The Gigantic Shadow

The Gigantic Shadow

First published in 1947

© Estate of Julian Symons; House of Stratus 1947-2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The right of Julian Symons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

Typeset by House of Stratus.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

www.houseofstratus.com

Julian Symons was born in 1912 in London. He was the younger brother, and later biographer, of the writer A.J.A. Symons.

Aged twenty five, he founded a poetry magazine which he edited for a short time, before turning to crime writing. This was not to be his only interest, however, as in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and held a distinguished reputation in each field. Nonetheless, it is primarily for his crime writing that he is remembered. His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day.

Symons commenced World War II as a recognised conscientious objector, but nevertheless ended up serving in the Royal Armoured Corps from 1942 until 1944, when he was invalided out. A period as an advertising copywriter followed, but was soon abandoned in favour of full time writing. Many prizes came his way as a result, including two
Edgar Awards
and in 1982 he received the accolade of being named as
Grand Master
of the Mystery Writers of America – an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. Symons then succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain’s Detection Club, a position he held from 1976 to 1985, and in 1990 he was awarded the
Cartier Diamond Dagger
from the British Crime Writers for his lifetime’s achievement in crime fiction.

He published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994; with the works combining different elements of the classic detective story and modern crime novel, but with a clear leaning toward the latter, especially situations where ordinary people get drawn into extraordinary series of events – a trait he shared with Eric Ambler. He also wrote two modern-day Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In
A Three Pipe Problem
the detective was ‘...a television actor,
Sheridan Hayes
, who wears the mask of
Sherlock Holmes
and assumes his character’. Several of Julian Symons’ works have been filmed for television.

Julian Symons died in 1994.

The French call a typewriter
une machine á ècrire
. It is a description that could well be applied to Julian Symons, except the writing he produced had nothing about it smelling of the mechanical. The greater part of his life was devoted to putting pen to paper. Appearing in 1938, his first book was a volume of poetry,
Confusions About X
. In 1996, after his death, there came his final crime novel,
A Sort of Virtue
(written even though he knew he was under sentence from an inoperable cancer) beautifully embodying the painful come-by lesson that it is possible to achieve at least a degree of good in life.

His crime fiction put him most noticeably into the public eye, but he wrote in many forms: biographies, a memorable piece of autobiography (
Notes from Another Country
), poetry, social history, literary criticism coupled with year-on-year reviewing and two volumes of military history, and one string thread runs through it all. Everywhere there is a hatred of hypocrisy, hatred even when it aroused the delighted fascination with which he chronicled the siren schemes of that notorious jingoist swindler, Horatio Bottomley, both in his biography of the man and fictionally in
The Paper Chase
and
The Killing of Francie Lake
.

That hatred, however, was not a spew but a well-spring. It lay behind what he wrote and gave it force, yet it was always tempered by a need to speak the truth. Whether he was writing about people as fiction or as fact, if he had a low opinion of them he simply told the truth as he saw it, no more and no less.

This adherence to truth fills his novels with images of the mask. Often it is the mask of hypocrisy. When, as in
Death’s Darkest Face
or
Something Like a Love Affair
, he chose to use a plot of dazzling legerdemain, the masks of cunning are startlingly ripped away.

The masks he ripped off most effectively were perhaps those which people put on their true faces when sex was in the air or under the exterior. ‘Lift the stone, and sex crawls out from under,’ says a character in that relentless hunt for truth,
The Progress of a Crime
, a book that achieved the rare feat for a British author, winning Symons the US Edgar Allen Poe Award.

Julian was indeed something of a pioneer in the fifties and sixties bringing into the almost sexless world of the detective story the truths of sexual situations. ‘To exclude realism of description and language from the crime novel’ he writes in
Critical Occasions
, ‘is almost to prevent its practitioners from attempting any serious work.’ And then the need to unmask deep-hidden secrecies of every sort was almost as necessary at the end of his crime-writing life as it had been at the beginning. Not for nothing was his last book subtitled
A Political Thriller.

H R F Keating

London, 2001

Again, for Kathleen

‘The name’s Mekles,’ Jerry Wilton said. ‘Nicholas Mekles. You must have heard of him.’

Should he have suspected something then, should there have been some small jarring shudder, like the moment when the fated ship first noses into the iceberg? Such a premonition would have been irrational, and Hunter liked to think that his life was ruled by reason. He felt nothing.

‘The name is familiar,’ he said. ‘But the fame escapes me.’

Jerry wiped his red face with a grey silk handkerchief. It was a hot day in early June, and the window in his small office was closed.

‘I don’t know what you read, but it isn’t the papers,’ he grumbled. ‘Mekles is always in the news. Big parties on his yacht, the
Minerva,
in the Med. or the Adriatic. Film actress fell off it during one of them, got herself drowned, she was his mistress, people said she might have been pushed. Owns a shipping fleet, shady goings-on I seem to remember in relation to that, Charlie Cash can dig it out for you. Gambles a lot, Monte Carlo, Nice. Fabulous villa out there on the Riviera, more big parties, socialites rubbing shoulders with crooks. Never married, but women queue up for him, socialites again a lot of them. And more, lots of it, the same sort. Plenty for Charlie to get his teeth into.’

‘I remember him now,’ Hunter said. ‘A sort of blend of playboy and gangster.’

‘More gangster than playboy. There are all sorts of rumours about him. They say he keeps half a dozen thugs as bodyguards. Also that he takes a lot of trouble to get the dirt on anyone he has dealings with.’ Jerry looked at the three pills on his desk, blue, green and white, selected the blue one, popped it in his mouth and swallowed.

Even then Hunter felt no anticipatory tremor. ‘A pretty tough customer.’

Jerry nodded solemnly. His face was glistening again, but this time he did not bother to wipe it. ‘He’s coming to England on Friday week, staying over till Tuesday. We’ve approached him, told him about the programme, and he’s agreed in principle.’

‘Why would a man like that want to go in front of the cameras?’ Hunter wondered. ‘He’s got a lot to hide.’

‘Vain as a peacock. Likes to show off in front of his women. Tickled to death to be asked.’

‘Even on my programme?’

‘Especially on your programme. Nicholas Mekles pitting his wits against those of TV’s special investigator and coming out on top – what a thrill for him. And anyway, it’s fame to be on that little old silver screen, something money can’t buy. Don’t tell me I’ve got to teach you psychology as well as fixing the programmes,’ Jerry cried in a pretended exasperation that only just missed being real. Hunter watched, fascinated, as he picked up the green pill and swallowed it, as he had the blue, without water. ‘Replaces the salt you lose through sweat,’ Jerry explained. ‘Salt makes energy. You take three in half an hour, twice a day. They cost thirty bob a packet. What do you think?’

‘It seems all right.’ He had found in the past that it was never wise to show too much enthusiasm.

‘All right!’ Jerry flung up his hands. ‘I serve up something like this on a plate for you, something that’s really the chance of a lifetime to turn a gangster inside out, and you say it seems all right.’ Again there was an undercurrent of real annoyance beneath the jocularity.

‘When I say all right, I mean I like it.’ And he did mean it, he had no real reservations. ‘It seems to me we’ve got to be a bit cagey, that’s all. The thing’s got slander possibilities sticking out all over it.’

‘Just a matter of the way you handle it.’ With agreement obtained, Jerry was mellow, calmly judicial.

‘Make the questions too soft and we get nowhere. Make them too hard, and we get a slander action up our shirts.’

‘I don’t think Mekles can afford to bring slander actions. Anyway you can handle it, you and Charlie, you’ve handled trickier ones.’ Jerry exuded confidence, went so far as to give a wink from the little blue eye in his boiled red face. ‘After all, it’s the trickiness that makes the programme, isn’t that right? Now, let’s get down to brass tacks.’

Before Hunter left, Jerry had swallowed the white pill.