Murder at the Manor

by Martin Edwards

  Murder at the Manor

  Country House Mysteries

  Edited and Introduced by

  Martin Edwards

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Introduction and notes copyright © 2016 Martin Edwards

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library

  First E-book Edition 2016

  ISBN: 9781464205743 ebook

  ‘The Mystery of Horne’s Copse’ reprinted courtesy of the Marsh Agency Ltd on behalf of the Society of Authors. ‘The Perfect Plan’ reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Estate of James Hilton. Copyright © The Estate of James Hilton. ‘The Same to Us’ from The Allingham Minibus by Margery Allingham reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Margery Allingham. ‘The Murder at the Towers’ copyright © 2016 Estate of E. V. Knox. ‘The Long Shot’ by Nicholas Blake reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Nicholas Blake. ‘Weekend at Wapentake’ reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Estate of Michael Gilbert. Copyright © The Estate of Michael Gilbert.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

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  Contents

  Murder at the Manor

  Copyright

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Copper Beeches

  The Problem of Dead Wood Hall

  Gentlemen and Players

  The Well

  The White Pillars Murder

  The Secret of Dunstan’s Tower

  The Manor House Mystery

  The Message on the Sun-Dial

  The Horror at Staveley Grange

  The Mystery of Horne’s Copse

  The Perfect Plan

  The Same to Us

  The Murder at the Towers

  An Unlocked Window

  The Long Shot

  Weekend at Wapentake

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Introduction

  Murder at the Manor is an anthology of short stories celebrating the British country house mystery. A sinister mansion set in lonely grounds offers an eerie backdrop for dark deeds, as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Copper Beeches” and W. W. Jacobs’ “The Well”. And the country house party with a richly varied assortment of guests provides an ideal “closed circle” of suspects when a crime is committed. An enjoyable example is Nicholas Blake’s “The Long Shot”, a story written by a former Communist who went on to become Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

  Today, enthusiasm for the country house crime story remains as strong as ever. Murder mystery evenings and weekends in country house hotels have become hugely popular, and a thriving industry provides interactive entertainment for guests who want to try their hand at amateur detective work in a suitable setting. The appeal is driven in part by nostalgia for a vanished way of life, and partly by the pleasure of trying to solve a puzzle.

  This collection gathers together stories written over a span of (very roughly) sixty-five years, during which British society, and life in country houses, was transformed out of all recognition. “Gentlemen and Players”, written by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, “Willie” Hornung, recalls a seemingly genteel and tranquil age, when members of the aristocracy hosted cricket matches at their country estates. But, as usual in crime fiction, all is not as it seems; A. J. Raffles, that charming gentleman and gifted cricketer, is also a thief with a fondness for diamonds and sapphires.

  Some of the stories included in this anthology were written before or after the Golden Age of Murder between the two world wars, but the Golden Age is well represented, and for good reason—it yielded many of the finest examples of this type of fiction. Renowned detectives who made their first appearance investigating crime in a country house include Hercule Poirot (The Mysterious Affair at Styles), Albert Campion (The Crime at Black Dudley), Mrs Bradley (Speedy Death) and Roderick Alleyn (A Man Lay Dead).

  A small minority of detective novelists not only wrote mysteries set in country houses but actually owned a country house themselves. Most famous of these country estates is Greenway in Devon, a house purchased by Agatha Christie and her husband in 1938, and now a much-loved visitor attraction in the care of the National Trust. Christie used Greenway as a setting more than once in her work, turning it into Nasse House in Dead Man’s Folly, a relatively late (1956) example of the classic country house whodunit. Margery Allingham and her husband Pip Youngman Carter lived in D’Arcy House at Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex from 1935. The Georgian house, still in private hands, is now adorned by a blue plaque commemorating the connection with Allingham, one of whose neatly crafted country house mysteries is included here.

  Anthony Berkeley Cox, who wrote as Anthony Berkeley and Francis Iles, also bought a country estate in Devon—Linton Hills. He used it as a setting for a murder mystery novel, The Second Shot, published in 1930. A map on endpapers of the book, in keeping with the fashion of the times, showed “Minton Deeps” estate in elaborate detail, identifying the “supposed positions” of the prime suspects. The short story by Berkeley in this book, “The Mystery of Horne’s Copse”, is much less familiar, but shares some ingredients with The Second Shot. A lively example of the traditional whodunit, it offers a cleverly crafted problem complete with vanishing corpses.

