Murder Will Speak

by J. J. Connington

  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.

  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 A
lfred 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 Mice Will Play

  SITTING at his absent employer’s desk, the chief clerk brought the telephone nearer to hand and dialled a number.

  “Mr. Hyson speaking,” he explained. “Can I speak to the nurse for a moment, please? What’s her name? Spencer? Thanks.”

  After a little delay, he heard a fresh voice.

  “Mr. Hyson? This is Nurse Spencer speaking. I suppose you want to know how Mr. Lockhurst’s going on?”

  “Sorry to trouble you, Nurse. Naturally we’re anxious about him.”

  “He’s doing very well,” Nurse Spencer assured him. “There’s been no recurrence of pain since the first attack, not so much as a twinge. He can breathe quite easily. Did Dr. Willoughby tell you about the electrocardiogram? It’s quite satisfactory.”

  “No likelihood of a second attack, is there?”

  “Well . . .” Nurse Spencer’s tone was cautious. “You can’t predict definitely, in cases of this sort. But so far as one can see, there aren’t any grounds for expecting further trouble at the moment. He seems to have stood the shock very well. His pulse is all right and his blood-pressure isn’t much off normal.”

  “Suppose you’re forbidding him to do much?”

  “Oh, well, he can read if he wants to; and perhaps they’ll let him smoke in moderation after a day or two if he goes on well. He’s a very good patient: does exactly as he’s told and doesn’t get fretful.”

  “Before I forget,” interrupted Hyson, “what’s the trouble called? Clients have rung up to ask for him. As well to have the scientific name to give them. I said ‘heart trouble’ to one man, and he wanted to know ‘What kind of heart trouble?’ I didn’t know one had assorted kinds of heart attacks.”

  “You can call it coronary thrombosis,” said the nurse, taking pains to speak distinctly. “Shall I spell it for you?”

  “Cor-on-ar-y throm-bos-is,” repeated Hyson syllabically. “No, don’t trouble to spell it, Nurse. Got it right, I think.”

  He made a jotting of the name on a piece of paper before him and then continued:

  “What is it, in plainer English?”

  “His coronary artery has got blocked, somehow, and that reduces the supply of oxygen to the heart muscle.”

  “Thanks. One lives and learns. What’s the treatment?”

  “Complete rest, to give the blood stream a chance of finding fresh channels to the heart.”

  “Complete rest for how long?” demanded Hyson, with a certain eagerness in his tone.

  “Twelve weeks, probably, to be on the safe side,” Nurse Spencer exclaimed. “Twelve weeks in bed, I mean. After that, he’ll probably be allowed to get up and sit about. But he won’t be fit for much, after lying up for three months. He’ll have to go very cautiously once he gets out of bed again. Especially in the matter of going up and down stairs. That tries the heart more than you’d suppose.”

  Hyson reflected that the office was on the second floor and that there was no lift in the building. For some reason, the idea seemed to give him satisfaction.

  “Three months, then, or perhaps four?” he commented. “Well, we shall carry on here. Any chance of seeing him, if I came up to the house?”

  “You’d better ask Dr. Willoughby. But it would need to be only a friendly call, Mr. Hyson. He mustn’t be worried by business affairs just now. You understand that, don’t you? Rest and quiet, physically and mentally, are what he must have at present, if he’s to get well quickly and have no set-backs.”

  “I’ll ring up the doctor and get his permission.”

  “That would be the best thing,” the nurse agreed.

  “You don’t mind my ringing up to ask for him once a day for the next few days?”

  “Not at all. Is that all I can do for you? Then good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” echoed Hyson as he hung up his receiver.

  He leaned back in his chair and reflected upon what he had heard. Three months in bed, then another month, say, to pull himself together and after that it might be a week or two anyway before he could face those long flights of stairs up to the office. That meant a free hand for the best part of five months. Well, it had just come in the nick of time, Hyson mused. A nervous man might have shivered at the thought of peril escaped, but Hyson was of tougher fibre. Pity for his employer never crossed his mind.

  “A damned good thing he didn’t peter out in that attack, though,” he reflected. “That would have meant auditors rushing in. . . .”

  As things stood, he felt h
imself on velvet. The old bird couldn’t discuss business at present. He’d leave everything to Hyson and Hyson resolved to see that business was postponed as long as possible. Old Lockhurst was a nervous beggar. He’d follow doctor’s orders to the letter. If he showed any inquisitiveness at all — which was unlikely — a hint dropped to Willoughby would make sure of keeping him quiet. Four months sure, five possibly. Time to turn round in, at any rate.

  Well, the first thing to do was to put that fellow Forbury in his place. Hyson had no definite instructions from his employer, but that did not trouble him. One assumed these things; and if anyone ventured to ask an awkward question, one simply stared at him in stony silence for half a minute and then gave him an order. Forbury was getting on in years; he had a wife and three kids depending on him. He’d never dare to make any real trouble. Still, he had to be dealt with, and the sooner the better, before he had time to think.

  Three white studs were let into the surface of the desk, each flanked by its ivorine label. Lockhurst had a mania for system in minor office affairs, Hyson reflected. Apparently he mistook it for efficiency; and yet when Hyson had pressed him to install that Moon-Hopkins machine he had hemmed and hawed and put off a decision. Worse still, he had asked Forbury’s opinion about it. And of course Forbury had scented trouble; for if Olive Lyndoch took over the bookkeeping machine, Forbury would cease to be necessary. He had seen the sack in the offing and had opposed the scheme, tooth and nail; and despite all the talk about system and efficiency, old Lockhurst had dropped the notion. Olive had lost the chance of a rise in her screw, and that hadn’t made her love Forbury any better.

  He examined the three little ivorine plates. HYSON. Well, Hyson was at the other end of the wire now, so that button would be out of use for a while. FORBURY. Forbury would have to jump as usual when his bell rang, a bit quicker than before, perhaps. TYPISTS. One short ring for Olive Lyndoch; two short rings for Effie Hinkley; and three short rings for this new girl — what was her name? — Kitty . . . Kitty Nevern, that was it. A pretty little piece, with neat hips and nice hands. No engagement ring. Might be worth asking her out to dinner shortly. She’d be glad enough to come, by the look of her. Not like Effie Hinkley. “Yes, Mr. Hyson, I like dinners, but I don’t care for dessert. Eve lost an estate by her taste in fruit, they say.” A cool little brat, Effie. She’d wait for a while before she got another invitation, he could promise her. And, finally, one long ring for the office-boy. That was the really sound bit in old Lockhurst’s bell-system. That long ring always made young Cadbury jump; it sounded bad-tempered.