Gun in Cheek (15 page)

"Really, James!" his aunt protested frigidly. "You are a most offensive-looking object, most! You are perspiring, boy!"

"Sorry! Yes, I know," gasped Jim. "Beastly hot weather. Damned well out of training! Had to run the hell of a way after you! Came to tell you—came to tell you—" he rolled his eyes wildly and racked his brains. What had he come to tell them? Must think of something. Something feasible. Must think of something quickly. "Came to tell you—" A wave of relief flooded over him. "Tea-time!" he shouted triumphantly. "Came to tell you it's tea-time! Tea-time, you know. Hate you to miss your tea. So beastly, you know—so—er—so beastly disappointing, you know, to miss your tea. I mean to say—tea. What is life without a nice cup of hot tea? Cold tea, you see, such beastly stuff. I mean to say, cold tea—well you feel as though you've put your shirt on the hundred to eight winner and the bookie's caught the fast boat to Ostend. No? Yes?"

To say that the pace is leisurely would be to commit premeditated understatement. The pace is nonexistent. People talk a great deal, either in drolleries or in the fashion of James as just quoted, and hold endless discussions about bird watching, alpine plants, relatives, church matters (" 'Father hasn't any morals. He's a clergyman.' "), money, and such macabre topics as sacrifices and missing skulls. The book's one homicide turns out not to be a murder after all but an accidental death; the dismemberment was by a different person than the one responsible for the accident—"that poor dago"—who had planned to kill the victim. The poor dago, a monomaniac, cut up the body because that was what he'd intended to do in the first place and "his fetish seems to be exactitude and laborious attention to correctness of detail." So he whacked off the dead man's head and went into hiding with it; then, later, he returned to where he had left the trunk of the body and dragged it off to his butcher's shop to make steaks and chops out of it. The person who caused the victim's death is turned loose by Mrs. Bradley because she has an "aunt-like affection" for him. The poor dago jumps out a hospital window and kills himself.

Justice triumphs again.

A
nother kind of amateur detective, although less prevalent in the British mystery than the series sleuth, is the "oneshot"—a person who becomes involved in a single mystery and must solve it in order to save his/her life/good name or the life/good name of someone he/she cares for. An example is one George Fenchurch (an alias), who joins forces with an undercover agent and romps through the pages of Edward Wood-ward's
The House of Terror
(1930) en route to the solution of a murder involving a deadly gas. The story stutters back and forth between the Yorkshire moors and northern Spain, is populated with a variety of unbelievable characters, and features homicide and attempted homicide by means of feathered darts tipped with an exotic Malay poison and propelled through a blowgun.

The real genius of the novel, though, lies in Woodward's portrait of a psychotic dwarf. No other mystery, British or otherwise, can boast of the likes of the "hidden terror of Cleeson Manor"—a drooling, blowgun-wielding, hunchbacked little viilain named Pedmore, servant to old man Dykeminster, who "had picked him out of the stews of Shanghai, and learning secrets, had kicked him into submission." Sprinkled throughout the narrative are such masterful descriptions as these:

For a second, before his eyes became accustomed to the dim light the dwarf stood bent forward in an attitude of alterness [sic], the huge hump on his twisted back looking like a heavy load, his long arms and great hands hanging a little forward as though prepared to grasp and crush anyone who challenged him.

Then he saw Alicia, and a maniacal snarl of rage came from the red cave of his mouth, whilst a glare of diabolical fury blazed in his eyes. . . . He made a staggering step forward, and, as Alicia, her volition returning, started to her feet, he hovered and a malicious leer came into his expression as his hand crept into one of the side pockets of his coat.

"So you think you have trapped me, do you?" he grated. "Think you have Pedmore, the dirty dwarf, by the heels at last, do you. . . . Ha-ha-hal. - . Pretty Miss. Rich young lady, take a dainty step towards me and see what happens to your beauty. . . ."

Spinning round, his brain and judgment shaken, Lattimer saw Pedmore standing, openly laughing at him, his ungainly body shaking with amusement, his great head lolling sideways in his malicious mirth. The coat he had discarded . . . was evidently the only garment he had worn over his shoulders, for now he was stripped to the waist, and Lattimer saw the sun playing on his great biceps and massive, hairy torso.

In his transports of vainglorious mirth at his own agility Pedmore was for a moment off his guard, and seizing his chance, Lattimer rushed forward, hoping to get a sure shot at the little swine before he could lift the long blow-pipe he carried, to his mouth. He had covered a dozen yards before the dwarf saw his intention, and then as Lattimer fired, he ducked and jumped sideways; and with the speed of a darting swallow, zig-zagged away.

But the most memorable passage in the book is this one:

Fury had come to the dwarf's face; saliva gleamed on his heavy underlip, and his eyes under their black pent-house brows, were red-rimmed and fierce.

"He comes here to-night, master," he croaked. "I've had word."

A crafty expression glimmered across Dykeminster's face.

"Then he'll get what he deserves as soon as he passes the lodge-gates," he said with a gross chuckle.

Pedmore hopped from one mis-shapen foot to the other; and again he tapped Dykeminster's arm with the fractious gesture of a petulant child.

"But the warning, master! . . . The letter! Don't forget that! I feel it in my hump that something is going to happen!"

T
he most popular of all detectives in British mysteries seems to be the police official—either a member of Scotland Yard or a local constable of some repute. One such heroic copper is Detective-Inspector Frederick Jubilee "Jumper" Cross of the CID, who, with his sergeant Johnny Lamb, investigates and solves several late-thirties and early-forties mysteries by John Donavan (a pseudonym of Nigel Morland, a prolific crime writer and creator of Miss Pym). One of Jumper and Johnny's more notable adventures is
Case of the Violet Smoke
, published in the United States in 1940 by the ever-reliable Mystery House (a division of Phoenix Press's lending-library rival, Arcadia House).

