Murder in the Maze (A Clinton Driffield Mystery)

by J. J. Connington

  J. J. Connington and The Murder Room

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  Murder in the Maze

  J. J. Connington

  Contents

  Cover

  The Murder Room Introduction

  Title page

  Introduction (Curtis Evans)

  1 · The Hackleton Case

  2 · The Affair in the Maze

  3 · The Immediate Results

  4 · The Chief Constable

  5 · The Evidence in the Case

  6 · The Toxicologist

  7 · The Pot of Curare

  8 · Opportunity, Method, and Motive

  9 · The Burglary at Whistlefield

  10 · The Third Attack in the Maze

  11 · The Squire’s Theories

  12 · The Fourth Attack

  13 · The Dart

  14 · The Forged Cheque

  15 · The Secretary’s Affairs

  16 · The Last Attack in the Maze

  17 · The Siege of the Maze

  18 · The Truth of the Matter

  Outro

  About the author

  By J. J. Connington

  Copyright page

  Alfred Walter Stewart / J. J. Connington

  (1880-1947)

  CURTIS EVANS

  During the Golden Age of the detective novel, in the 1920s and 1930s, J. J. Connington stood, along with R. Austin Freeman, Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode (Cecil John Charles Street), as one of British mystery fiction’s foremost exponents of the science of true detection. I use the word “science” advisedly, because the man behind “J. J. Connington,” Alfred Walter Stewart, was an esteemed scientist who held the Chair of Chemistry at Queen’s University, Belfast, for twenty-five years, from 1919 until his retirement in 1944, three years before his death. A “small, unassuming moustached polymath,” Stewart was “a strikingly effective lecturer with an excellent sense of humor, fertile imagination, and fantastically retentive memory,” qualities that served him well in his detective fiction. During his years at Queen’s University, the talented Professor Stewart found time to author not only a remarkable piece of science fiction, the apocalyptic novel Nordenholt’s Million (1923), but also a mainstream work of fiction, Almighty Gold (1924), and, between 1926 and 1947, a string of two dozen mysteries, all but one tales of true detection. Among these latter works are at least eight examples of the Golden Age detective novel at its considerable best. Critics at the time doubtlessly reflected the views of many mystery genre devotees when they avowed that “Mr. Connington is one of the clearest and cleverest of masters of detective fiction now writing” and that “for those who ask first of all in a detective story for exact and mathematical accuracy in the construction of the plot, there is no author to equal the distinguished scientist who writes under the name of J. J. Connington.” Nor are such assessments off the mark.

  Born in Scotland, Alfred Walter Stewart was the son of a prominent professor of divinity at Glasgow University. Yet despite his parentage and his marriage into the wealthy and devout Coats family—probably the most socially prominent Baptists in Scotland—Stewart himself throughout his life remained markedly materialistic and skeptical in his own philosophical outlook. “I prefer the Odyssey to Paradise Lost,” the author once remarked, while the pseudonym “J. J. Connington” he derived from a nineteenth century Oxford professor of Latin and translator of Horace. Stewart’s most renowned series investigator, Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield, who appears in seventeen novels, is one of the most sardonic and acerbic detectives in the literature of mystery fiction, sometimes behaving, especially in the earlier tales, in a ruthlessly highhanded fashion. Yet whether one finds Driffield’s behavior appealing or appalling, the Chief Constable is, I believe, one of the most impressive and interesting Great Detectives in British crime fiction.

  We see Sir Clinton at nearly his most ruthless in his debut in Murder in the Maze (1927), the novel that established “J. J. Connington” as one of Britain’s premier detective writers. No less a literary figure than T. S. Eliot praised Murder in the Maze in The Criterion for its plot construction (“we are provided early in the story with all the clues which guide the detective”) and its narrative liveliness (“the very idea of murder in a box hedge labyrinth does the author great credit, and he makes full use of its possibilities”), deeming it “a really first-rate detective story.” For his part, the prominent English critic H. C. Harwood declared in The Outlook that with the publication of Murder in the Maze its author “demands and deserves comparison with the masters.” Harwood urged mystery fans, “buy, borrow, or—anyhow get hold of it.” Two decades later, in his 1946 critical essay, “The Grandest Game in the World,” the great locked room detective author John Dickson Carr echoed Eliot’s assessment of the novel’s virtuoso setting, writing: “These 1920s . . . thronged with sheer brains. What would be one of the best possible settings for violent death? J. J. Connington found the answer, with Murder in the Maze.”

  In his first recorded case, Sir Clinton Driffield—who, we learn, served in “a big post” in the South African police—returns to England to claim ownership of a landed estate and the office of Chief Constable of the county. Driffield is given his fullest description in Murder in the Maze, where we find that deliberately concealed under a conventional façade is a masterful individual:

  Sir Clinton was a slight man who looked about thirty-five. His sun-tanned face, the firm mouth under the close-clipped moustache, the beautifully-kept teeth and hands, might have attracted a second glance in a crowd; but to counter this there was a deliberate ordinariness about his appearance. . . . Only his eyes failed to fit in with the rest of his conventional appearance; and even them he had disciplined as far as possible. Normally, they had a bored expression; but at times the mask slipped aside and betrayed the activity of the brain behind them. When fixed on a man they gave a curious impression as though they saw, not the physical exterior of the subject, but instead the real personality concealed below the facial lineaments.

