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A Taste for Honey
A Mycroft Holmes Mystery
H. F. Heard
Foreword by Stacy Gillis, Ph.D.
Afterword by John Roger Barrie
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
TO CHRISTOPHER WOOD
A CONNOISSEUR,
THIS UNCLASSIFIED VINTAGE
CONTENTS
Foreword by Stacy Gillis, Ph.D.
1. The Solitary Fly
2. The New Beekeeper
3. Rolanding the Oliver
4. Fly to Spider
5. The Fly Is Missed
6. Fly Made to Introduce Wasp to Spider
7. Double-crossing Destiny
8. Wasp Strikes Spider
9. Fly Breaks from Wasp
10. As We Were?
Afterword by John Roger Barrie
Preview: Reply Paid
About the Author
FOREWORD
Stacy Gillis, Ph.D.
Who was this old stranger, pushing his advice on me and directing what I should do and whom I should see and in whose care?
It is extremely difficult to escape from Sherlock Holmes. Making his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, Holmes straddles the history of detective fiction. He has become the archetypal detective and his influence is felt across the genres of crime, mystery and detective fiction—whether through an attempt to be as unlike him as possible (as with Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot), through overt references (as with Ian Rankin’s DC Brian Holmes) or through the possession of Holmesian attributes (as with House, M.D.’s Dr Gregory House). Holmes appeared in a number of rewritings, pastiches and parodies, even during Arthur Conan Doyle’s lifetime, and throughout the twentieth century. H. F. Heard is rare, however, amongst these writers, in that he ostensibly chose to concentrate not on the highly recognizable figure of Sherlock but instead on his less well-known, yet intellectually far superior, brother Mycroft. Conan Doyle’s Mycroft may have possessed deductive abilities which surpassed those of his younger brother, but he was either incapable of (or perhaps highly disinclined for) the physical activity which marked much of his brother’s detecting exertions. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” (1908), Mycroft has an undeniable presence:
Heavily built and massive, there was a suggestion of uncouth physical inertia in the figure, but above this unwieldy frame there was perched a head so masterful in its brow, so alert in its steel-gray, deep-set eyes, so firm in its lips, and so subtle in its play of expression, that after the first glance one forgot the gross body and remembered only the dominant mind. (916)
Here Mycroft’s gross build and extreme physical inertia are in evidence, yet the attention is drawn to those intellectual abilities so clearly evident in his physiognomy.
Despite being described by his brother as, at times, being the British government, Mycroft remains a physically inactive individual, one who simply does not care enough to verify his hypotheses, as his brother indicates in “The Greek Interpreter” (1893): “he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right.… [he] is absolutely incapable of working out the practical points” (436). This Mycroft appears to simply not care enough to work through—or is not corporeally capable of working through—the intellectual, the physical and particularly the emotional demands of detecting. Considering this, the individual we meet in A Taste for Honey (1941) is singularly unfamiliar. Heard’s Mycroft is not only a man of science who takes a tremendous sense of achievement from his work, but a humanist who cares about the behavior of those around him, to the extent of taking upon himself the moral (albeit illegal) prerogative of punishing the villain with death. Possessed of supreme deductive skills, this Mycroft actively hunts Heregrove: “No doubt he was an amazing actor, but it was equally clear to me that he was really in high spirits, an old hunter, finding itself once again following a breast-high scent, a veteran adventurer looking once more into the bright eyes of danger” (78). This is certainly not the Mycroft of the Holmes stories—although Conan Doyle’s Mycroft was largely presented to the reader by the only apparently trustworthy medium of Sherlock—but a Mycroft who is both a superb detective and who cares enough to pass ethical judgments and to follow through on these decisions.
Of course, one possibility is that this is not Mycroft at all—but his more famous brother, seeking an anonymous bee-keeping retirement. This possibility, albeit never admitted by Heard, has been discussed for years by Sherlock aficionados—beginning soon after the novel’s publication, a preface to a Heard short story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (1945), stated that “although a certain name never once appeared in the [A Taste for Honey], it became increasing certain that Mr Heard had written a full-length pastiche of the Great Master himself” (98). Whether or not this is a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes or a story about his lesser-known brother is not vital: what is important is that this Mycroft—whether Sherlock, the Mycroft of the Holmes stories or a version of what Mycroft might have been—is merely another re-envisioning, another permutation, of the Holmesian myth, so common in British detective fiction.
