Swing Low, Swing Death
Page 1
Other Dover Books by R. T. Campbell
Bodies in a Bookshop
Death for Madame
Unholy Dying
Foreword by
Peter Main
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Mineola, New York
Copyright
Foreword copyright © 2018 by Peter Main
Copyright © 1946 by R. T. Campbell
Reprinted with permission from the Estate of Ruthven Todd.
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2018, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by John Westhouse (Publishers) Ltd., London, July 1946, as part of a double volume along with The Death Cap. R. T. Campbell is the pseudonym of Ruthven Todd. A new Foreword by Peter Main has been specially prepared for this volume.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Campbell, R. T., 1914-1978, author. | Main, Peter, Dr., writer of foreword.
Title: Swing low, swing death / R. T. Campbell; foreword by Peter Main.
Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, 2018. | Series:Professor Stubbs
Identifiers: LCCN 2017051718| ISBN 9780486822761 (softcover) | ISBN 0486822761 (softcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Detectives—England—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | London (England)—Fiction. | BISAC:
FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Traditional British. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6039.O26 S95 2018 | DDC 823/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051718
Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications
82276101 2018
www.doverpublications.com
Contents
Foreword by Peter Main
Part 1
1.Autumnal Geometry
2.Small Metaphysical Interior
3.Melancholy of a Day
4.Delights of the Poet
5.The Disquieting Muses
6.Morning Meditation
7.Enigma of an Afternoon
Part 2
1.The Joy of Return
2.The Joys of a Strange Hour
3.Nostalgia of the Infinite
4.Uncertainty of the Poet
5.Soothsayer’s Recompense
6.Revolt of the Sage
7.Serenity of the Scholar
8.The Blinding Light
9.Conquest of the Philosopher
About the Author
Foreword
R. T. CAMPBELL was the pen name of Ruthven Campbell Todd, a man better known under his real name as a poet and leading authority on the printing techniques of William Blake. The true identity of R. T. Campbell was not revealed to the world until the publication of Julian Symons’s 1972 history of crime fiction, Bloody Murder (published in the United States as Mortal Consequences). Symons was a close friend of Todd, who had agreed readily enough to be unmasked. Symons recorded that Todd had written ten detective stories under the name R. T. Campbell, published by John Westhouse, and that the novels were “now distinctly rare.” In a revised edition after Todd’s death, Symons had to change his tune somewhat: “ten” novels became “twelve.”
“A pleasant uncertainty prevails about the publication of four among the twelve books. Did The Hungry Worms Are Waiting ever see print, or did Westhouse go broke first? No copy of it is known to have appeared in any specialized bookseller’s list.”
This uncertainty has since been resolved, and it is now known that only eight novels were published, although Todd probably wrote four more. The missing novels were repeatedly advertised by Westhouse as “forthcoming,” but they never forthcame because in 1948 Westhouse went into liquidation.
Todd wrote the novels toward the end of World War II, when he was living in rural Essex, England, having been bombed out of his apartment in central London. He wrote them at speed and claimed he finished one of them in three days. Throughout his life, he remained dismissive of their quality, saying they were “hack work,” which he wrote to make money he badly needed to support himself while engaged in what he regarded as his more serious work: poetry and art history. Although the novels are uneven in quality, it is difficult to read them without feeling that he rather enjoyed writing them. Westhouse paid him two hundred pounds for each manuscript—quite a considerable amount at the time!
He was advised by fellow poet Cecil Day Lewis, who wrote detective novels as Nicholas Blake, to try his hand at detective fiction as a means of making money, but to use a pen name in order to avoid “ruining his name.” Thus, Todd gave birth to R. T. Campbell by reworking his own full name. These books were his only foray into crime fiction, with the exception of Mister Death’s Blue-Eyed Boy (set in New York City’s Greenwich Village), which was never published and which Todd later said the manuscript was “probably happily, now lost.” He also wrote two short stories in crime magazines under his real name, which later found their way into anthologies published by Mystery Writers of America.
