiny began as it were to crumble, to fall in upon himself, till he, too, like Cy, lay in a huddled, dreadful, helpless heap.
Bobby went to him. Ford, panting heavily, came up. Bobby said:
“Well, that’s over. A near thing, but it’s over.” He, too, was breathing heavily. He said: “While Tiny held Cy up like that, in the air, head down, Cy managed to strike down to push his knife into the back of Tiny’s neck.”
He bent over the prostrate man. The knife had gone deep. There was nothing to be done. Tiny opened his eyes.
“I shan’t swing now,” he said, and a rush of blood choked him so that he died.
“There’s his epitaph,” Ford said. “He won’t swing now.”
Bobby went across to where Cy lay. He was unconscious, though he was moaning slightly and the position in which he lay was twisted and unnatural. Bobby bent over him, and Ford said:
“We’ve got him, anyhow.”
But Bobby said:
“Looks to me as if his back was hurt pretty badly. I doubt if he’ll ever come to trial. He may go on living a year or two.”
“Pity to let him,” Ford said, and looked as if he would have small hesitation in cutting very short that hypothetical year or two.
“You hurry off and get help,” Bobby told him. “Doctor, an ambulance. Hurry up. Don’t forget that umbrella of yours.”
“Only thing I could think of,” Ford said apologetically.
“Oh, it helped,” Bobby said. “Distracted attention, and that meant a good deal just then. Hurry up. I must see if Ted Wyllie and the girl are all right. These two can wait. They won’t move, either of them; but I wonder what’s become of Gladys. I hope she isn’t up to any mischief,” he added, faintly uneasy.
“No fear of that, sir,” Ford answered. “It was seeing her made me late. It thought it might be the other girl wandering off, so I went chasing after her till I saw who it was. She was collapsed when I got to her. She’s pretty bad. Face cut open and her nose so flat it looks like it was broken. You couldn’t want worse for her, even if it’s no more than she deserved.”
Bobby, inclined to agree with this remark, observed that the ambulance could pick her up, too, when it arrived. Then he and Ford separated, Ford hurrying away on his errand, Bobby to find Ted Wyllie and Betty and to tell them it was now all over and for them all was well.
. . . . .
So far as the public was concerned the deaths of Tiny Garden and of Ada Day—it had to be assumed that that was her real name—were put down simply to a gang feud. At the adjourned inquest on old Mr Smith a verdict of murder against ‘persons unknown’ was returned, though the police let it be understood that the questioning of Tiny Garden, on the basis of information by the murdered Ada, had been contemplated. As Bobby had thought would be likely, Cy never came to trial. His spine had been very seriously injured, and he did not live long. Gladys was allowed to disappear. There seemed little point in prosecuting one who had already suffered so terrible a punishment in the disfigurement for life that had been inflicted on her. Nor was it thought desirable to proceed against any of the others. Mrs Day; her son, known as ‘Sunday’; Cy’s associate, Bill Bright; and the woman who had called herself Gladys’s aunt were all allowed to go free. It would not have been easy to formulate against any of them a charge on which conviction would have
been certain. Little direct evidence, for instance, to prove that ‘Sunday’ had taken part in the murder of Mr Smith, and the women could all have argued that they had had no real knowledge of what was going on, and had taken in it no real part. Medical opinion, too, protested strongly against the risks involved in putting, after all she had gone through, Betty into the witness-box, now that she was recovering so well at Bournemouth her mental poise and equilibrium. And again there was the official doubt as to whether a jury could be asked to accept her evidence.
“She would be asked if she could distinguish between her dreams and reality,” it was said, “and that would settle it with the jury. Imagine the average jury being asked to convict any one on the strength of dreams.”
So far as legal proceedings therefore were concerned, it was decided that the whole matter must be considered closed.
Fortunately Ted Wyllie was an exceedingly healthy young man, and though his wound had been serious, he made a quick and complete recovery—and Mrs Wyllie took exceedingly good care that he, too, should spend the whole period of convalescence at Bournemouth. Nor was it so very long before Olive was able to show Bobby in the paper an announcement of the engagement of Mr Edward Wyllie to Miss Elizabeth Smith. Then two or three days later the two of them appeared at Bobby’s flat, explaining rather shyly that they both wanted to say ‘Thank you’ to Bobby. So Bobby explained that he had his job to do, that he was paid to do it, though on a wholly inadequate scale, and that was all there was to it. But what about that paragraph he had seen in the papers about Mr Smith’s will?