  Debuting with Sir Clinton Driffield in Murder in the Maze is Sir Clinton’s best friend, Squire Wendover. The Squire appears in fourteen of the seventeen Driffield novels (he is entirely absent from three of the first five Driffields, but appears in every one from 1931’s The Boathouse Riddle through 1947’s Commonsense Is All You Need), serving as Driffield’s Watson figure as the Chief Constable marches from one investigative triumph to another. As in Murder in the Maze, Driffield often is staying over at his fellow bachelor’s ancestral country estate, Talgarth Grange, when he is ca
lled into a local murder investigation. Driffield seems to have a dry affection for his friend, but that does not prevent him from frequently twitting the Squire, whose enthusiasm for the art of amateur detection somewhat exceeds his skill at practicing it.

  Although the resemblance of Driffield and Wendover to Holmes and Watson is specifically referenced by the pair themselves in Murder in the Maze (“I see,” announces Wendover at one point. “I’m to be Watson, and then you’ll prove what an ass I am. I’m not over keen.”), in Maze Connington takes pains to make clear that Wendover is no mere “idiot friend,” as the Watson figure in the detective novel was often labeled:

  [Wendover] was one of those red-faced, hearty country gentlemen who, on first acquaintance, give an entirely erroneous impression of themselves. Met casually, he might quite easily have appeared to be a slightly fussy person of very limited intellect and even more restricted interests; but behind that façade lived a fairly acute brain which took a sly delight in exaggerating the misleading mannerisms. Wendover was anything but a fool, though he liked to pose as one.

  Squire Wendover indeed is a more interesting character than Agatha Christie’s Captain Arthur Hastings and many of the other “fairly acute” to outright dim individuals who filled the stolid ranks of the Watson phalanx in Golden Age detective fiction, though he was never as fully limned by his creator as he might have been. We learn, for example, that Wendover has an instinctive and indulgent sympathy for “pretty girls,” but Connington never really lets us glimpse any deeper emotional life that the Squire might have (even Watson had a wife, however briefly). Yet Wendover’s warmer, more humane presence admittedly provides relief from the brilliant but formidable and sometimes forbidding Sir Clinton Driffield.

  Like many 1920s Golden Age detective novels, Murder in the Maze is centered on criminous events at a country house. Attending a weekend house party at Murder in the Maze’s Whistlefield, the estate of Roger Shandon, are the following individuals: Roger Shandon himself; Shandon’s fraternal twin brother, Neville, and his other brother, Ernest; his niece and nephew, Sylvia and Arthur Hawkhurst; his private secretary, Ivor Stenness; and his charming young houseguests, Vera Forrest and Howard Torrance. Ne’er-do-well Ernest’s continual presence at Whistlefield is a constant source of mild irritation to Roger Shandon, but of more concern to him of late is his nephew Arthur, who has exhibited a disturbing lack of mental balance after coming down with “sleepy sickness” (encephalitis lethargica). Further, both of the elder Shandon brothers are involved in contentious business matters: Neville, an attorney, is King’s Counsel in the controversial Hackleton case; while Roger, who made his fortune from mysterious doings in South Africa and South America, has been vaguely threatened by a former colleague, who accuses Roger of having cheated him. Finally, the private secretary, Ivor Stenness, clearly is up to something untoward.

  After both Roger and Neville Shandon are felled in Whistlefield’s famous hedge maze by curare-tipped darts, Sir Clinton arrives to restore order at this fractious country estate. Sir Clinton’s performance as a criminal investigator is dazzlingly acute and the novel boasts several bravura scenes, all centering on the sinister hedge maze of death. Surely Murder in the Maze is one of the very finest country house mysteries produced by a British detective novelist in the 1920s.

  Connington followed Murder in the Maze with additional fine Clinton Driffield tales, including Tragedy at Ravensthorpe (1927), The Case with Nine Solutions (1928), The Boathouse Riddle (1931), The Sweepstake Murders (1931), The Castleford Conundrum (1932) and The Ha-Ha Case (1934). Like Murder in the Maze, four of these novels we may properly term country house mysteries. One of the very best of the Connington country house mysteries, in every way a worthy successor to Maze, is The Castleford Conundrum. In this tale the author does an extremely effective job of portraying an odious, stupid woman, Winifred Castleford, and her detestable, sponging in-laws. Even her seemingly sympathetic second husband, Philip Castleford, is offhandedly dismissed with contempt by Clinton Driffield as a cringing weakling. Only Philip’s daughter (and Winifred’s stepdaughter), Hillary, is portrayed by the author with real sympathy. If one desires to read a novel with a houseful of scheming, contemptible relations and a cleverly arranged murder of the one person with all the money—and what fan of classical English mystery does not—one could not do better than to choose The Castleford Conundrum.

