THE END
AFTERWORD
The Birds and the Bees and The Case of the Running Mouse (1944)
The Facts of Life (and Death) in Christopher Bush’s Forties Detective Fiction
Note: Discussion of a major plot spoiler to Christopher Bush’s The Case of the Running Mouse begins in the fourth paragraph of this afterword, so if you have not read the novel already, take heed. The reader is warned.
Golden Age detective fiction remains to this day, nearly a century after its first dawning, routinely dismissed by detractors as frothy, cozy concoctions whose authors have carefully removed any bitter taint of real world unpleasantries, particularly those which pertain to the illicit sexuality and violence that more than occasionally takes place within it. During the Second World War, however, crime fiction (like the real world itself) was undergoing tremendous upheaval, with the fast-rising popularity of hard-boiled mysteries by such writers as Raymond Chandler, Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase. In tandem with American noir cinema, this tough and tantalizing mystery sub-genre impacted even traditionally staid British mystery, where headlong excitement tended to take a back seat to the dallying delights of detection. In the case of Christopher Bush, who published his first tale of the investigative adventures of gentleman amateur sleuth Ludovic “Ludo” Travers in 1926, sexuality becomes more of a felt presence in his mysteries during these wartime years, as we learn that Ludo Travers and men and women of similarly good social standing have been, at times, no better than they should have been. To riff on songwriter Cole Porter, certainly no shrinking violet when it came to sexual intimations, in Forties Ludo Travers mysteries like The Case of the Running Mouse (1944) “the birds do it, the bees do it/even educated Brits do it”—sometimes rather naughtily indeed and with quite nasty results.
In his essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” which appeared in print the same year as Bush’s The Case of the Running Mouse, George Orwell, an admirer of the decorous Edwardian detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and Doyle’s contemporaries R. Austin Freeman and Ernest Bramah as well as the rogue stories of E.W. Hornung and Maurice Leblanc, was famously critical of the wartime influence of American crime fiction and its British imitators on British crime fiction and society. Orwell graphically likened the act of reading Englishman James Hadley Chase’s “sordid and brutal” crime novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), which enjoyed tremendous popularity in the UK during the war, to taking a “header into the cesspool.” In books like Miss Blandish, Orwell complained, “one is not, as in the old-fashioned crime story, simply escaping from dull reality into an imaginary world of action. One’s escape is essentially into cruelty and sexual perversion.” Orwell speculated that the rise in popularity of such fiction owed something to the “mingled boredom and brutality of war.” In another essay from this period, “The Decline of the English Murder” (1946), Orwell contrasted classic genteel English true crime cases like those which concerned, respectively, the notorious Mrs. Maybrick and Dr. Crippen with a merely tawdry recent affair, the Cleft Chin Murder, where an American army deserter and wannabe gangster, Karl Hulten, accompanied by his vacuous, thrill-seeking English pick-up, an 18-year-old named Elizabeth Jones, murdered a taxi driver with a cleft chin, taking the dead man’s paltry eight pounds to bet at dog races. Of this singularly and sickeningly pointless and stupid crime Orwell observed: “Perhaps it is significant that the most talked-of English murder of recent years should have been committed by an American and an English girl who had become partly Americanized.”
Like his male contemporaries in Britain’s august Detection Club, a convivial social organization of the finest writers of detective fiction in the UK, Christopher Bush though of humble birth publicly adhered to the standards of an English gentleman. Although he appears certainly to have been a reader of American hard-boiled crime fiction, Bush in his crime writing maintained a sense of decorum which was entirely absent from the salacious books that so disgusted George Orwell. Yet Bush had lapses from his own standards in his life where women were concerned. Like his Detection Club colleague Cecil John Charles Street, Bush left his wife and cohabited contentedly with another woman for decades. Moreover, an earlier affair of his resulted in the birth of an illegitimate son (the distinguished British composer Geoffrey Bush). The author seems to draw on these experiences in his portrayals, throughout the Ludo Travers mystery series, of designing, sexually aggressive women, which gives his books something of the flavor of hard-boiled mysteries, with their constant depictions of predatory femmes fatales. This aspect of Bush’s crime fiction reaches its apotheosis in The Case of the Magic Mirror (1943), which pits Travers against a dangerously alluring old flame, Charlotte Craigne, and directly quotes Raymond Chandler’s The High Window, published the previous year. (Chandler is known for his gorgeous rapacious women, who are always trying to destroy Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s provokingly fastidious, if slightly shop-soiled, PI hero.) Intriguingly a major plot point in Bush’s novel is Charlotte’s attempt to blackmail Ludo into doing her bidding by showing him a photo of a boy who purportedly is her and Ludo’s illegitimate son.