The novel opens with a cloud of "villainous violet haze, writhing uneasily like some heavy smoke," which undulates across London. The police trace the origin of this "colored wind" to an old and apparently empty mansion, on one floor of which they discover a violet-hued corpse and on another floor of which is a chemical laboratory. Jumper and Johnny are called in and proceed to uncover a plot that centers around what the jacket blurb calls "a fascinating piece of industrial espionage." This translates to mean an underhanded struggle for control of a major chemical company.

The unraveling of events, like those in one of Mrs. Bradley's cases, can most charitably be described as plodding.
Case of the Violet Smoke
may, in fact, be prototypical in its dull dialogue, not-very-thrilling police procedure explained in minute detail, and final explanations that go on for pages in the following fashion:

"Now then, sir: we had that red stuff tested at Hendon. Their report stated it was a double salt of antimonious iodide and an alkali iodide, which at that moment they hadn't identified. It's not material. There are two points about that. The behavior of antimonious iodide—or antimony iodide—is not very fully discussed in ordinary chemistry books. The knowledge of it, therefore, would not be in the possession of the ordinary man with chemical inclinations. Its alleged unimportance is shown by the fact that in one textbook described as a textbook for a degree course in chemistry, all that's said is that antimony combines readily with the halogens. Iodine is one of them. Antimonious iodide is a compound of antimony and iodine."

"This looks interesting." Cross's attention was being aroused.

Cross's, maybe, but not that of most readers.

T
he private investigator in British crime fiction tends to follow one of two patterns: Sherlock Holmes, with emphasis on deduction, or a bastardized version of Philip Marlowe and/or Mike Hammer, with emphasis on sex, violence, and the ill-chosen wisecrack. Most proponents of the latter school read like bad British imitations of bad American imitations, but without any special qualities to elevate this or that book to the status of even a minor classic. The practitioners of the former school are much more intriguing. Take, for instance, R.A.J. Walling, the father of that inimitable investigator Philip Tolefree.

Walling, a British journalist and newspaper editor who began writing mysteries as a hobby in his late fifties, was a popular writer during his time. (His first book was published in 1927, his last posthumously in 1949.) He was not only popular in England but in the United States, where he received a certain amount of critical acclaim.
The New York Times
stated in 1936 that Walling had considerable skill in weaving mystery plots; the
Saturday Review of Literature
decided that he wrote suavely baffling stories; the eminent critic Will Cuppy rhapsodized about one of the early Tolefree stories, "We don't wish to seem pontifical, but if we were asked for an elegant example of modern bafflement, we'd name
The Corpse with the Floating Foot
on six or seven Counts, such as style, suspense, general interest, and miscellaneous. Absolutely required reading."

One can't help but wonder, after reading this and other of Walling's literary endeavors, at the levels of mystery reviewing and popular taste a generation ago. Walling may have concocted mildly diverting plots (sometimes), but the effort required to read far enough to unravel them seems prohibitive in most cases. The fact of the matter is that R.A.J. Walling wrote some of the dullest mysteries ever committed to paper—far duller than those of Gladys Mitchell and John Donavan. It may even be said that he elevated dullness to a fine art. No greater soporific has been invented by the pharmaceutical companies than ten or fifteen pages of a Philip Tolefree opus.

In the first place, Tolefree is a twit. Detectives who are twits are not uncommon in British mysteries, or in American mysteries, either; but a private detective who is a twit is uncommon. And Tolefree is a twit of gargantuan proportions.

This is how he talks:

"You're a vandal, Pierce," said Tolefree. "You've feloniously broken and entered my ivory tower. Never mind. I'd have been bored in another half hour. How'd you find me out? Sit down, my dear fellow. Cigarette? Pipe? Well, carry on. What's the trouble now? Or did you come for the sake of my beautiful eyes?" (
The Corpse Without a Clue
)

And this is how he thinks:

"Money, money, money!" Tolefree found the refrain echoing in his head when . - . the train slid alongside the platform at Paddington; "
plures pecunia strangulat
–I wonder, now!" (
The Corpse with the Blue Cra
vat)

A remarkable girl, thought Tolefree, while he rubbed up his small talk. (
By Hook or Crook
)

And this is how he acts:

Careful to disturb nothing, he crouched, sniffing at the face and the clothes [of the dead man]. He put a finger on the sleeve of the coat. He lifted it off the grass a little. He took a magnifying glass to examine the wound. He walked around peering at the ground. . . . (
The Corpse With the Eerie Eye
)

Tolefree is also inordinately fond of quoting obscure Latin phrases, usually without benefit of translation for those of us plebeians who either did not study Latin in school or did study it but failed to make it a second language.

"I've always found candor a good card, Mr. Quigley," said Tolefree, falling into step beside him.

"Ah?" said the young man. He looked down quizzically upon him. "You haven't read Tacitus on Vitellius."

"Haven't I? Let me see—but yes, I have." Tolefree mused. "You mean,
'Inerat tamen simplicitas ac liberalitas'
—gosh! that's a good come.back!" (
The Corpse in the Coppice
)

Other of Tolefree's traits include the pseudo self-deprecating remark:

"It's very serious indeed," said Tolefree. "And if I'm not Public Jackass Number One, it'll be more serious yet." (
The Corpse With the Grimy Glove
)

And the pointed homily: