Death of Anton
Alan Melville
With an Introduction
by Martin Edwards
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Originally published in 1936 by Skeffington
Reprinted by kind permission of Eric Glass Ltd on behalf of the Estate of Alan Melville
Copyright © 2015 Estate of Alan Melville
Introduction copyright © 2015 Martin Edwards
Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library
First E-book Edition 2017
ISBN: 9781464208737 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
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Contents
Death of Anton
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
More from this Author
Contact Us
Introduction
Alan Melville’s Death of Anton is a lively whodunnit in which murder stalks a travelling circus. First published in 1935, this is another lost gem from the Golden Age of Murder between the two world wars which has been rescued from oblivion by the British Library. “The greatest show on earth” provides an engaging backdrop for an example of “the grandest game in the world”, to use a favourite phrase of John Dickson Carr, one of the finest practitioners of traditional detective fiction. Melville’s brief contribution to the genre is much less celebrated by mystery fans than Carr’s, but this story shows that his work does not deserve to be forgotten.
The eponymous Anton and his seven Bengal tigers form “the Most Fearless and Sensational Act in the History of Animal Training”, and when Anton is found dead in a cage in the company of his tigers, the obvious assumption is that he has been mauled to death. Things are never so simple in a detective novel, however, and after Joseph Carey, the circus owner, invites Detective Inspector Minto from Scotland Yard to look into what has happened, it emerges that Anton was murdered by one of his enemies in the circus. But which one? Suspects include the man who takes over Anton’s act, a trapeze artist, a clown, and Carey himself.
Minto’s methods are frequently unorthodox, as when he pretends to be a housing inspector (“Did you get the form?…it’s just a formality you know, Housing Act of 1935”) in order to gain access to suspicious premises, but he is decent and likeable. So is his brother Robert, a Catholic priest, who provides him with a crucial lead as he sets about untangling a web of criminality, but is unable to disclose who has, under the seal of the confessional, admitted to killing Anton. Fresh dramas unfold, involving both the trapeze and the tigers, before justice is done.
The story is told with a youthful exuberance, which is unsurprising, given that the author was still in his twenties. It tends to be forgotten that much of the best Golden Age fiction was written by young men and women. John Dickson Carr, for instance, was also in his twenties when his early crime novels were published, while Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Anthony Berkeley, the cream of the crop, also started young. This helps to explain why they were able to write about the serious business of murder with an irrepressible joie de vivre.
Alan Melville (1910–1983) was a man of many parts. Born William Melville Caverhill, he began his working life at Berwick-upon-Tweed in the family timber business, and ended it as a well-known wit, raconteur, and television celebrity. Along the way, he tried his hand at many forms of writing, and produced half a dozen detective novels in a brief flurry during the mid-1930s, before abandoning the genre for richer pickings elsewhere. He did, however, adapt his first whodunnit, Week-end at Thackley, into a play, which duly became Hot Ice, a film screened in 1952.
Melville showed that he had a way with words early in life, and he won a return trip to Canada as a prize in a literary competition at the age of 22. He started writing lyrics for songs, and joined the BBC as a scriptwriter in its variety department. Having gained experience as a radio producer, he proceeded to combine writing revues with war service; he enlisted in the RAF, rising to the rank of wing commander, and taking part in the Normandy landings. He wrote several popular light-hearted plays, and the book and lyrics to Ivor Novello’s final musical, Gay’s the Word.
The television era saw his career take a fresh turn. Before long, it was hard to avoid Alan Melville, as his range of interests was matched by unfailing industry. He became chairman of The Brains Trust—on one programme he sparred with Nancy Spain, another TV celebrity who dabbled in humorous detective fiction. Later he hosted a satiric revue series called A–Z, and was a panellist on What’s My Line? and a “castaway” on the long-running radio show Desert Island Discs. In the 1960s, he presented Before the Fringe, a series focusing on the genial humour popular in the days before Beyond the Fringe took comedy in a new and edgier direction. As an actor, his credits included parts in a televised adaptation of Noel Coward’s once-controversial play The Vortex, and in By the Sword Divided, a costume drama set around the time of the English Civil War. Melville spent his last thirty years or so resident in Brighton, and became a regular at the Neptune Inn in Hove, a haunt of many of his contemporaries in the theatre. Versatile as ever, he was occasionally to be found serving behind the bar. A.S. Byatt’s description of him as a “chameleon” seems apt.
He used the title of one of his television shows, Merely Melville, for an autobiography, but in later life he had little to say about his work as a detective novelist. Probably, like so many of his contemporaries, he regarded his crime writing as akin to a guilty secret, considering his other work to be much more important. But the appeal of detective fiction is enduring, and Melville made a lively if short-lived contribution to the genre. Its rediscovery by the British Library will be welcomed by readers in search of light-hearted escapism.
Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com
Chapter One
The circus came to town.