The next year Bush published The Case of the Running Mouse, wherein not one of the female characters, including the “nice girls,” to use the language of the era, appears to be a virgin. The most striking case in this regard is that of the vanished Georgia Morbent, whose lover, Peter Worrack, under the impression that Travers is a private detective (on a lark Ludo plays along with this), hires Ludo to trace. Ludo makes comparatively little progress toward finding Georgia until her severed head shockingly pops up in London. Gradually Ludo discovers that Georgia, having been impregnated by Peter Worrack (unknown to him), had departed not to meet an employee in Ireland as she had claimed she was doing but to keep an appointment with an abortionist—one which tragically turned fatal, with Georgia dying as a result of the operation.
Georgia’s pregnancy is a secret which the author keeps well, though Mouse being a fair play mystery we are told of Georgia, through the words of Peter Worrack, (1) “. . . she said she wasn’t marrying a second time. Kids and a home and all that sort of thing weren’t her line.” (2) “. . . she had a superb figure. One of the things she was most proud of.” Although Georgia runs a private gambling club in London, a fact which would have filled Bush’s puritanical Detection Club colleague Freeman Wills Crofts with righteous horror (see Crofts’s pious crime novel concerning what he terms “gambling hells,” Fatal Venture, 1939), Travers summarizes the missing woman as “a damn good sort. One you could trust to the last inch.” In stark contrast with Freeman Crofts and his sententiously moralizing series detective, Inspector Joseph French, Ludo Travers declines to judge erring humanity:
Who was I . . . to adopt a superior or puritanical attitude because [Worrack] chose to get a living in his own way and meet, in what he considered a square way, a definite demand? . . . And wasn’t I also fond of an occasional gamble? . . . And who was I, in any case, to make myself a custodian of war-time or any other morals? . . . just because I had chosen to masquerade as a private detective, what right did that give me to be hypocritical about my patron?
Bush treats Georgia Morbent’s death as a genuine tragedy, not as deserved retribution against a woman who behaved badly. Earlier in the Travers series Bush had dealt with abortion (in The Case of the Tudor Queen, 1938, where the actress murder victim had become pregnant out-of-wedlock by her murderer and in The Case of the Climbing Rat, 1940, where one of the murder victims is a disgraced Harley Street doctor who was prosecuted for performing an abortion), but only in The Case of the Running Mouse does the author focus so squarely on a matter, which, though little acknowledged in crime fiction of the day, was a major social problem increasingly aired in public in the 1930s and 1940s. Unquestionably Mouse is a unique mystery novel for its time.
In her guidebook Mystery Fiction: Theory and Technique, published just a year before The Case of the Running Mouse, author, editor and literary agent Marie F. Rodell gi
ves us an outline of the strictures regarding sexuality under which crime writers of the time still worked, despite the rise in popularity of hard-boiled and noir fiction. Concerning abortion specifically, Rodell advised that the subject “is considered legitimate mystery material if it is handled carefully and, of course, condemned. Apparently it is regarded by the fans as closer to murder than to sex.”
When Ludo Travers in The Case of the Running Mouse delicately asks his friend Superintendent George Wharton of Scotland Yard to tell him “something about—about shady women’s doctors,” the “Old General” makes sufficiently clear where he stands: “Why all the humbug? Why don’t you say what you mean? You aren’t talking about doctors, you’re talking about abortionists. . . . You ought to know enough about them. Dirty, furtive little swine, that’s what I call ‘em. Living up back streets usually.”
But then Travers makes clear that what he is wondering about are reputable physicians, leading to this interesting exchange:
“What about the recent case of a doctor with a first-class practice and reputation who’d been making a packet out of doing the job, and for years?”
“Of course there are all sorts. . . . The man you instanced simply moved among a better class, that’s all.”
[. . .]