  The novel opens at Winifred Castleford’s country house, Carron Hill, with the author detailing the multiple after-dinner animosities (all centering on the very wealthy Winifred) simmering among the various people there that night. In the one camp we find Philip Castleford and his daughter Hillary, in the other Winifred’s designing relations: Constance Lindfield, Winifred’s half-sister and companion; Laurence and Kenneth Glencaple, her brothers-in-law from her first marriage (a country doctor and a struggling businessman respectively); and Francis Glencaple, Kenneth’s brutish, seemingly near semi-moronic fourteen-year-old son. Not part of the menagerie at Carron Hill, but of great concern to the three women who live there, is Dick Stevenage, an utter waster nevertheless found intensely interesting by the local female population.

  In The Castleford Conundrum, Connington casts his scorn for humanity about in heaps. Winifred is an utterly worthless being–pushy, selfish and common—eminently deserving of murdering. Thirty-five and with “calves like a sturdy dairy-maid’s,” “Winnie,” as she likes to be called (one of her irritating qualities is her insistence that everyone, even adults, be addressed by diminutives), despises her younger, prettier stepdaughter and makes her life miserable in every petty way that she and her half-sister can devise. Constance is resentful of the presence of Phillip and Hillary at Carron Hill and does all she can to undermine them. Thirty-three years of age and, like Winnie and Hillary, powerfully attracted to the handsome Dick Stevenage, she also is intensely jealous of Hillary Castleford. The main concern of the calculating Laurence and the piggish Kenneth is to secure as much as they can of the fortune Winnie inherited from their deceased brother, by getting Phillip and Hillary essentially written out of Winnie’s will. Kenneth’s son is possibly the worst of the worthless lot, a horrid young brute whose favorite pastimes are torturing animals and playing with the rook rifle his doting Aunt Winnie has given him. “I could shoot you, Aunt Winnie. Look!” he yells proudly on receiving the weapon, foreshadowing his aunt’s imminent demise. Soon the egregious Winnie Castleford is discovered shot dead in a chair on the porch of her summer chalet.

  Clinton Driffield and his friend Squire Wendover do not appear on the scene until the final third of the book, but they then find their hands full with a highly complex crime. Before the relentless Sir Clinton reveals all in a classic drawing-room lecture to the suspects gathered at Carron Hill, he sportingly provides Wendover a list of the nine key points in the case, for the Squire to work his way through, if he can. Cryptic clue tabulations like this one were eagerly devoured by the puzzle gluttons of the Golden Age, and Connington certainly does not stint his readership its meat and drink in The Castleford Conundrum, a novel full of good things.

  The Castleford Conundrum presented crime fiction critics with no puzzle as to its quality. “In The Castleford Conundrum Mr. Connington goes to work like an accomplished chess-player. The moves in the games his detectives are called on to play are a delight to watch,” raved the reviewer for the Sunday Times. He added that “the clues would have rejoiced Mr. Holmes’ heart.” For its part, the Spectator concurred in the Sunday Times’ assessment of the novel’s masterfully-constructed plot: “Few detective stories show such sound reasoning as that by which the Chief Constable brings the crime home to the culprit.” Additionally, writer E. C. Bentley, much admired himself as the author of the classic detective novel Trent’s Last Case (1913), took time to praise the purely literary virtues displayed by Connington in Castleford, noting: “Mr. Connington has never written better, or drawn characters more full of life.”

  The tenth Clinton Driffield detective
novel, 1935’s The Tau Cross Mystery (In England In Whose Dim Shadow) moves away from a country house milieu that by the mid-thirties was becoming clichéd to a well-conveyed setting in an English suburb beset with a multitude of sins. The mystery itself is meticulously clued and compelling and the kicker of a closing paragraph is a classic of its kind, showing a pithily sardonic Sir Clinton to great advantage. Additionally, the author paints some excellent character portraits, including an ambitious young police constable, a pushy freelance journalist, a callow Christian evangelist, a careworn Frenchwoman in a marriage of convenience and an introverted, elderly clerk who dreams of traveling to Japan. Connington in particular portrays the clerk, Mr. Mitford, with considerable poignancy. Mitford’s one great goal in life is to visit the storybook Japan of his dreams before it is vanquished entirely by the forces of modernization, but, alas, he may not be destined to achieve his goal.

  I fully agree with the Sunday Times reviewer’s enthusiastic assessment of The Tau Cross Mystery: “Quiet domestic murder, full of the neatest detective points. . . . [T]hese are not the detective’s stock figures, but fully realised human beings.” The American humorist and crime fiction reviewer Will Cuppy was similarly discerning in his praise of Tau Cross. Having a keen appreciation for data and material fact, Cuppy was dazzled by the tale’s “abundance of clews and many other aids to armchair sleuthing,” including “an extra pair of shoes, a handkerchief soaked in gore . . . an overturned paint pot . . . the fact that the corpse wears rubber gloves . . . a small bludgeon, a crumpled piece of brown paper and a little gold ornament in the shape of a Tau cross.” With such fascinating aids at Clinton Driffield’s disposal, the delighted Cuppy concluded, “Sir Clinton can hardly fail, especially as he’s letter perfect on ‘The Golden Bough,’ can quote Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Garden of Cyrus,’ and can speak any language—we mean, he’s smart.”