by Otto Penzler
In that first Chambrun novel he was seen through the eyes of a young woman who did public relations for the Beaumont. I had learned long ago that when you are dealing with a special background you have to avoid telling it from the point of view of someone who knows everything about it. If you do, you have to know everything yourself, an impossibility with only relatively superficial research. You view your expert from the outside; everything he says about his specialty is true and accurate; but you stay out of his head because you couldn’t possibly describe the thinking of that expert and make it sound real.
So Chambrun was seen in that first book by the young woman who worked for him, and by the young man with whom she fell in love in the course of the story. Through them we met Jerry Dodd, the Beaumont’s security man, Betsy Ruysdale, Chambrun’s fabulous secretary, the various maitre d’s, desk clerks, bellhops, doormen, all a part of the Beaumont’s handpicked staff. We saw for the first time the Trapeze Bar, hung like a birdcage over the Beaumont’s lobby, the Blue Lagoon Nightclub, the Spartan Bar, a remnant of male chauvinism, where old gentlemen play backgammon and chess without the danger of intrusion by females and where they reminisce about the days when their joints didn’t creak and when if they whistled at a girl, she might pay attention.
All this was there to surround the cannibal of that first novel and to watch his undoing by Pierre Chambrun, who seemed to know how the dice would come up before they were rolled.
That was to be that. I, figuratively, said goodbye to Pierre Chambrun and set about looking for greener fields. I forgot about him for some months until the book came out and the public response came in. Ray Bond was very stern this time. I must do another Chambrun book.
There were problems. The young girl and her lover who had been the objective observers of Chambrun in the first book had, so to speak, ridden off into the sunset. There had to be a new “viewpoint character,” so Mark Haskell was born. Mark is a brash young man who took over the public relations job at the Beaumont. He falls in love forever about once a year, which means that, by and large, he has a new girl interest in each book. He views with some cynicism the daily problems at the Beaumont, problems faced by any big luxury hotel: the drunks, the deadbeats, the call girls, the endless cantankerous and baseless complaints, the heart attacks suffered by elderly gentlemen in the wrong rooms. He found out something that might have disturbed Beaumont guests: there is a card on each registered guest indicating his financial and business standing, whether or not he is an alcoholic, whether he is a husband cheating on his wife or she is a wife cheating on her husband, his political affiliations (particularly if he is one of the many United Nations people who stay at the Beaumont). Finally Mark found himself caught up in what he calls “the Chambrun disease,” a passion for the smooth running of the hotel. Every night he checks through the bars, the restaurants, the nightclubs, the ballrooms, “like Marshall Dillon putting Dodge City to bed for the night.”
Pierre Chambrun had to be more than the somewhat one-dimensional figure he’d been in the first book, the expert on hotel management who used his knowledge to solve a particular crime. He had to become a fully rounded human being, but we could only find out about him through what other people observed. I still had to stay out of Chambrun’s mind because I couldn’t begin to know all that he is supposed to know about his special world.
Mark is continually surprised to find that when he takes a piece of information to Chambrun the Great Man already knows about it. “When I don’t know what’s going on in my hotel it will be time for me to retire,” Chambrun says. And he knows because everyone on his staff, from dishwasher to accountant, from floor maid to security personnel, instantly reports anything out of line. People who work for Chambrun have learned long ago that they won’t be blamed for mistakes, only for covering up on them. If anyone has any doubts about how to handle a situation, they come to Chambrun. He then shares in the responsibility for any decision made, right or wrong. If you don’t know for certain how to handle a situation and you don’t go to him and you muff it, you’ve had it.