Todd’s novels are comedic, and all but one of the published works (Apollo Wore a Wig, a spy caper in the style of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps) feature a botanist-cum-amateur detective, Professor John Stubbs. The blurb on the dust jacket of his debut appearance in Unholy Dying tells us Stubbs is “an explosive and fallible character in the long English tradition of engaging comic figures. Professor Stubbs sets out to unravel the crime with considerable energy and the tact of a herd of elephants.”
Stubbs is corpulent, mustachioed, opinionated, smokes a pipe filled with evil-smelling tobacco, and constantly swills beer from a quart mug in order to overcome his susceptibility to “dehydration.” He cheerfully accuses innocent people of murder and lumbers on, unabashed, to find the true culprit. His “Watson” for most of the books is Max Boyle, with whom he has an engagingly prickly relationship, as he does with his sparring partner Inspector Reginald Bishop of Scotland Yard.
Here are the seven published Stubbs novels and their publication dates in the order they were presumably written, based on references that appear within them to previously occurring events:
Unholy Dying (November 1945)
Take Thee a Sharp Knife (February 1946)
Adventure with a Goat (April 1946, published as a double volume with Apollo Wore a Wig)
Bodies in a Bookshop (April 1946)
The Death Cap (June 1946)
Death for Madame (June 1946)
Swing Low, Swing Death (July 1946, published as a double volume with The Death Cap)
One of the most attractive features of the novels is they are alive with atmosphere—primarily of London in the 1940s. Todd did not dream up his backgrounds; he drew on his own experiences. Thus, Unholy Dying is set in the midst of a congress of geneticists, an environment he had recently experienced firsthand when helping his father-in-law, Francis Crew, himself a distinguished geneticist, to organize the Seventh International Congress of Genetics at Edinburgh University. His first draft of the story (then called Drugs Fit and Time Agreeing) was written in 1940, although it did not see publication until 1945. Also in 1940, Todd began writing When the Bad Bleed, which he never completed. However, the manuscript survives and leaves no doubt that this was an early version of Take Thee a Sharp Knife. This is a sleazy tale of murder in London’s Soho and was based on his own all too frequent trips in the company of Dylan Thomas and other hard-drinking cronies around the bars and clubs of Soho and Fitzrovia. Adventure with a Goat is the shortest and slightest of the Stubbs novels, whose theme was suggested to him by an incident during childhood when a goat devoured the notes for a local minister’s Sunday sermon before it could be delivered. Bodies in a Bookshop is a b
iblio-mystery, and Todd himself was a bibliomaniac who continually trawled the secondhand bookshops of Charing Cross Road to supplement his already groaning bookshelves. From childhood, Todd had been fascinated by the natural world and developed a specialized appreciation of fungi. Drawing on this knowledge, the plot of The Death Cap deals with the dastardly poisoning of a young woman using amanita phalloides, the deadly “death cap” mushroom. The plot of Death for Madame centers around the murder of the owner of a seedy residential hotel, inspired by Todd’s dealings with the memorable Rosa Lewis, chef and owner of Cavendish Hotel in St. James’s district of London. At the time he wrote the Stubbs novels, Todd was deeply occupied with art historical research, and his understanding of the world of art and artists provided him with the backdrop for Swing Low, Swing Death, a book in which a poet called Ruthven Todd makes a cameo appearance! We are lucky that Todd even left a clue in his memoirs about the plot of one of the four missing novels. Its events took place in a “progressive” school, a setting suggested no doubt by his interest in the work of A. S. Neill, founder of Summerhill School, which Todd had visited.