It arrived, not with any of the majesty and excitement which herald the arrival of a small circus in a small town, but with all the modern efficiency for which Joseph Carey’s World-Famous Circus and Menagerie was famous. There was no triumphal procession through the streets of the town to delight the youngsters, give a brief preview of the circus’s delights, and act as a powerful piece of publicity; instead, the two special trains which pulled Carey’s Circus around Britain during the summer months rolled more or less smoothly into the station between eleven and twelve o’clock on that hot July night.
From the first of these trains there stepped out a
small army of human beings, well-dressed and apparently prosperous. If every available hoarding in the town had not been plastered with those well-known blue-and-gold posters announcing the coming of Carey’s, it is certain that not one of the passengers waiting on the platform that night would have recognized any of these human beings as circus people. At a pinch, they might have taken them for the cast of some extravagant and successful musical comedy which had condescended to visit the town. But never as people of the circus.
The porter who attended to Herr Ludwig Kranz’s suit-cases and travelling-rug, for instance, would never have imagined for one moment that this tall, distinguished, and good-looking young man with the slightly foreign accent who was inquiring about the locality of the best hotel in the town was none other than Anton, whose name appeared at the top of the blue-and-gold posters. Anton and His Seven Bengal Tigers, The Most Fearless and Sensational Act in the History of Animal Training. Direct from His Continental Successes, First Time in Britain, Secured at Enormous Expense. There were many more-than-life-size posters of Anton besprinkled over the town, showing the gentleman clad only in a small triangle of tiger-skin (doubtless made out of one of his former conquests) and surrounded by seven ferocious tigers, all sitting on their rear portions on boxes of varying heights.
Until he paid a visit to the circus on its opening night, the porter would never have associated that sparsely-clad figure with the elegant gentleman who gave him a tip several times larger than he was accustomed to receive. Herr Ludwig Kranz, buried deep in an expensive camel-hair overcoat and smoking a cigarette which conjured up visions of harems and Eastern potentates in the simple mind of the porter, was a very different-looking personality from Anton, the gentleman who appeared with next to nothing on inside a cage which also housed seven none too friendly tigers. These two beings were, however, one and the same person, as the porter found when he sat down on the hard one-and-threepenny benches, which was the cheapest way of seeing Carey’s World-Famous Circus and Menagerie. “Gorluvaduck!” as the porter remarked to his best girl. “That’s the lad what slipped me a couple o’ bob tip last night. ’Struth!…I hope them ruddy tigers don’t do nothing to him.”
“Why not, Bert?” inquired the best girl.
“Well, he’ll be going away by train again, end of the week. And I know who’ll be looking after his bags all right. Yours truly, if there’s another couple o’ bob going.”
The small gentleman who followed Anton out of the compartment was even more difficult to place in his true light. He was dressed quietly in a well-cut, dark-grey suit. His collar was of the stiff variety which is now even losing its grip on its last stronghold, the necks of successful stockbrokers. A bowler hat crowned his head and a neatly rolled umbrella dangled over his arm. He, too, passed on the job of coping with his luggage to a porter, for he was carrying—in addition to the umbrella and a Burberry—a copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which is enough for any man to deal with and at the same time manage to get out his ticket in time to be punched at the barrier.
The few people on the platform, if they troubled to think about him at all, would almost certainly have put this gentleman down as a sober and successful business man, a man who dictated letters all day to a pretty stenographer without ever splitting an infinitive or leaving a preposition at the end of a sentence…and who never thought of his stenographer as anything but a stenographer.
The lady standing beside the chocolate machine on the platform went, in fact, a stage further in guessing the business of this immaculate little man. She was a teacher of mathematics in the local elementary school, and as soon as he stepped down from the train she scented danger on the following morning. Miss Jenkins was perfectly certain that the immaculate little man was one of those archfiends, His Majesty’s Inspectors of Education; she rushed at once to warn the other members of the staff of the impending peril. He looked exactly like an inspector, and it was fully two months since one had swooped down on the school. Yes, an inspector, without the slightest doubt: the bowler and the umbrella gave him away at once, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom settled it.
Miss Jenkins spent a horrible morning the next day, with her class taut and tense, waiting for the classroom door to open and the immaculate little man to walk in and start asking awkward questions. He did not come. Miss Jenkins, in fact, did not see him again until she visited the circus on the Thursday evening, and even then she was unable to penetrate the immaculate little man’s disguise. It was not easy to do so: a white face, a red nose, a ginger wig, baggy trousers of an enormous check pattern, a tiny comic hat, and a waistcoat with the Union Jack stitched on the back—all these made a great difference to the soberly dressed individual who stepped down from the train that night. He was, however, Dodo—King of Clowns.