“Oh, yes, isn’t it lucky?” Betty answered, beaming. “Mr Moon says it’s no good, because it isn’t clear who is meant. That poor girl who got killed wasn’t his niece, so it can’t be her, because she wasn’t any relation at all, and it can’t be me, because it says ‘in consideration of his niece’s kindness in giving up her employment in Canada to look after him and the care and attention shown him,’ and though I’m his niece I didn’t do that, so Mr Moon says the consideration fails, and I can’t claim, and all the money goes under an earlier will to some musty old museum that used to help him about his furniture collecting.”
“Well, if that’s your idea of luck,” Bobby said.
“Well, you see,” she explained, “the museum people are giving me quite a lot of what’s left after they’ve paid all the taxes they have to, and Ted says he doesn’t mind that so much. Ted kept saying he wouldn’t have me—not with all that money, wouldn’t touch me with a barge-pole.”
“Oh, come, I say, draw it mild, Betty,” Ted protested. “I never said anything like that.”
“It was what you meant,” Betty told him severely, “and I think it was most awfully rude. You just simply can’t imagine, Mr Owen, how frightfully obstinate and stupid Ted can be when he tries.”
“Oh, can’t I?” Bobby exclaimed, with bitter memories surging up in his mind. “I can congratulate him on his good luck, which is a lot more than he deserves, but I don’t know about you. Still, so long as you realize how frightfully obstinate and pig-headed and stupid he can be, I suppose it’s all right.”
“Oh, come, I say, draw it mild,” protested Ted again.
“Oh, I do,” Betty declared earnestly; “but then, he’s a man, and so he can’t help it, can he? Because men are always like that, aren’t they? Ask your wife.”
E.R. PUNSHON – CRIME FICTION REVIEWER
E.R. Punshon was for many years a reviewer of crime fiction for the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. The following six reviews by Punshon were published in The Guardian between 1938 and 1939.
Appointment with Death, Agatha Christie (1938)
The End of Andrew Harrison, Freeman Wills Crofts (1938)
Lament for a Maker, Michael Innes (1938)
The Four of Hearts, Ellery Queen (1939)
Death of his Uncle, C. H. B. Kitchin (1939)
The Reader Is Warned, Carter Dickson (John Dickson Carr) (1939)
Appointment with Death
by Agatha Christie
The End of Andrew Harrison
Freeman Wills Crofts
27 May 1938
A reproach is occasionally made that the detective novel is lacking in human values, and indeed at times there is truth in this, for some authors wish to offer and some readers prefer to accept a problem of which the ingenuity is as distant and aloof as the terms of a mathematical equation.
Yet in fact no class of fiction should be more closely concerned with human relationships than the detective novel, dealing as it does with that crisis of the mind and spirit which leads to the extremity of murder. One reason for the leading position won by Mrs. Agatha Christie is that she deals not merely with the mechanics of crime but treats also psychological problems of universal interest. In “Appointment with Death” she tells of a family entirely under the influence of one of its members, a woman of such dominating personality that those around her have almost lost the power of independent thought. But their tyrant makes the mistake of taking them abroad, and in new surroundings the seeds of rebellion are sown. Will they, or any of them, take actions to free themselves? Easy enough, perhaps, for one or other to break away, but will not such rebellion intensify the bondage of those left behind? Is, in fact, any solution possible except the death of the tyrant; and when that death occurs, was one of them guilty of the murder? The reader hopes not, for all have been drawn as sympathetic, deeply tried characters. There is a young woman doctor, too, a spectator hot with indignation; there is the French psychologist who knows that for one of the sufferers at least it is a question of more than life or death, since sanity is in the balance. There are others, too, and above all, Poirot, resolute that never must murder remain unhidden. For ingenuity of plot and construction, unexpectedness of dénouement, subtlety of characterization, and picturesqueness of background “Appointment with Death” may take rank among the best of Mrs. Christie’s tales.