British detective fiction has traditionally been understood as more embedded in rural locales than its American counterpart, although this is not to say that all British detective stories are set in country villages and all American detective fiction is set on the “mean streets.” In “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), Raymond Chandler notoriously claimed that British detective fiction was resolutely formulaic and had neither realistic characters nor plot. Chandler was particularly concerned with what we now know as the Golden Age of British detective fiction—populated by such detectives as Poirot, Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn and Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion. While this Golden Age is often understood as belonging to the inter-war years (strictly restricted, for some, to the period between the publication of Christie’s first detective novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1921 and the publication of Sayers’ last detective novel Busman’s Honeymoon in 1936), its style and rural setting have continued to impact on British detective fiction. Published in 1941, A Taste for Honey was firmly in step with this tradition—the village of Ashton Clearwater, with its class stratifications, gossip and local tensions, will be familiar to detective fiction aficionados for its resemblance to such Golden Age locales as St. Mary Mead. The novel clearly places itself in this tradition—albeit playfully—when it opens on the remark that “I read a novel not long ago that made out of every village, however peaceful it looked, to be a little hell of all the seven deadly sins” (3). As with Golden Age detective fiction, the bucolic idyll of Ashton Clearwater is itself revealed to be, in fact, a “little hell.” There is a homicidal maniac in the village who, as Mycroft discovers, is killing for the sake of killing.
It is rare to find a random killer in early British detective fiction—the random killer is someone far more common in the novels of such late twentieth-century authors as Val McDermid and Ian Rankin. In most Golden Age detective fiction the villain kills for a motive: an inheritance, desire for someone’s spouse, fear that a long-kept secret is about to be revealed. In A Taste for Honey, Heregrove kills because he loves to kill. While his apparent first victim is his wife—killed because, as village gossip reveals, their relationship is highly acrimonious—Heregrove goes on to kill because of the pleasure in it:
Here was a desperately cunning man who, starting perhaps with some slight suspicion of me, now evid
ently for sport, if for no other reason, was set on killing me and in an abominably agonizing way, just to show off his malicious power and to experiment with an instrument of death, which, when perfected, he could employ with absolute precision and equal impunity. (58)
In perfecting a new kind of death—one that means he can kill without concern of a motive leading back to him—Heregrove is the perfect killer able to commit the perfect crime: no motive and a “trackless killer” (78). Yet it is the ability to kill without fear of recrimination that leads to Heregrove’s downfall, as Mycroft recognizes:
I know more of bad men than of bad bees. Heregrove will get rid of the present hives, maybe. But, mark my words, he will not give up beekeeping and the new lot will not be less malignant, but more, if he can make. A man like that gets the habit, the taste for malicious power. It grows, and it is harder to break than an addiction for morphia, I know. (31–32)
Here is one explicit reference to Sherlock in the novel—his addiction to morphia—and also to concerns about killing for the love of killing, which are all the more resonant considering that this novel was published during World War Two.
These tensions are all the more compelling considering that the action—the committing of the crime and the resolution—takes place within a small village and that there are, aside from the ubiquitous comedic servant Alice, only three main characters: the first-person narrator Sydney Silchester, the detective Mr. Mycroft and the killer Heregrove. Silchester fulfills the common function of mediating between the detective and the reader—the Watson figure, as Silchester illustrates, is necessary in that he translates for the reader the detective’s cryptic words and action—“Would you be good enough to tell me what we are looking at and what it is meant to convey?” (27), he asks Mycroft at their first meeting.
While Silchester is keen to let all know that he would rather be left alone, the plot hinges on his taste for honey. But if Silchester and Mycroft are linked together by their detecting—the former undertaking much of the physical activity and the latter the intellectual (and emotionally judgmental) activity—so too are Mycroft and Heregrove linked. Silchester notices the physical similarities when talking with Heregrove: “He looked at me with a curiously expressionless face. He certainly was not what fashion papers call prepossessing. Dark, strong, resolute, and intelligent—yes, all these, and cold. Where had I seen a face as cold as that? Of course—old Mycroft’s; but there it seemed to me that coldness came from detachment, this from hardness” (42).
Indeed, just as Heregrove traps Silchester into buying his honey so that he can have an object to kill, Mycroft also traps Silchester with his honey—his intricately lettered sign high up in the hedge pulled Silchester out of his life of retreat—“I supposed I liked life at second hand—reflected, not too real” (5)—into one of necessary action and emotional involvement. This linking of Mycroft and Heregrove makes the final confrontation all the more emotionally fraught.
The final pages of the novel are a justification of the means—however illegal—to stop a killer. If the detective is always right in the detective novel—necessary, some would argue, for a genre in which the reader identifies so strongly with the protagonist—then the detective-as-killer complicates the question of morality. Mycroft tells Silchester that what they do is justified because there is no other way of stopping Heregrove: “The law protects us from the sudden, unpremeditated violence of the untamed blackguard. It is helpless against the calculating malice of a man who patiently and deliberately studies to get around its limitations” (95). Yet the novel does call into question what it means to take a life: if Heregrove kills and is punished, is presenting Mycroft as the supreme moral authority enough to pardon him, in the eyes of the reader, for doing the same with impunity? The detective who kills renders ambivalent the righteous position allocated to this figure within the genre. Silchester certainly does recognize that Mycroft offers Heregrove an escape:
He was, in actual fact, face to face with his judge who was pleading with him to take a last chance—if, as it seemed to me, it was a spurious offer—to escape his doom. It was appallingly thrilling to me, this scene, which, with its tragicomic irony, seemed to me, as I watched it, to be more terrible than any trial scene, when the dry-mouthed prisoner at the bar sees the judge put on the black cap. (117)
Yet the ambivalence that Silchester feels, regarding the illegal actions and the way in which Mycroft acts as judge and jury, is clear in his simultaneous experience of awe and discomfort: “he was a wonder, a man ahead of his age in skill and also in justice … somehow, the very supermanly quality about it all put me off, daunted me. I don’t want to have to live with mental or moral geniuses” (139). Returning to the opening of the novel, we see that Silchester has drawn back from Mycroft and reverted back into his solitude.
