The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries
E. X. Ferrars
Edited by John Cooper
Crippen & Landru Publishers
Norfolk,Virginia
2012
This compilation copyright © 2012 by Peter MacTaggart, the author’s son and proprietor
Introduction copyright © 2012 John Cooper
Cover artwork by Gail Cross
Lost Classics design by Deborah Miller
Crippen & Landru logo by Eric D. Greene
Lost Classics logo by Eric D. Greene, adapted from a drawing by Ike Morgan, ca 1895
Crippen & Landru Publishers
P. O. Box 9315
Norfolk, VA 23505
USA
e-mail: [email protected]
Web: www.crippenlandru.com
Contents
Introduction by John Cooper
The Case of the Two Questions
The Case of the Blue Bowl
The Case of the Auction Catalogue
The Case of the Left Hand
Invitation to Murder – On the Party Line
A Lipstick Smear Points to the Killer
Custody
The Trap
Stop Thief!
The Long Way Round
Fly, Said the Spy
Instrument of Justice
Suicide
Look for Trouble
Justice in My Own Hands
The Handbag
Sequence of Events
Sources
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
INTRODUCTION
Elizabeth Ferrars (1907-1995) was the pseudonym of Morna Brown, who was known as E.X. Ferrars in the United States. She wrote seventy-one detective novels over a period of fifty-five years (see Appendix 1). According to her British publishers, she was one of Collins’ biggest sellers. She also contributed the last two chapters to the collaborative story “Crime on the Coast” which first appeared as a serial in the News Chronicle in 1954 and in book form in the United Kingdom in 1984, and the United States in 1987.
She had a marvellous talent for weaving elegant mysteries around middle-class characters in a traditional English setting. Some are located in and around the fictitious town of Helsington. However, several of her books have settings as diverse as Italy (Alibi for A Witch), Africa (The Swaying Pillars), a Greek island (No Peace for the Wicked), Australia (Small World of Murder, Come And Be Killed), France (Hunt The Tortoise), Madeira (Skeleton Staff, Breath of Suspicion, Witness Before the Fact). Her skill was always to involve the reader with her characters and their entanglement in crime, which was usually murder. Her books have no gratuitous violence and, although moving with the times, she stayed true to the spirit of the Golden Age of crime writing. She admitted that Agatha Christie was her favourite writer of detective fiction but she was also a great fan of Rex Stout. Her own books usually took four months to write.
Elizabeth Ferrars showed great dexterity in plotting and over the years her books have been well reviewed by many critics (see Appendix 2). Some fine examples of Elizabeth Ferrars’ work are Give a Corpse a Bad Name (1940), Milk of Human Kindness (1950), Enough to Kill a Horse (1955), Murder Moves in (UK) or Kill or Cure (US) (both 1956), The Small World of Murder (1973), Thinner Than Water (UK 1981, US 1982), Something Wicked (1984), Beware of the Dog (UK 1992, US 1993), and A Hobby of Murder (UK 1994, US 1995).
Elizabeth Ferrars was a founding member of the Crime Writers’ Association and its chairman during 1977-1978. In 1958, she edited and wrote an introduction to the C.W.A. anthology Planned Departures. She was also a member of the Detection Club and the Mystery Writers of America. H.R.F. Keating included her 1946 novel Murder Among Friends in his Crime and Mystery, The 100 Best Books. In April 1980, Collins Crime Club celebrated “Fifty Golden Years of Crime” by reprinting twelve vintage titles originally published between 1930 and 1955. Elizabeth Ferrars’ Enough to Kill a Horse was one of the specially bound volumes chosen and introduced by Julian Symons for this series. Similarly, in the Spring of 1990, a further twelve titles, including Ferrars’ Skeleton in Search of a Cupboard were reprinted celebrating “Sixty Brilliant Years of Collins Crime Club.” Elizabeth Ferrars was awarded a special Silver Dagger in 1980 by the C.W.A. in recognition of her fifty outstanding books.
One of her short stories, “Truthful Witness,” was adapted as a radio play and was broadcast on 2 February 1960 on the Light Programme. It was also read as part of a series called A World of Their Own on 30 December 1969 on Radio 4. These two items are the only broadcasts of material written by Elizabeth Ferrars.
Besides Jonas P. Jonas, Elizabeth Ferrars created five other amateur detectives. The young Toby Dyke, who appears in her first five novels, is “a journalist of sorts” and is assisted by his friend George. Andrew Bennett, retired professor of botany, first surfaced in the excellent Something Wicked and went on to solve eight mysteries. Felix and Virginia Freer, who feature in eight of her later novels, are a husband and wife who have been separated for several years, but continue to meet.
It is in six of Elizabeth Ferrars’ short stories that we meet Jonas P. Jonas, a garrulous, conceited, old codger. The stories were first published during one week in 1958 from December 8 until December 13 in the London Evening Standard. This must have been a pre-Christmas treat for the readers of this newspaper. Although Ferrars never provided a physical description of Jonas, several of the stories were illustrated by Keith Mackenzie. The investigator was depicted as stocky but smart looking, dark suited with thinning dark hair and a moustache. He is variously shown drinking in a pub, sitting on a train, interviewing Hilary Hodson, listening to a telephone call and looking through a letter-box. He was billed by the Evening Standard as “the amazing Jonas P. Jonas” and “fiction’s newest sleuth.”
His cases are related by the wife of Jonas’ nephew, who is a professional writer. At one point, she complains that it would be very difficult for her to write the private investigator’s memoirs. She then goes on to say, “I know I bring in a murder now and then, just to keep things going, but I make it happen among nice people, living in the suburbs, nice, cultivated people with nice comfortable incomes, the sort of people, actually, who in real life practically never take to violence.” This exactly sums up the type of detective novel that Ferrars herself usually wrote.
The other eleven stories that make up this collection span the period 1960 to 1992 and contain a variety of murders from bludgeonings, shootings, and throat cutting to strangulation.
This present volume, plus the nine stories in Designs on Life (1980), collects all the known short stories1 by the phenomenal Elizabeth Ferrars.
John Cooper
Westcliff-on-Sea
THE CASE OF THE TWO QUESTIONS
Ever since I married into the family of Jonas P. Jonas, he has been trying to persuade me to “ghost” his memoirs for him. He has said to me more than once, “What a shame it is that all those experiences of mine haven’t been written down! Ah, what wouldn’t I give for your knack with words, my dear! And what wouldn’t you give for some of my experiences, eh?” In fact, I should hate to have had his experiences. Few writers really want experiences. They want peace and quiet, relieved by the arrival of substantial cheques. I was careful to make that clear to Uncle Jonas before I even agreed to listen to him.
He waved it aside. “Listen, my dear, for years I had to be discreet. For years I had to keep my mouth shut about almost everything that happened to me – just as I had to wear drab clothes and behave in a drab way so that people wouldn’t remember having
seen me. It’s only since I retired that I’ve been able to wear fancy waistcoats or suede shoes when I wanted to. So you see what it means to me just to talk.”
By then I knew very well what it meant to him “just to talk.”
He went on, “Of course, it’s when you know you’ve been clever that it’s hardest not to confide in your friends. You want to ask them what they’d have done in your place, and then show them they wouldn’t have been half as bright as you were.
“For instance, what d’you think you’d have done if a nice-looking young girl, whose eyes were almost crazy with worry, had come to see you in your office, refused to give her name, and said she just wanted to ask you two questions?
“The first question was: Is it possible for a middle-aged woman to go out of a room, get a rifle from somewhere, run about a hundred yards, shoot a man through the head, get rid of the rifle, run home again, and come back into the room without puffing for breath or having a hair of her head disarranged, all in five minutes?
“And second: Was it possible for a car to be driven through a watersplash and back again, without its tires getting wet?”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “What would you have said?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “What did you say?”
“I said no.”
“Just no?”
“What else was there to say? I told you, in those days I never talked any more than I could help.”
“And what did the girl do?”
“She said thank you, got up and walked to the door. Then she turned and looked at me and her eyes were as worried as ever. So I knew, of course, she hadn’t yet asked the questions she really wanted to ask. People never do at first, you know. You have to give them time. So just to help her along, I said, ‘You lied at the inquest, then?’
“She gave a little gasp, and said, ‘How did you know? I haven’t even told you who I am.’
“I said., ‘Well, I read the papers, and it isn’t every murder that happens close to a watersplash. You’re the secretary, aren’t you? – the girl who said Sara Selkirk never left the house that evening.’
“She came back to the chair and sat down again. She said, ‘That’s what Miss Selkirk asked me to say. She said it was just to save her from a lot of nasty publicity. And I didn’t see how she could possibly have had anything to do with the murder, so I didn’t mind agreeing. But you see, she is in love with the other brother, the one who’s inherited all the money. And so, somehow, ever since I told those lies at the inquest, I’ve been almost worried to death.”
I interrupted him. “Just a minute, Uncle Jonas. I realize you’re talking about the Deakin murder, but I was too young at the time to grasp all the details. Perhaps if you could just fill in the picture a little...”
He nodded, a Cheshire grin on his face. “Well, you see, it was Mortimer, the elder of the Deakin brothers, the rich one, who got murdered. Mortimer was a widower whose wife had left him a lot of money. Hubert, the younger brother, was an unsuccessful painter, and he lived in a tumbledown cottage that didn’t even have a garage or a driveway – that’s important, because it explains why Mortimer used to leave his car, a nice Bentley, in the road, about thirty yards from the cottage, when he visited Hubert.
“The number of those visits to Hubert suddenly went up when Mortimer discovered that Hubert’s nearest neighbor was Sara Selkirk, the actress – a very striking woman, as I remember her, very thin and decadent-looking, as was the fashion at the time. The two cottages were about a hundred yards apart, with a watersplash across the lane about halfway between the two of them.
“But Sara hadn’t reciprocated Mortimer’s interest. The events of that evening – the evening of the murder – started, you might say, with Sara’s telephone ringing and her saying to Helen Hudson, her secretary, ‘There’s that wretched man again. You answer for me and say I’m out.’ Then, as the girl went to the telephone, Sara said, ‘While you’re at it I’ll just pop out and put the car away.’