  The upstairs-downstairs life of a country house provided potential suspects among the staff when murder occurred. “The butler did it” became a cliché, although in fact this particular solution is seldom found in Golden Age whodunits. Herbert Jenkins used the device in one of his stories featuring the detective Malcolm Sage, but in 1928, the American detective novelist S. S. Van Dine published “Twenty rules for writing detective stories”, which today seem both amusing and absurd, not least for their insistence that “a servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit”. Servants were sometimes suspects, and sometimes victims, perhaps most poignantly in Christie’s A Pocket Full of Rye, when one of Miss Marple’s former parlour maids meets a cruel end.

  The notion of finding “a body in the library” of a country house was another trope of the genre. Christie had fun with it in The Body in the Library, where the corpse is found in Gossington Hall, owned by Miss Marple’s cronies, Colonel Arthur Bantry and his wife Dolly. But profound changes were taking place in British society as war was followed by peace-time austerity, and high taxes made it impossible for many families to cling on to old houses that were cripplingly expensive to run. Country house parties fell out of fashion, and although traditional whodunits continued to be written and enjoyed, detective novelists could not altogether ignore the reality. The scale of upheaval is apparent in another Marple story, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, published twenty years after The Body in the Library. Gossington Hall has been sold off, and been run as a guest house, divided into flats, bought by a government body, and finally snapped up for use as a rich woman’s playground b
y a much-married film star. Her entourage provides a “closed circle” of suspects suited to the 1960s.

  The tropes of classic detective fiction make the genre a prime target for humorists, and I was keen to include one of the best send-ups of the country house murder, “The Murder at the Towers”. Among the other contributors are such distinguished writers as G. K. Chesterton, and the gifted James Hilton, famed as the author of Goodbye, Mr Chips, and as the creator of Shangri-La, whose ventures into crime fiction were sadly infrequent. Murder at the Manor also includes little-known stories by the likes of J. J. Bell, and Michael Gilbert. Readers may not hanker after the days of the country house party—after all, attending them often placed one at risk of sudden death or arrest and the prospect of the gallows—but they will, I am sure, relish these entertaining reminders of a bygone age.

  Martin Edwards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  The Copper Beeches

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  The accomplishments of Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) were many and varied, but he is remembered above all as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes first appeared in two long stories, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, which enjoyed modest success. His investigations proved to be ideally suited to the short story form, and once Conan Doyle embarked on writing up a series of Holmes’ cases for the recently established Strand Magazine, literary immortality was assured.

  Country house mysteries are at the heart of several of the finest Holmes stories, including “The Speckled Band”, set at sinister Stoke Moran, which concerns a classic “impossible crime”. “The Copper Beeches” features the eponymous mansion, to be found “five miles on the far side of Winchester…it is the most lovely country, and the dearest old country house”. But devilry is afoot, and as Holmes and Watson travel by train, the detective remarks that “the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside”. The truth of this famous line is borne out as the story unfolds.

  ***

  ‘To the man who loves art for its own sake,’ remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, ‘it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish, you have given prominence not so much to the many causes célèbres and sensational trials in which I have figured, but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province.’

  ‘And yet,’ said I, smiling, ‘I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records.’

  ‘You have erred, perhaps,’ he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs, and lighting with it the long cherrywood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood—‘you have erred, perhaps, in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements, instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.’

  ‘It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter,’ I remarked with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had more than once observed to be a strong factor in my friend’s singular character.

  ‘No, it is not selfishness or conceit,’ said he, answering, as was his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. ‘If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing—a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.’

  It was a cold morning of the early spring, and we sat after breakfast on either side of a cheery fire in the old room in Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs, through the heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit, and shone on the white cloth, and glimmer of china and metal, for the table had not been cleared yet. Sherlock Holmes had been silent all the morning, dipping continuously into the advertisement columns of a succession of papers, until at last, having apparently given up his search, he had emerged in no very sweet temper to lecture me upon my literary shortcomings.