This is a novel which meta-fictively parodies Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories. Mycroft slyly alludes to his fame—or his brother’s fame—at the end of the novel and is tellingly rather surprised when Silchester has not heard of him. The arrogance of the detective—he cannot believe that his (brother’s) fame has not preceded him—is borne out, however, by the reader’s knowledge. The reader is aware of Mycroft’s actual identity, which Silchester, in spite of the number of hints which Mycroft drops, is unable to detect for himself: even though he is told Mycroft’s last name, Silchester is unable to recall it when writing his narrative. His inability to remember may be an indication of how he has been traumatized, both by a murderous attack and by his participation in murder. The novel opens with him repeatedly articulating his concerns: “But my mind goes round and round like a pet rat in his whirligig. That’s because I can’t write and also because I am really considerably worried, shocked, and perhaps frightened. Getting it all down, will help. Get it down, then, I will, and no more blundering about as though I were trying to keep something back from someone” (6). While the Silchester at the end of the novel may seem calmer, it is this Silchester who, after the attack on Heregrove, sits down to write an account of what occurred and who then clearly reveals his deep distress. In the end, only through narrating is Silchester able to ascribe responsibility for what happens to Heregrove. Revealing the tensions of first-person narrative, Silchester finishes his story with the insistence that “Mycroft did it, not I” (142). At this point, the complete parody of the Holmesian narrative emerges: Sherlock may commit petty crime for the purposes of combating criminals, but he does not kill. Precisely what Mycroft did is left ambiguous by Silchester’s narrative—was “it” solving the crime or punishing the criminal? Ending on this lack of clarity demonstrates the tensions normally contained by positioning the detective as an arbiter of absolute truth and justice, tensions that look ahead to the concerns of post-war detective fiction in both Britain and America.
Works Cited
Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” 1944. The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Biblio and Tannen, 1946. 222–37.
Conan Doyle, Arthur. “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.” The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. 1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. 913–31.
Conan Doyle, Arthur. “The Greek Interpreter.” The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. 1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. 435–46.
Queen, Ellery [Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee]. Preface to “The Adventure of Mr. Montalba, Obsequist.” Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine 6.24 (Sept 1945): 98.
Stacy Gillis, Ph.D., is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University, UK. She has published widely on detective fiction, cyberpunk and feminist theory and has a particular interest in the rise of the British detective novel in the early twentieth century. For more information visit http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/staff/profile/stacy.gillis
Chapter I
THE SOLITARY FLY
Someone has said that the countryside is really as grim as any big city. Indeed, I read a novel not long ago that made out every
village, however peaceful it looked, to be a little hell of all the seven deadly sins. I thought, myself, that this was rather nonsense—a “write-up”—devised by those authors who come to live out of town and, finding everything so dull, have to make out that there’s no end of crime going on just behind every barn door and haystack. But in the last month or so, I’m bound to say I’ve had to change my mind. Perhaps I have been unfortunate. I don’t know. I do know that many people would say that I had been fortunate in one thing: in meeting a very remarkable man. Though I can’t help saying that I found him more than a little vain and fanciful and rather exhausting to be with, yet there is no doubt he is a sound fellow to have with one in a tight corner. Though, again, I must say that I think he is more to be valued then, than when things are normal and quiet. Indeed, as I shall show, I am not sure that he did not land me in one trouble in getting me out of another, and so, as I want to be quiet, I have felt compelled, perhaps a trifle discourteously, to refuse to go on with our acquaintanceship.
But I must also own that I did and do admire his skill, courage, and helpfulness. I needed such a striking exception to the ordinary (and very pleasant) indifference of most people, because of the quite unexpected and, I may say, horrible interest that one person suddenly chose to take in me. Yet, as I’ve said, perhaps I would never have known that I had become of such an awkward interest—the whole thing might have passed over without my ever having to be aware of my danger if this same well-meaning helper had not uncovered the pit past which I was unconcernedly strolling. And certainly the uncovering of it led me into great difficulties. I don’t like being bothered. I like to think sufficiently well of my neighbors that I can feel sure they won’t interfere with me, and I shan’t have to do anything to them, and, perhaps I should add, for them. I must be frank, or putting all this down won’t get me any further. I suppose—yes, there’s no doubt—I came to live in the country because I wanted to be left alone, at peace. And now I have such a problem on my mind—on my conscience! Well, I must set it all down and then, maybe, it will look clearer. Perhaps I’ll know what I ought to do. At the worst it can remain as a record after me, to show how little I was really to blame, how, in fact, the whole thing was forced on me.