The platform filled up with the discharge of people from the train. They stood about in groups—acrobats, bare-back riders, the owner and trainer of Horace (the World’s Most Intelligent Performing Sea-Lion), clowns, trapeze artists, jugglers, and the rest. They had none of the glamour and excitement which would be so much in evidence at this hour tomorrow night, when they would be wearing considerably less and doing considerably more than at present. Only one of the battalion, in fact, seemed to be doing anything at all, and he was certainly making a great deal of noise. Mr. Joseph Carey, proprietor of the most famous touring circus in Britain, lost no time in letting the townspeople know that Carey’s Circus had arrived.
“Don’t suppose there’ll be taxis in a place like this, eh?” demanded Mr. Carey, throwing away the stub of a cigar on to the rails.
“Yes, sir. Outside the station, sir.”
“Enough for all this bunch, eh?”
“Well, sir—I don’t know about that, sir.”
“No. Didn’t expect you would. Mr. Johnston! Where’s Mr. Johnston? Get Mr. Johnston, will you? ’Ere—Mr. Johnston…are you in charge of the advance arrangements for this circus, or aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I mean, I am, sir.”
“And ’aven’t I told you a ’undred times that being in charge of advance arrangements means looking after the comfort of the artists, as well as letting the public know what’s coming to ’em?”
“Well, sir…I mean, yes, sir.”
“And doesn’t looking after the comfort of the artists include such-like things as carting ’em from the station to their hotels, eh?”
“Well, yes, sir. I suppose so, sir. But I thought—”
“I don’t pay you to think, Mr. Johnston. If I’d wanted someone to think I wouldn’t ’ave engaged you as advance manager. Get a couple o’ dozen cabs. And make it snappy, will you?”
“Yes, sir.”
The overworked and underpaid Mr. Johnston flies off to round up all available forms of vehicles, however ancient or unreliable, and the army saunters down the platform and across the bridge and out, via the booking-hall, into the town, and are bundled into the various vehicles, and discover (as Mr. Johnston discovered when he paid his first visit to the town six weeks before) that their hotels are mostly less than five minutes’ walk from the station, and that they could have been safely inside them long before this had it not been for the Boss’s concern for the comfort of his artists.
Caravans? Tents? Such things are simply not mentioned in connection with a circus like Joseph Carey’s, which has appeared by Royal Command and has been patronized by most of the crowned heads of Europe, not to mention a certain well-known politician who very nearly threw up his portfolio in order to become a trapeze artist. There are, certainly, a number of lesser persons who put up for the night in caravans dotted over the field where the circus is to be held, but these are mainly the corps of workers whose job it is to put up and take down the big tent in an amazingly short time. These men, and the men responsible for looking after the animals and cleaning out their cages, live in the shadow of the big tent and are the only remnants of the good old days when a circus was a
circus and not a mammoth touring variety show. But the actual performers are all housed under proper roofs and on more or less proper beds in various establishments in the town, according to their prominence in the bill.
Anton, the gentleman who befriended the Seven Bengal Tigers; Dodo, the highest-paid clown in the business; Lorimer and Loretta, the world’s most sensational trapeze artists; the stars of the show, such as these, have the best rooms reserved for them in advance in the Station Hotel. A little further down the scale, Lars Peterson and his Intelligent Sea-Lion will be found in the second-best hotel in the town, the King’s Head. (Or, to be more accurate, Lars Peterson will be found there, most probably drinking a succession of quick whiskies in the bar; Horace, his sea-lion, is living happily in his tank at the back of the big tent.)
And so on, right down the programme, until one comes to the lesser clowns, the foils to Dodo, and those rather pathetic females who are now losing their figures and whose job in the circus is to hand a great variety of articles to the jugglers, or to stand in the middle of the ring and make “allezoop!” noises whenever their more famous colleagues have brought off some particularly daring feat. This last category will be found in some rather dilapidated boarding-house in the town, grumbling at the hardness of the beds and the softness of the drinks, and talking nineteen to the dozen about the days when they were on the legitimate stage (which means the music-halls), and actually took part in the acrobatic feats instead of merely standing to one side and bowing, in a tired fashion, to applause that is not for them.
There is one exception to this rule. However hard you may look, you will not find Mr. Joseph Carey himself in any of the hotels or boarding-houses. You will find him instead on the scene of battle, in an enormous green-and-white caravan pitched in a corner of the field where the circus is to be held. It is one of Mr. Carey’s little idiosyncrasies. He insists on his artists being put up in the best hotels (or in the worst, according to their value in the circus); but he himself always stays in his caravan beside the big tent. Asked for his reasons for this, Mr. Carey will reply that he likes to hang on to the glorious traditions of the circus, that he is a Regular Trouper, that a caravan was good enough for his father and is good enough for him. An answer, incidentally, that is usually taken with considerably more than the average grain of salt, and even greeted on occasions with murmurs of “Baloney!”…for Mr. Carey only came into the circus business three or four years ago, after losing a great deal of money on three revues called, successively but not successfully, Femmes de Paris, Nuits de Paris, and Joies de Paris.
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