  ‘At the same time,’ he remarked, after a pause, during which he had sat puffing at his long pipe and gazing down into the fire, ‘you can hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of these cases which you have been so kind as to interest yourself in, a fair proportion do not treat of crime, in its legal sense, at all. The small matter in which I endeavoured to help the King of Bohemia, the singular experience of Miss Mary Sutherland, the problem connected with the man with the twisted lip, and the incident of the noble bachelor, were all matters which are outside the pale of the law. But in avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the trivial.’

  ‘The end may have been so,’ I answered, ‘but the methods I hold to have been novel and of interest.’

  ‘Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! But, indeed, if you are trivial, I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. I think that I have touched bottom at last, however. This note I had this morning marks my zero point, I fancy. Read it!’ He tossed a crumpled letter across to me.

  It was dated from Montague Place upon the preceding evening, and ran thus:

  ‘DEAR MR HOLMES—I am very anxious to consult you as to whether I should or should not accept a situation which has been offered to me as governess. I shall call at half-past ten tomorrow, if I do not inconvenience you—Yours faithfully, VIOLET HUNTER’

  ‘Do you know the young lady?’ I asked.

  ‘Not I.’

  ‘It is half-past ten now.’

  ‘Yes, and I have no doubt that is her ring.’

  ‘It may turn out to be of more interest than you think. You remember that the affair of the blue carbuncle, which appeared to be a mere whim at first, developed into a serious investigation. It may be so in this case also.’

  ‘Well, let us hope so! But our doubts will very soon be solved, for here, unless I am much mistaken, is the person in question.’

  As he spoke the door opened, and a young lady entered the room. She was plainly but neatly dressed, with a bright, quick face, freckled like a plover’s egg, and with the brisk manner of a woman who has had her own way to make in the world.

  ‘You will excuse my troubling you, I am sure,’ said she, as my companion rose to greet her; ‘but I have had a very strange experience, and as I have no parents or relations of any sort from whom I could ask advice, I thought that perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me what I should do.’

  ‘Pray take a seat, Miss Hunter. I shall be happy to do anything that I can to serve you.’

  I could see that Holmes was favourably impressed by the manner and speech of his new client. He looked her over in his searching fashion, and then composed himself with his lids drooping and his finger-tips together to listen to her story.

  ‘I have been a governess for five years,’ said she, ‘in the family of Colonel Spence Munro, but two months ago the Colonel received an appointment at Halifax, in Nova Scotia, and took his children over to Amer
ica with him, so that I found myself without a situation. I advertised and I answered advertisements, but without success. At last the little money which I had saved began to run short, and I was at my wits’ end as to what I should do.

  ‘There is a well-known agency for governesses in the West End called Westaway’s, and there I used to call about once a week in order to see whether anything had turned up which might suit me. Westaway was the name of the founder of the business, but it is really managed by Miss Stoper. She sits in her own little office, and the ladies who are seeking employment wait in an ante-room, and are then shown in one by one, when she consults her ledgers, and sees whether she has anything which would suit them.

  ‘Well, when I called last week I was shown into the little office as usual, but I found that Miss Stoper was not alone. A prodigiously stout man with a very smiling face, and a great heavy chin which rolled down in fold upon fold over his throat, sat at her elbow with a pair of glasses on his nose, looking very earnestly at the ladies who entered. As I came in he gave quite a jump in his chair, and turned quickly to Miss Stoper:

  ‘“That will do,” said he; “I could not ask for anything better. Capital! Capital!” He seemed quite enthusiastic and rubbed his hands together in the most genial fashion. He was such a comfortable-looking man that it was quite a pleasure to look at him.

  ‘“You are looking for a situation, miss?” he asked.

  ‘“Yes, sir.”

  ‘“As governess?”

  ‘“Yes, sir.”

  ‘“And what salary do you ask?”

  ‘“I had four pounds a month in my last place with Colonel Spence Munro.”

  ‘“Oh, tut, tut! sweating—rank sweating!” he cried, throwing his fat hands out into the air like a man who is in a boiling passion. “How could anyone offer so pitiful a sum to a lady with such attractions and accomplishments?”

  ‘“My accomplishments, sir, may be less than you imagine,” said I. “A little French, a little German, music and drawing—”