“A lot of it, these days, is there?”
“Is there not!”
“Just one other thing. . . . These fellows seem to me to get into the hands of the police because of a patient’s death, at least in most cases. Why should a patient die?”
“Several reasons. . . . Simple shock, though that’s rare. The peritoneal cavity may have been pierced and there may be shock from that. In most cases it’s septic poisoning owing to dirty conditions of instruments.”
In the novel Georgia’s abortionist, who operates in collusion with a gynecologist’s receptionist, is an anti-Hitler Austrian refugee physician by the name of Halberg. Doctors who came to trial for procuring abortions in the UK after the war were disproportionately foreigners, notes Barbara Brooks in Abortion in England, 1900-1967, perhaps because they tended to be unshielded by the “professional solidarity which protected English doctors.” (Brooks cites the cases of a Dr. Sutorowski and a Dr. Bieberstein.) Bush may have partly had in mind a real life case of a purported doctor and charming villain who two years before the publication of The Case of the Running Mouse was convicted of manslaughter in the horrid demise of Helen Mary Pickwoad (1914-1942), a 28 year-old woman from Liverpool who was found dead, notes Amy Helen Bell in Murder Capital: Suspicious Deaths in London, 1933-1953, in the City “in a Marble Arch motel room littered with used bandages, medical supplies and a cigarette box with temperature readings on the back of it.” At trial the eminent pathologist Bernard Spilsbury, countering the defense’s calm that Pickwoad had had the abortion done in Liverpool, testified that the unfortunate woman’s death had resulted from “sepsis from a perforated uterus,” contracted by her within the last few days, when she unquestionably had been in London. Tasked with finding those responsible for the tragedy, police arrested Pickwoad’s married London lover, a 27-year-old army captain by the name of Edward Tickell who had procured the services of an abortionist, in addition to the abortionist himself: a man with the tony handle of George Frederic Montague de Fossard (or, as he also styled himself, the Comte de la Vatine).
The grandson of handsome and dapper Latvian immigrant Charles Fredrick Von Fossard and a nephew of the elocutionist and classical tenor Alfred Von Fossard, George Fossard (1898-1967) bears resemblance to the native French abortionist Gustave Rionne in Christopher Bush’s The Case of the Climbing Rat (1940), who married an aunt of Ludo’s wife and practiced plastic surgery, performing abortions covertly—though Georges Fossard’s ancestry seems to have been French by way of Germany. Fossard served a three-year prison term in connection with his abortion trade in 1931-34 and upon his release began styling himself a plastic surgeon and performing face lifts, though he had only nine months’ training at King’s College, London, having left the school without taking exams. A corporal in the Somerset Light Infantry during the First World War, Fossard while on leave in 1919 from active service in Cologne, Germany (which British troops has occupied, as part of the Allied maintenance of the German Rhineland as a buffer zone between France and Germany under the Treaty of Versailles), wed solicitor’s daughter Dorothy Louisa Curtis, seven years his elder and the first of his several wives; the marriage lasted only a few years.
Oddly Fossard’s immigrant grandfather had married a woman whose grandfather Henry Baker, rector of the stunning classical All Saints Church in Nuneham Courtenay, Oxfordshire, had dismissed a maid for getting pregnant by his groom. Although she delivered the child she remained despondent over the state of her personal affairs, her groom lover being either unwilling or unable to marry her, and in 1829 she fatally poisoned herself with arsenic (which in classic fashion she claimed she needed in order to poison rats), thus illustrating, over a century before Helen Pickwoad’s sad death, the grave dangers an unwanted pregnancy could pose for a women.
Like the fictional Georgia Morbent, Fossard’s victim, Helen Pickwoad, came of a good family, making the affair even more shocking to the British public in 1942. Her father, Howell Pickwoad, was a colonial civil servant who served at various posts in Africa, including Nairobi, who retired with his family to The Old Vicarage at the village of Wangford in Suffolk, forty miles east of Great Hockham, Christopher Bush’s adolescent home. There he and his wife brought up their adolescent daughter Helen and son William Mervyn, two years Helen’s elder, with whom Helen was living in Liverpool in 1939, keeping house for her brother, now an actor, and making trips to London to keep up her love affair with Edward Tickell. At the trial Tickell wore his army uniform every day and conducted himself with dignified reserve, impressing the jury and securing an acquittal for himself, but Fossard was found guilty and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for the botched May 20 abortion.
Helen’s father died just five months later at the age of 62, but her brother William Mervyn Pickwoad lived on and prospered, after the war attaining fame on stage and the large and small screen as the actor William Mervyn. His film roles included parts in A Touch of Larceny with James Mason, Operation Crossbow with Sophia Loren, Murder Ahoy with Margaret Rutherford, Hot Millions with Peter Ustinov, The Railway Children with Jenny Agutter and The Ruling Class with Peter O’Toole, while on television he was known for playing a variety of very British authority figures in the Sixties and Seventies, such as the popular Chief Inspector Charles Rose in several crime series, Bishop Cuthbert Heyer in All Gas and Gaiters, the Duke of Tottering in Tottering Towers and Mr. Justice Campbell in Crown Court. One of his films, the shocker Circus of Horrors (1960), details the murderous activities of a mad plastic surgeon (played by German actor Anton Diffring).
Upon his release from prison George Fossard departed for Australia, as a representative of the Big Brothers Movement, a non-profit youth migration program. (One fears the worst.) By 1950, however, Fossard, now grandly calling himself Count George Frederick de Fossard de la Vatine and claiming to be an artist, was back in London, however, and back on trial, this time for obtaining £900 (about £29,000 or 40,000 USD today) under false pretenses. Nine years later he made the news pages yet again, in a story picked up internationally by the AP, when 25-year-old brunette striptease artist Louisa Worsley announced that she and the 65-year-old “count” (actually 61) were planning to wed, as soon as Fossard obtained a divorce from his third wife, (the mother of his son Nicholas), from whom he had been separated since 1933. The count, the news story divulged to ingenuous readers, was an “aristocrat whose title stretches back into history” and an “artist who specializes in portraits of ballet dancers and church bishops.” Recalling Raymond Chandler, we might idly wonder whether Fossard’s new inamorata Louise Worsley was a brunette “to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
To be sure, there were other cases in the UK in the 1940s of doctors
—real doctors with actual degrees—being arrested and convicted for performing abortions, like Crichton Alison, son of a Scottish minister and a prestigious Harley Street practitioner who in 1940 was “found guilty of conspiring with a male medical student and a woman to perform illegal abortions” and was sentenced, along with the other man, to a five-year term of penal servitude. After his release, Alison remained on the cutting edge of sexual controversy, in 1950 editing a 36-page pamphlet, Men in Women’s Clothes, a collection of “case histories of transvestism.” And then there was Canadian native Alva Delbert Evans, a posh Piccadilly surgeon who for two decades had run “two private nursing homes in the West End” where he performed abortions at considerable profit to himself until the police finally caught up with him in 1944 (though court records reveal he had skated on a patch of very thin ice in 1932). In a system very much resembling that described in The Case of the Running Mouse, Evans charged his abortion patients fees which ranged from 100 to 350 pounds, in addition to nursing home fees. The women paid Evans these large sums in cash, the only entry made in his books being a three-guinea consultation fee. Convicted of performing illegal abortions, Evans, like Georges Frossard and Crichton Alison, was sentenced to a five-year prison term. (On the trials of Crichton and Evans see Brooks, Abortion in England.)
Intriguingly Evans had served in the General Hospital Army of the Rhine at Cologne, in charge of the Venereal Disease Center in 1920, at the time a young Georges Fossard was posted in the city. In Cologne the collision of British troops and German civilian women, many of them prostitutes, had produced a 350% increase in cases of VD, much to the mortification of British authorities. “We are doing all we can to combat it,” wrote a British general of the problem, “but it is difficult in a large town of this nature where there are 30,000 women of loose character.” (See Keith Jeffery, “‘Hut ab,’ ‘Promenade with Kamerade for Schokolade,’ and the Flying Dutchman: British Soldiers in the Rhineland, 1918-1929,” in Conan Fischer and Alan Sharp, eds., After the Versailles Treaty: Enforcement, Compliance, Contested Identities.) In short, during his service in the Great War Dr. Evans had seen at first hand the dire problems resulting from unprotected sexual activity.
The Case of the Running Mouse: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 24