What do we know of Ruthven Campbell Todd himself? He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1914, the eldest of ten children of Walker Todd, an architect, and his wife, Christian. Ruthven received an elite private school education at Fettes College, which he hated and reacted against, leading to him being “asked to leave.” During a short spell at Edinburgh College of Art, he recalled that he spent more time drinking beer and Crabbie’s whiskey than attending to his studies. After less than a year, his father became fed up with his son’s antics and Ruthven was dispatched to the Isle of Mull in the Scottish Highlands to work as a farm laborer for two years. After a further year as assistant editor to an obscure literary magazine, he left finally for London. Apart from occasional family visits, he never returned to Scotland.
In London, Todd embraced the bohemian world of poets, writers, and artists with rather too much enthusiasm, developing the alcoholism and addiction to strong tobacco that was to undermine his health and, to an extent, his productivity as a writer. Nevertheless, at this time he did publish several volumes of poetry as well as two fantasy novels, Over the Mountain and The Lost Traveller (the latter became something of a cult classic). His most notable achievement, however, was Tracks in the Snow, a book on Blake and his circle, which is still remembered today as a highly original and groundbreaking work.
In 1947, Todd left for the United States to pursue research for a complete catalog of the artworks of Blake. He lived there for the next thirteen years, first in New York City and later in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Here he became famous among younger readers for his four books about a feline astronaut, Space Cat, and he became a US citizen. In the late 1950s, he was commissioned to write the official life of Dylan Thomas, a project he failed to deliver. In 1960, while visiting Robert Graves in Mallorca, Spain, he became seriously ill with pleurisy and pneumonia and was hospitalized. He recovered, but the treatment costs he incurred meant he was unable to return to the United States. He lived in Mallorca for the rest of his life, first in Palma and then in the mountain village of Galilea, where he died of emphysema in 1978.
Original editions of Todd’s detective novels remain elusive and expensive. However, Dover Publications is publishing four of the Stubbs books: Bodies in a Bookshop; Unholy Dying; Swing Low, Swing Death; and Death for Madame.
Peter Main, author
A Fervent Mind: The Life of Ruthven Todd
London, England, 2018
*Part 1—Chapter 1
Autumnal Geometry
MANY MONTHS of intensive work and even more intensive publicity had gone to the making of it. Now it was almost ready. At last London was to have its Museum of Modern Art. Tall and sharply bleak, the new building, inheritor of the traditions of the Bauhaus, rose in between the Victorian absurdities and eighteenth century dignities of Iron Street, just behind Bond Street.
The usual letters, from the usual signatories, had been written to the Times, protesting against the erection of this “concrete and glass monstrosity” in the confines of Iron Street, where eighteenth century bucks had wined and dined with their bawds and where the fortunes of great houses had been reversed by the turn of a single card. Sir John Squire had interrupted the composition of his autobiography to attempt to save Iron Street. Cameras placed cunningly had stressed the plain and elegant brickwork of the eighteenth century and had omitted the Victorian baroque in all its splendour of encaustic tile and yellow and blue brick and stucco of the Ely Arms. The bellied window of Mr. Snodgrass, tailor to half the titled families in England, was well in the forefront, but no one mentioned the Tottenham Court Road modernism of the Excelsior Beauty Parlours, where wealthy women had their faces dislocated in the hope that, Phoenix-like, something better might rise from the ruins and ashes of the original.
None of this had availed to protect the street and the slender concrete monolith rose as if unaware of the controversy that beset its being. The façade was carefully finished with its circles and contrasting squares of colour by Ben Nicholson and the slender column by Constantin Brancusi rose on one side of the entrance while the other was guarded by a carving in African wonderstone by Henry Moore. Elderly dilettantes, hurrying from their clubs or mistresses, to inspect the Rembrandt etchings or the lesser Italian paintings at Tooth’s or Colnaghi’s, averted their scandalised eyes. They shuddered inwardly and wondered why things had changed so much since they were boys. This was indeed the final action which shewed the decadence of a world which had grown beyond them. In some way they felt that the concrete building was a personal attack upon their being, it threatened their security and it bored at the foundations of well-established and unalterable things. It was not that it shouted. No, rather, it whispered subversive phrases in the stillness of the night. It spoke quietly, but insistently, of the breakdown of Civilisation, spelt with a capital, and of the invasion by the new barbarians, nurtured by the harsh winters of the Gothic North.