* * *
Mr. Freeman Wills Crofts, equally well known and successful, pursues a different technique. He excels above all in ingenuity and in conveying the thrill and passion of the hunt as inch by inch the trail is followed until at last the truth is reached. It might be thought there would be tedium in the long, quiet process of addition and subtraction by which the essential facts are put together, the unimportant eliminated, but presently the slow, almost mathematical procedure changes as it were into a multiplication of excitement as the true solution begins to appear. In Mr. Crofts’s new book, “The End of Andrew Harrison,” the story deals with the world of high finance and with the odd things that happen therein, with the death of a millionaire found murdered in a houseboat on the Thames in circumstances that must have passed for suicide had not Inspector French noticed just the one simple point the culprit overlooked. Then follows the long, slow chase, checked here, succeeding there, uncovering many things, till at last the guilt is made plain. The book is one that shows at its best Mr. Crofts’s remarkable and distinctive talent.
Lament for a Maker
by Michael Innes
1 July 1938
It is the quaint habit of librarians to divide their books into two classes, fiction and serious—Mr. [Charles] Morgan’s “The Fountain,” for instance as fiction and “Lives of Light Ladies of France” as serious. In the same way a superstition exists that fiction itself may be divided into two classes, “serious” fiction and detective stories, and indeed only the other day a broadcast referred to the borderland between “literature” and the detective tale as though the latter were in some way of necessity excluded from consideration as “literature.”
Obviously, in the higher sense of the word, little current fiction, few of the day’s books for that matter, can lay claim to be “literature,” but the notion that a detective novel is by its nature inferior is merely a specially silly instance of attaching a label and then using that label to judge by. But since some such idea does seem to exist, the warmest of welcomes is due to Mr. Innes’s “Lament for a Maker,
” which has at least a good claim to be “literature,” is at least as worthy of the attention of the intelligent reader as any piece of fiction published for many a long day. It is remarkable for strong and clear characterisation and for power of narrative as well as for those distinctive qualities of the detection tale: suspense and mystery logically developed to a reasonable conclusion. The book gives, too, the somewhat rare pleasure of seeing words treated with a fine sensibility, and there is in addition both humour and that agreeable flavor of scholarship given to a book when there is felt to be behind it a background of culture and knowledge.
The story has its faults: the opening is too long—even too Scottish—and Mr. Innes depends to much upon coincidence and on such base mechanical tricks as conversations overheard to carry on his tale, so that at times the situations seem to be built up artificially instead of arising, as they should, from the natural flow of the narrative. Few readers, however, will forget the portrait of the aged “sutor” or the picture drawn of the old laird, aloof in his solitary castle, as a man driven by the whips of the pursuing fates. In contrast there are the sketches of quiet Scottish village life, with its small, everyday excitements. Comparisons are not only odious, they are useless; but it may at least be said that, as there is one glory of Sayers and another of Crofts, so now there is a glory of Michael Innes.
The Four of Hearts
Ellery Queen
9 May 1939
In every form of fiction, in every work of art for that matter, a primary difficulty is always that of keeping even the balance of general composition. In especial the detective novelist must beware lest his main ingredient, the problem, does not play Aaron’s rod and swallow up all those other ingredients that make for a good story.
It is a point that Mr. Ellery Queen, with all his skill in problem-making, seldom forgets, and in his new novel “The Four of Hearts” he stages the problem he offers for our solution against the always fascinating background of Hollywood. Two of the best-known Hollywood stars are to be married in reconciliation of an ancient stage vendetta. They begin to get mysterious warnings, they leave for their honeymoon on an aeroplane in the best Hollywood tradition of publicity and “ballyhoo,” and are somehow poisoned in mid-air. There seems to be no motive, no explanation. The son of one victim, the daughter of the other, agree in their turn to marry; begin, too, to receive mysterious warnings, and thence ensues a strange and exciting climax in the air. The reader, if he is as shrewd an observer and logical a thinker as is Mr. Ellery Queen, can solve the problem equally promptly, but one imagines comparatively few will so succeed. Yet the argument is clear, simple, and logical. Mr. Queen has the great gift of inventing a fantastic, almost impossible, sequence of events and then providing a perfectly reasonable explanation.
The Secret Search: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 25