But what about the man as a human being? He began to grow, almost without my having thought about him in advance. His habits were easy. He eats only twice a day, a very hearty breakfast and a gourmet dinner at night, prepared by the Beaumont’s French chef. He drinks Turkish coffee all day long, prepared by Miss Ruysdale in a coffee maker in his office. He smokes Egyptian cigarettes. He lives in a penthouse which he owns, on the roof of the hotel, but in his whole history we have only been in it once when the owner of the hotel was loaned it for security reasons. If he has a private life there, not even Mark or Jerry Dodd, the shrewd security chief, knows truly what it is. There are rumors about Miss Ruysdale, the cool, chic, and efficient secretary who seems able to anticipate Chambrun’s needs in any crisis. Chambrun calls her simply “Ruysdale,” as impersonal as you can imagine. And yet Mark thinks that she may supply needs of Chambrun’s that have no relationship to the business. “If Ruysdale is ever in any danger we may find out the truth about them,” Mark has said. Someday that may happen, and then, perhaps, we will know.
Where did Chambrun come from? What do we know about his past? Well, he is French, English educated, with a later degree in hotel management from Cornell. The presence of foreign diplomats who stay at the Beaumont revealed, early on, a whole segment of Chambrun’s past. The outbreak of World War II sent him back to his native country where he fought in the Resistance in Paris. It is hard to associate the dapper little man sitting behind his carved Florentine desk in his office in the Beaumont with the violence of those times. He calls those “the dark days”: a time when he was involved in hanging Nazi war criminals from the nearest lamppost. So we know that he was imbued with unusual physical courage, had a gift for secret stratagems and a passion for justice.
So it developed that the Hotel Beaumont, regardless of who owns the real estate and the building, is Chambrun’s creation. It is a very complete world in itself with Chambrun the king, or the president, or the mayor, or whatever title you like to use. In the simple yet complex things involving service to the guests, Chambrun can take pride in what he offers. No two suites in the Beaumont are decorated alike, the artwork on the walls is real and not reproduction; the cuisine is unsurpassed anywhere in the world, the wine celler incomparable. The service is elegant, courteous, quiet, and totally efficient. You want privacy, you get privacy; you are a movie star or a politician and you want it known you are in town, it becomes known. If you have a problem and you need help, there is a man sitting in a plush office on the second floor who will provide assistance and compassion if you ask for it. His name is Pierre Chambrun.
But there is one key thing about Chambrun, I think, and he has put it into words. “We live in an unjust world,” he has said. “We live in a world corrupted by the super-rich, the super-powerful, who use bribery and terror to satisfy their greed for more wealth and more power.” His eyes, buried in their pouches, glitter brightly as he says this. “But they will not play their games here in the Beaumont, my hotel! We will cater to their tastes in caviar and champagne, but not to their games of violence and terror. Let them try to use the Beaumont as a stage for their kind of evil and they will find themselves crushed and thrown out on the street. And I am the man who can do it!”
This from the man whose square, stubby-fingered hands can make Chopin’s music sing on the grand piano in his apartment. A man of contrasts, Pierre Chambrun: a gentle and compassionate man who can turn into a cold and implacable enemy of evil.
That’s how he has developed over the years, and I expect I will learn more about him as time goes on.
Inspector Cockrill
Christianna Brand
SHREWD AND ACERBIC, THE aging and birdlike inspector of the Kent County Police is one of the kindest and gentlest of detectives. His irascibility tends to conceal a genuine humanitarianism.
Cockrill has not appeared in many books, and in no recent novels, but his cases have been unfail
ingly memorable. Curiously, the popularity of both the detective and the author have lagged behind critical acclaim. Erik Routley, in The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story, describes Green for Danger as “one of the really great detective novels of all time.” A motion picture was made from the book a year after its publication, and noted film authority William K. Everson wrote, in The Detective on Film, “Despite the admitted entertainment value of literally thousands of movie mysteries, barely a handful have really matched the skill, cunning, and meticulous construction of their source novels. The British Green for Danger was one that did.” The demanding Everson listed only two others. And the dean of American mystery critics, Anthony Boucher, wrote, “You have to reach for the greatest of the Great Names (Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen) to find Brand’s rivals in the subtleties of the trade. …”
Mary Christianna Milne was born in Malaya in 1907 and lived there and in India before attending an English convent school. She worked as a governess, dress packer, receptionist in a nightclub, professional ballroom dancer, model, secretary, salesgirl, interior decorator, demonstrator of gadgets at trade fairs, and ran a club for working girls. Married to a surgeon, she makes her home in London, and has resumed writing mysteries after a twenty-year hiatus.
Inspector Cockrill
by Christianna Brand
TWO THOUSAND WORDS, HE says—“or thereabouts.” Am I, then, to squeeze this important biography into a mere two thousand words? Is Inspector Cockrill, with all my devotion to him, to be crammed hugger-mugger into so narrow a pint pot?
Well—none better, you may think: for Cockie, it must be admitted, is a little man—unique in being several inches below the minimum height for a British policeman. He came into being in the fine, free, careless days before I became hagridden by the necessity for accuracy in detail. At intervals during his literary career, I have tried to add a bit to his stature, he “looks shorter than he actually is,” and so on; but for the most part we find him described as a sparrow, a small, dusty brown sparrow—“soon he was, sparrow-like, hopping and darting this way and that in search of crumbs of information.” “What a funny little man!” thinks Louli, in Tour de Force, and “A little man, he is,” says one of the twins in a short story, “Blood Brothers.” He adds, I’m sorry to say: “And near retiring age, he must be. He looks like a grandfather.”
For not only is Inspector Cockrill too short to have been in the force; he does also seem to be a bit too old.
True, in Fog of Doubt (British title: London Particular), his hair is said to be gray, but, were it not so entirely out of character, we might here suspect him of having taken a leaf out of M. Poirot’s book. For elsewhere, it is indubitably white: “a little brown man with bright brown, bird-like eyes deep-set beneath a fine broad brow, with an aquiline nose and a mop of fluffy white hair fringing a magnificent head.” “Fringing” does even suggest a touch of baldness but this, I swear, is no more than a thinness on top. He is old enough, at any rate, to be wondering rather anxiously whether he may not be in danger of becoming a dirty old man—dearly loving, as he does, a pretty girl. Nothing could be further from the truth—Venetia and Fran, the loving and confiding sisters, sad, gentle Esther Sanson, enchanting Louli, so comic and so vulnerable, even the bouncy little sexpot Rosie—they were all safe enough with him; and when the dreadful Grace Morland sets her cap at him, “though half-heartedly, for he was not to be considered her equal in education or birth,” he thinks of her without rancor merely as a sentimental goat. I mention it only to suggest that he is old enough to be already a little in dread of the approach of senility. There is even a terrible moment in Tour de Force when the local police chief of the island of San Juan el Pirata refuses to believe he can be in the British police. The tourist guide is forced into apprehensive explanation: “Inspector, he says—he says that you are too old.”
“Too old?” said Cockie in a voice of doom.
If he is elderly, however, the inspector has made up for it by remaining, like the matinee idols of his youth, at the same age for something like thirty years. Any further comparison would hardly stand up; one could by no means describe his attire as the pink of sartorial perfection. He has a habit of picking up the first hat to hand; “Well, never mind—it’s quite a good fit,” he will say. Any hat that does not deafen and blind him is quite a good fit to Inspector Cockrill. “ ‘I must have picked up my sergeant’s by mistake,’ he said, irritably, pushing the enormous hat up from over his eyes for the fifth time. ‘I’m always doing it.’ He seemed perfectly indifferent to anything but the discomfort involved by this accident.” The hat will be crammed sideways on to his head as though he might at any moment break out into an amateur rendering of Napoleon’s Farewell to his Troops. True, on his one visit abroad—Cockie simply hates Abroad!—he does acquire a rather splendid straw, but “contrary to custom, he had bought it, not two sizes too large for him, but considerably too small, and it sat on his splendid head like a paper boat, breasting the fine spray of his greying hair.” He wears a rather rumpled gray suit and, far ahead of his time, a disreputable old mac trailing over his shoulder. He smokes incessantly, rolling his own shaggy cigarettes, holding them cupped in the palm of his right hand so that the fingers are so stained with nicotine as to appear to be tipped with mahogany.
But by no means suppose my hero to be a figure of fun. “I hadn’t counted on its being Inspector Cockrill,” says the young villain in “Blood Brothers,” “and to be honest it struck a bit of a chill to the heart of me. His eyes are as bright as a bird’s and they seem to look right down into you. …”
He came into being when, having set my first book in London, I wanted a country background—which necessitated a detective from the local force. He is attached, therefore, to the Kent County Police: a tricky job for his author, getting him to London when a crime must be set there—he is obliged to interfere only in an unofficial character, as personal friend of one or another of the suspects. As he disapproves strongly of the innocently brash young Chief Inspector Charlesworth of New Scotland Yard, it makes for some difficulty all round, not to say an occasional unseemly touch of triumph. “Et, avec un clin d’oeil satisfait, l’Inspecteur Cockrill s’en alla, clopin-clopant dans la nuit,” says the French translation, rounding off Death of Jezebel; and clopin-clopant does seem to just about sum it up.
But at home in Heronsford, matters are very different. “Cockie was sitting with his feet up on the mantelpiece—which fortunately was a low one or his short legs would have been practically vertical and his behind in the fire,” musing on the horrors of eventual retirement. He’ll have to buy a couple of disguises, that’s all, and set up as a private detective, to stave off the boredom. But it had better be elsewhere. “Here in Heronsford, no such attempt would be of the smallest use; no density of beard or whisker could long conceal him from the sheep, black and white, among whom he had moved, the Terror of Kent, for so long. …”
And indeed he can be pretty fierce. “He was widely advertised as having a heart of gold beneath his irascible exterior but there were those who said bitterly that the heart was so infinitesimal and you had to dig so far down to get at it, that it was hardly worth the effort.” Long ago, his wife had died, as had their only child; and with them had died also “all his hope and much of his faith and charity.” The heart is there, nevertheless, however deeply buried. He can be very tender and kind, very understanding with all those pretty girls caught up, innocent, in the ugly toils of murder; with the enchanting old grandmother in her room on the top floor of the house in Maida Vale, enlivening her boredom by pretending to be a good deal more dotty than she actually is. And he will have compassion for the guilty, drawn by inner compulsions to the committing of a single crime. On the other hand, he can be forthright and stern. “He thought it unwise and unhealthy that, because she had died for her sins, she should be allowed to grow into a martyr in the family’s eyes. He thought they should face the facts. ‘She made up her mind to do this t
hing and she worked it all out thoroughly, and acted quickly and cleverly. …’ ” There is no false sentiment about Chief Inspector Cockrill, none at all.
The secret of his success?—which, strange to say, is unfailing—well, I wonder. He is not a great one for the physical details of an investigation: “meanwhile his henchmen pursued their ceaseless activities” writes his creator, not too sure herself exactly what those would be; and he is content to leave fingerprint powder and magnifying glass to the experts, using their findings in a process of elimination, to get down to the nitty-gritty from there on. He has acute powers of observation, certainly; a considerable understanding of human nature, a total integrity and commitment, much wisdom; and as we know a perhaps overlong experience of the criminal world. (“And buns in the oven is the net result,” says naughty little Rosie, confessing, in Fog of Doubt [British title: London Particular] to conduct unbecoming a young maiden, on a recent visit to the continent. She adds that now she supposes he will be shocked. “My dear child,” says Cockie, “you should come to the Heronsford police court some time!”)
Above all—he has patience.
And spell it another way, and you have his biography, not only in a pint pot, but reduced right down to a nutshell. For Detective Chief Inspector Cockrill is the dead spittin’ image of my father-in-law; and my father-in-law was for over fifty years a medical practitioner in a Welsh mining town about the same size as Heronsford.