The outcry did not diminish as the building rose. Instead, as if realising its futility it became the louder, like a dog barking after the wheels of a car. A certain eminent divine, celebrated for his enlightened views upon the modern world and for his stupidity, preached a sermon upon the subject of the tower of Babel, by which his listeners rightly supposed that he referred to the Museum of Modern Art. With a fervour that would have done credit to a Calvinist cursing the Catholic Church he cursed the building and was only prevented by his lack of faith from calling down a thunderbolt from heaven upon it.
In the flighty and inaccurate columns of the Daily Courier, Lord Monrose’s young men were gaily irreverant. They reproduced a plan of a new public lavatory in Holborn alongside one of the abstract paintings and got the titles mixed. The following day’s apology was an example of unrepentant absurdity. They published pictures by children and claimed that they were better than those by the well-known artists who were to be hung in the Museum. They asked the granddaughter of a pre-Raphaelite painter for her opinion and displayed it as if it were an opinion of some weight and meaning.
Professor Thomas Bodkin returned to the attack. He proved that Van Gogh and Gauguin suffered from obscene diseases and that, consequently, all modern art was diseased. His logic, having no foundation, was as unassailable as a barrage balloon is to a man with a penknife. D. S. McColl was trenchant and amusing in the columns of the Times and Douglas Cooper spent much ink and patience in correcting the factual errors of those who wrote without knowing what they were writing about.
In fact, it might be said, that a very good time was had by all, and that no one really suffered as a result of the sparrow-shot and ill-aimed brickbats. Certainly Miss Emily Wallenstein enjoyed herself.
The daughter of a millionaire meat-importer and shipping magnate, Miss Wallenstein had a penchant for all that was modern. Her sets of magazines such as Transition and Minotaure had been bound by the French surrealist, Georges Hugnet, in fur a
nd glass, with blobs of mercury running in channels behind the glass. Her house, near Shepherd’s Market, was a mixture of the austerity of a Walter Gropius and the fantastic extravagance of a Salvador Dali. Fur-lined teacups and chance-found objects, such as twisted flints and obscene scraps of driftwood, consorted with furniture designed by Marcel Breuer. A stuffed eagle owl looked gravely at the polished whiteness of a carving by Barbara Hepworth, and a tube of coloured sand, from Alum Bay in the Isle of Wight, raised its striped finger to point to a painting by the Dutch constructivist, Piet Mondrian, while a green granite Mexican god inspected an engraving of the Temptation of St. Anthony, after Jacques Callot.
Miss Wallenstein, thin and smart and thirty-fivish, felt that she had at last found her place in this turmoil, and, what made it even better, was that not only was the publicity extremely amusing, but that she really felt that she was being a useful person. Her efforts on behalf of modern art made her feel a second Livingstone in the African wilds of artistic London.
As she said to her stout, henna-haired assistant, Sylvia Rampion: “It isn’t, my dear, as though I’d thought there would be all this publicity, but it will help, won’t it? Can’t you just see the crowds flowing in when we open? Some of them will be unconvertible, of course, but we can only hope that there will be some who will come to mock and who will stay to cheer.”
The concrete was dry, and the furnishing was going on apace. The library shelves were filling up and the young poet, Douglas Newsome, who had been engaged as librarian, looked gloomily at the shelves of books which he never intended to read. He scowled at the plastic backs of brochures by Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer. He wondered why the hell he had ever accepted the job. The money was all right but he wanted a drink. He wanted a drink more than anything in the world. He wondered if Miss Wallenstein would pull him up if she caught him on the way out to the Ely Arms. He decided that he’d make the effort and, anyhow, he might as well start the way he meant to go on. It was too much for anyone to hope that he, Douglas Newsome, could sit all day among a lot of books without wetting his whistle once in a while.