“So Helen answered the telephone, but it wasn’t Mortimer; it was a wrong number, or so she supposed, because when she said hello there was just a click and then nothing. So she put the telephone down again, and a few minutes later Sara came back. She hadn’t been gone more than five minutes. Yet later that night, when the police called in with the news that Mortimer Deakin had been found dead in his car, shot through the head, she made Helen promise not to mention that she’d been out of the room at all.
“The girl thought there couldn’t be much harm in agreeing, because she knew that Sara, who was forty, a chain-smoker and anemic into the bargain, couldn’t have run a hundred yards to where Mortimer’s car was, done the shooting, run back and come in again, cool as a cucumber, all in five minutes.
“But just to make sure that Sara hadn’t gone there and back by car, Helen went to the garage, and there she found that the tires of Sara’s car were perfectly dry. So she couldn’t have driven it through the watersplash. And yet, although it was quite clear that Sara couldn’t possibly have done the murder, the poor secretary got more and more worried about the lies she had told at the inquest. And so she came to me, to see if I could set her mind at rest.
“She’d been spurred on to do something because the police seemed to suspect the young man who had reported finding the car with the body in it, and Helen happened to be very interested in that young man. The police didn’t suspect Hubert at that time, though he had the most obvious motive, because his old housekeeper, deaf as a post but absolutely honest, swore he’d never been out of the house that night.
“It was conceivable, of course, that Hubert might have shot Mortimer, as he sat in the car from a window of the cottage, without the housekeeper hearing it; but Hubert could hardly have done it, and got Mortimer slap through the forehead, unless Mortimer had been sitting in the car with the lights on inside it. The headlights were on, but that would only have made it harder for Hubert to see Mortimer behind them, and the first thing Helen’s young man told the police was that the dead man had been sitting in the car in darkness.
“No, as the evidence then stood, Hubert had nothing whatever to fear from the police. He couldn’t possibly have shot his brother.”
“And yet, as I remember the Deakin case,” I said, “they did arrest Hubert in the end and hang him.”
Uncle Jonas gave a satisfied smile. “Yes, because of something I told them after the secretary had come to see me. I told them that although Sara couldn’t possibly have skipped along that dark road and done the shooting herself, she could have helped Hubert – if the telephone was a signal from him that Mortimer had just gone out to his car to start the journey back to London.
“Sara could then have gone out to her car and turned her headlights full on, just before driving the car into the garage. And that would have made Mortimer, silhouetted against the beam of light, a perfect target for Hubert at his window. The only problem, I told them, was what Hubert had done with the rifle. Well, he’d popped it down an old well in his coal cellar.
“Yes, I told them all that, and then, of course, I tactfully withdrew. It was always very important to me, being on good terms with the police, and that meant knowing the right moment to withdraw tactfully. And I really believe you’re the first person I’ve told the story to since then.”
Somehow I doubted that, but I did not see the virtue of saying so.
“Make what use of it you like,” he added magnanimously. “I just like to talk, and it’s enough for me if you’re really interested. Though if you should happen to use any of it...” He paused, and a shrewd glint came into his eye. “Well, we can talk terms later on, can’t we?”
THE CASE OF THE BLUE BOWL
Well, if you aren’t interested in murder,” said my husband’s uncle, Jonas P. Jonas, “perhaps you’re interested in birds.”
By then I knew him well enough to recognize the gambit. Even if the story that was coming began with birds, it would not take long to get to the bloodshed.
In his retirement Uncle Jonas lived on nostalgic memories of crime and criminals, and the hope that some day he might convert these memories into something more substantial to live on. But for this he needed the assistance of someone with the habit of putting words on paper, and ever since I had married into the family he had been trying in all sorts of ways to overcome my resistance to accepting the part of collaborator.
“The extraordinary thing about birds is the way they learn things,” he went on craftily. “Look at the way they learned about milk bottles. When I was a boy you could leave a milk bottle on the doorstep all day, but what happens if you do that now? Some bird pounces on it the minute it’s been put down, jabs its beak through the top, and guzzles up the cream. Isn’t that amazing? Wouldn’t you like to know about the first bird that thought of doing it?”
“Yes, I think I should,” I said. “Can you tell me?”
“Oh, I don’t mean that I know,” Uncle Jonas said. “I don’t even know when it first began to happen. But I remember when I first heard about it. It was when I was investigating the disappearance of Emily Toombs, the old woman who’d apparently remembered to stop the milk before she vanished but forgotten to stop the newspapers...
“No, don’t worry, my dear, it’s the birds I want to tell you about, not the murder. I know it’s the birds that’ll interest you most, because the murder was just a sordid affair of a poor old woman killed for the imaginary thousands she was supposed to have sewn up in her mattress. They weren’t there, of course, but you know how that sort of story gets around.
“Old Mrs. Toombs lived alone in a rather poor sort of cottage, and she used to be visited from time to time by a nephew who arrived in an expensive car and wore expensive clothes. They weren’t prepared in the village to believe that it was just because he was fond of her. As it turned out, they were quite right about that too. The nephew had other excellent reasons.
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