The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  When we wrote asking them to elaborate on the question, they sketched in the plan which eventually with slight changes we adopted.

  “Have dear little Eleanor sicken, slowly, inexorably. Orchestrate a chorus of village concern as she sinks, passing into a better world. Resist the temptation to open the deathbed scene to the general public at a shilling a time. Do it all tastefully. Have her practise short breathing – getting tiny gulps in in a way that hardly moves the lungs. When she is ‘dead’ have a simple funeral, though one marked by inconsolable local grief. Take the coffin to the local church and have grandpa mount guard over her all night. Keep a supply of sand in the vestry (NOT rubble, it tends to rattle). Fill (or half fill) the coffin with it. In the morning have the ceremony, bury the sand, and get Nell off to London suitably disguised – as her real self, we would suggest. Hey presto! In the future she can come back to visit her grandad if she wants to – posing as a long-lost cousin.”

  It was a wonderful idea! It left grandad free to use his great gifts in the country gaming holes, and it left me in London sampling the high life of Mayfair and the low life of Dan Quilp and his haunts. I liked the idea so much that I fell ill the very day we got the letter.

  I didn’t overdo it, of course. I am nothing if not tasteful. At first I was very brave, denying that I was ill at all. When they commented on my pallid complexion (flea powder) I shook my head bravely, then said there was nothing wrong. Then I thought it must be something I had eaten. Then I lost the use of my legs (they all shook their heads gravely at that). Before ten days were out I was permanently confined to bed, offering my visitors sickening platitudes, and sweetly prophesying I would soon be up again and as busy as ever. Tears flowed like cataracts. Behind their hands everyone started making suggestions for the gravestone.

  The end was unutterably poignant. We made it semi-public. The schoolmaster and The Bachelor were there, and a couple of rustics who could be relied on to get everything wrong and then rehash their account to the whole village, over and over again. I was visibly failing, and much whiter than the sheets on my bed. When the little knot of witnesses was assembled I began the tearful climax to my short life.

  “Grandad,” I said (he was sitting on my bed, and now clutched my hand in his horny one), “I think a change is coming. I think I am getting better. Is the sun shining? How I would love to see the sun again. It is getting light. The whole world is becoming brighter. I feel I am in a new place – better and more lovely than anything I have known before—”

  And so on. And on. I managed about ten minutes of this, and then my voice started to fade. Words could be heard – “world”, “bright”, “sun” and others, but nothing together that made sense until I suddenly said “Grandad, give me the sun” and my head fell back on the pillow, and my grandfather let out an anguished howl.

  Artistic, I’m sure you’ll agree.

  The witnesses clustered round, observing the lifeless corpse and the sobbing frame of that old fraud my grandfather. Then he stood up, still wracked with sobs, and ushered them out of the door.

  He drew the heavy curtains, locked the door, and then the pair of us had a good if quiet laugh. After a while grandad slipped out to order a coffin from the village carpenter. He found it was almost ready, as the carpenter with his practised eye had made a note of the likely size and had done most of the work a couple of weeks earlier. We, or he, took delivery that evening.

  We made a slight change of plan. The nights were drawing in and the days were nippy. I didn’t fancy (as we had planned) a long day in the staircase leading up the church tower while the funeral went ahead and night fell. We agreed to do the substitution in the cottage. We had a showing of me in the coffin next day, when the whole village and rustic dolts from miles around filed past uttering idiocies like “She do seem at peace” and “Oh what a ’eavenly hexpression she do ’ave”. When that collection of human rubble had passed through I jumped out of the coffin. Grandfather and I heaved the sack of sand (purloined by him from a building site) into the coffin and he nailed it down extremely tightly. We heaved it on to a trestle and went to bed in Grandad’s bed. It will not have passed my sharper readers by that, whatever else he was, Grandad was certainly not my grandfather.

  I have, writing now from the Old Curiosity Shop and awaiting another visit from dear, excitable Mr Quilp, who is finding me a bit of a handful, only one or two details to add. The next day, the funeral, was a big laugh. It was the last day of Little Nell, that brilliant creation the world had come to love. The vicar was in church, and the schoolmaster, the Old Bachelor, the gravedigger and Grandad assembled in our cottage to carry the coffin to the churchyard. As they were heaving it up on to their shoulders the schoolmaster said, in his typically spiritless tone of voice:

  “I’m sure Little Nell is already there, at home in Paradise, chanting with the heavenly choir.”

  “I’d lay you ten pounds at whatever odds you choose to name that she’s up there now, singing along with them other angels, lungs fit to bust,” said Grandad, winking towards the bedroom door, where I was surveying the delicious scene through the keyhole and barely suppressing my roars of laughter.

  I laugh when I think of that now. We made such fools of them all, Grandad and I. Putty in our hands, that’s what they were. I long to have Mr Quilp helpless like the yokels, also putty in my hands. Already he is mad with jealousy every time I look at a London swell, which is fairly often, because they’re on every street corner. But I must go very slowly. I have so much to learn from Mr Quilp about crime, about gaining the upper hand over the fools around me. I learned a lot from Fagin, but I could not use my sex with him, for obvious reasons. With Quilp I can use my sex to get from him every jot and tittle he knows. I said to him two evening ago I needed above all to learn, and he was my chosen master, the one who would lead me up the path to my being Europe’s Queen of Crime. “Wait till I see you next time,” said my dear Quilp. “I’ll give you a lesson as’ll last you a lifetime.”

  I think that’s him. Those are his uneven steps on the stairs. I can’t wait to see his delicious deformed body. His hands are on the doorkn—

  Here the creator of Little Nell fell silent for ever.

  Encounter in the Dark

  F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

  Dickens followed The Old Curiosity Shop with Barnaby Rudge, his first historical novel and, though not intended solely as a murder mystery, arguably one of the first historical whodunnits. The contract for the novel had been outstanding for several years and had become a millstone around Dickens’s neck. Once it was completed he determined to escape the restriction of monthly serials and decided to explore America – an enthusiasm that was not shared by his wife, Kate. Amongst other things, she dreaded leaving the children – there were four by now, Charles, Mary, Kate and Walter. To help console her, Dickens agreed she could be accompanied by her maid, Anne. The American trip lasted from January to June 1842 and Dickens wrote a detailed travelogue in American Notes, which was published at the end of the year. It’s not ranked amongst his most interesting books but it remains a useful study of American society at that time, and shows much that disturbed Dickens about America, especially slavery. He also used the tour to promote the need for a copyright agreement between Britain and America to stop the piracy of books and stories. Dickens was incensed that American publishers could grow rich on reprinting his work without paying a penny.

  Dickens’s itinerary was exhausting – Boston, Hartford, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati . . . and on and on. And all the time Dickens was in demand and he could not relax. He was feted and applauded, and long before the journey was over Dickens felt trapped by his own fame. He had discovered how difficult it was to escape his celebrity.

  One of the places which Dickens enjoyed was Philadelphia. While there, he was keen to see the vast new Eastern Penitentiary, at the time the largest building in America, and a special visit was arranged
for him. One man who must have envied Dickens was Edgar Allan Poe. Three years older than Dickens, Poe was struggling to find anything remotely like the same attention for his stories and poems. He hoped that Dickens might be his ticket to fame and sought to meet the man when he came to Philadelphia. Dickens made no mention of Poe in his Notes, though the meeting took place, much as described in the following story.

  F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre is the author and co-author of several books, including the science-fiction novels The DNA Disaster (1991) and The Woman Between the Worlds (1994). His non-fiction has been published in The New York Daily News, Literary Review, Games Magazine and many British and US publications. In 2003, he was short-listed for the Montblanc/Spectator Award for his arts journalism.

  6 March, 1842

  The blood! The unrelenting blood! Its flow cannot be stanched!

  The dread pestilence of tubercular consumption, so recently christened by Doctor Schönlein of Berlin, is at once both the red death and the white plague, the latter so named for the ashen death-pallor it confers on its victims. This pallor haunts my earliest memory: when I was not yet two years old, I recall my mother coughing up consumptive blood and tubercular lesions as she died in the cellar of the Indian Queen tavern, in Richmond. Eleven years ago, in Baltimore, the self-same plague carried off my brother Henry, and I left my posting at West Point scantly in time to reach his bedside before he succumbed.

  Now, here in Philadelphia, the white plague has marked its next prey. Three fortnights past, on the twentieth of January – the evening after my thirty-third birthday – I was with my sweet wife, in our rented home at the adjunction of Coats Street and Fairmount on this city’s northwestern outskirts. My darling Virginia was at her piano-forte, performing Thomas Moore’s “Come Rest in This Bosom”. She sweetly sang, in her light and clear soprano . . . when, at midpoint through the third stanza:

  “. . . thine Angel I’ll be

  ’mid the horrors of this.

  Through the furnace, unshrinking . . .”

  Oh, Judas! I beheld the sudden gushing from her mouth, the swift eruption, as my little wife Virginia incontinently coughed up tubercular blood. In the six weeks since then, her consumption has worsened. There is no cure; there is only grim certainty that this plague, this monstrous red death will eventually devour her.

  I have nursed her as best I could. She lies awake with the night sweatings, her thin eyelids so very nearly transparent that I easily perceive the narrow blue veins through her flesh. Her skin has turned as pale as alabaster, in grotesque contrast to her sloe-black eyes. Virginia lies moaning in her narrow bed, with the roof-beam nearly scraping her forehead . . . for our meagre cottage is so small, and its roof inclined so sharply, that the rafter barely affords a passage of three inches above my sick wife as she repines in her agony.

  I have fed her Jew’s beer, and purchased such medications as I can afford or pledge upon. Her mother Maria, my aunt – my beloved Muddy, as we call her – renders such assistance as she can. We must take it in turns to fan my wife, and so cool her fevers, else she cannot breathe at all. Even sweet Catterina, our little tortoise-shell cat, gives aid by lying closely with my wife in her narrow bed, and so sharing the tiny warmth of her own body. This past fortnight, Virginia has haemorrhaged thrice. The bright flame of my little wife’s existence, so briefly lighted, steadily dwindles into gloom.

  We are fortunate, at least, that here in my adopted city Philadelphia I have attained the proudest growth of my literary endeavours. I am situated as editor of Graham’s Magazine, reaping a yearly wage just above $800. Six days ago, on the end-month, George Graham paid me $58 of my salary: I have already spent nearly all on medicines and repayment of debts, yet this sum is the veritable purse of Fortunatus when contrasted with the pathetic wages I received in New-York and Baltimore.

  Here in Philadelphia, this past April witnessed in Graham’s Magazine the publication of my “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, something altogether new and different in literature: a tale of ratiocination and deduction; of a crime committed, clues perceived, and a solution deduced. In spasmodic leaps, my reputation grows . . . and I yearn that my invalid wife may yet live long enough to behold the sacred day when chance and fortune elevate me to the station rightfully my due, as the author and journalist Edgar A. Poe.

  It maddens me that I remain so little known, so unacclaimed. Recent numbers of the Philadelphia Public Ledger have heralded the approach of the English author Charles Dickens, visiting America on a lecture tour. Dickens! The most applauded author in the world! The most beloved . . . and, assuredly, the wealthiest. This man Dickens is three years younger than I; in consequence, he has spent the less time toiling at our mutual craft. Yet fame, wealth, adulation come easily to him, while I labour in unjust obscurity. Last May, I reviewed Mr Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge for the Saturday Evening Post . . . and in such wise I glean a few crumbs of the public crust for myself and my writing, as a parasite upon the works of Dickens! Meantime, my own two volumes of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque were first published nearly two years past by Lea & Blanchard of this city, yet continue to lie fallow in the book-stalls. If justice dwelt in earthly realms, this Charles Dickens would be writing reviews of my tales, while I would be touring the world and harvesting acclaim!

  Still, I may yet achieve a portion of my due. The gazettes report that, yester-evening, Mr Dickens arrived in Philadelphia from New-York. He has slipped past me in the night, then: for my small rented hovel in northwestern Philadelphia stands only a few yards north to the tracks of the Columbia Rail Road which conveyed Mr Dickens to this place.

  I have sent greetings to Mr Dickens by courier, taking care to refer to the two volumes of my Tales. This morning, while my poor wife coughed and vomited, I received a reply from Dickens, vowing that he will deign to meet me in his rooms at the United States Hotel, in tomorrow’s forenoon. I mean to urge him to take copies of my stories back to Britain with him, and thus contrive that the combined weight of my literary skill and Mr Dickens’s influences will persuade some London publisher to bring forth an edition of my Tales. There being no copyright agreement a-twixt our two nations, I can only hope that England’s publishers will prove honest enough to midwife my stories without diddling me out of fair payment. The world has cheated me more than enough.

  7 March

  The United States Hotel, on Chesnut Street between Fourth and Fifth Streets, is at once both familiar ground and yet alien domain to me. Familiar, because my editorial desk in the offices of Graham’s Magazine is situated on the top storey of Mr Graham’s premises at the southwest corner of Chesnut and Third, affording me a splendid view of the roof and façade of the hotel. The Philadelphia Public Ledger emits its gazettes from a lower storey of the same building as Graham’s offices. At the crossroads of Chesnut and Fourth, adjoining the hotel to its east, stand the mocking portals of Lea & Blanchard: alleged publishers of my Tales of the Grotesque, which they refuse to advertise. Within that same block of edifices – Chesnut, between Fourth and Fifth – I am taunted by the eight Doric pillars forming the mocking countenance of the Second Bank of the United States, which failed so ignominiously thirteen months ago. Before that debacle, I had contracted with Mr Graham to finance – and with his colleague J. R. Pollock to publish – what would have been my proudest achievement: The Penn Magazine, a journal to be wholly edited and largely written by myself. Had the bank suspensions not queered my prospects for this venture, I would now be a successful editor, with sufficient wealth to house my dear wife and her mother in a far more healthful domicile. When the Second Bank collapsed, it killed my hopes . . . yet the edifice still stands, taunting me. Just farther westward on Chesnut, between Seventh and Eighth Streets, stands the Masonic Hall where – three years past – I glimpsed within its exhibition cage the bestial Ourang-Outang that inspired my “Murders in the Rue Morgue”. This thoroughfare, indeed, is known to me.

  Yet the United States Hotel – the most luxurious guesthouse in Phi
ladelphia – is terra incognita . . . for I have never previously entered its foyer, owing to the fact that my shabby appearance would at once declaim me as a trespasser in such wealthed environs.

  At quarter-past eleven this morning I entered the hotel, dressed in a suit of sombre black – formerly blue, yet dyed the darker colour to conceal its frayings – and a mended pair of gloves . . . for I have nothing better to wear. In the hotel’s lobby, lacking a carte-visite, I gave my name to a negro pageboy along with Mr Dickens’s regards, and I was swiftly ushered into the suite of the distinguished Englishman.

  Charles Dickens, I observed, wore a fawn-coloured morning-suit and a chocolate-coloured velvet waistcoat, surmounted with a watch-chain and fob which are – my instincts warrant it – genuine gold. His necktie, of dark green silk, is restrained by a tie-clasp ornamented in diamonds: I am confident as to their authenticity. In this man’s mere ornaments, I am confronted by more wealth than I have ever possessed in my lifetime!

  Dickens is clean-shaven, with smooth youthful features nearly girlish in tone, framed by auburn hair: a trifle longer than the American fashion, and a more attractive hue than my own dark brown tresses. At five foot nine, he stands an inch taller than myself. I have studied this man’s particulars intently enough to know that Charles Dickens’s thirtieth birthday occurred precisely one month ago this very day, yet he might easily pass for a man of some seven years younger. If his soul knows aught of hunger or despair, I fail to discern it in his smooth unlined face.

  As his first lecture of the day was imminent – in the theatre just west of here: at Sixth Street, below the Arcade – I hastened to my purpose. Giving Mr Dickens the two volumes of my Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, I made bold to suggest that he might find some London publisher willing to venture them. Hoping to drum up some interest in my poetic achievements, I drew Dickens into a comparison between my own verse “Al Aaraaf” and Emerson’s “The Humble Bee”, the latter ode being laughable in its ineptitude.