Portrait of a Murderer Read online

  Portrait of a Murderer

  A Christmas Crime Story

  Anne Meredith

  With an Introduction

  by Martin Edwards

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Originally published in 1933 by Victor Gollancz

  Copyright © 1934 Lucy Malleson

  Introduction copyright © 2018 Martin Edwards

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library

  The right of Lucy Malleson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  First E-book Edition 2018

  ISBN: 9781464209055 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

  Portrait of a Murderer

  Copyright

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part I: Christmas Eve

  Part II: The Journal of Hildebrand Gray

  Part III: Christmas Day

  Part IV: Aftermath of a Crime

  Part V: The Verdict of You All

  Part VI: Witness for the Defence

  Part VII: The Answer

  Epilogue

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Introduction

  Portrait of a Murderer is a Christmas murder story whose tone, suited to the bleak midwinter, is captured in the opening words:

  Adrian Gray was born in May 1862 and met his death through violence, at the hands of one of his own children, at Christmas, 1931. The crime was instantaneous and unpremeditated, and the murderer was left staring from the weapon on the table to the dead man in the shadow of the tapestry curtains, not apprehensive, not yet afraid, but incredulous and dumb.

  The novel earned praise from that most demanding of judges, Dorothy L. Sayers, who reviewed detective fiction for the Sunday Times: “The book is powerful and impressive, and there is a fine inevitability in the plot-structure which gives it true tragic quality.” Portrait of a Murderer also earned Anne Meredith a contract with an American publisher, but despite its quality, it earned her neither fame nor fortune. Soon the book was forgotten, even though its author continued to write (under another name) with considerable success for another forty years.

  Meredith was, even at the time Portrait of a Murderer first appeared in 1933, a seasoned writer of detective novels, but this book is not a whodunit, and is conspicuously more ambitious than her earlier work. As Sayers put it: “In the ‘straight’ spot-the-villain kind of detective story, the murderer is apt to be the most unreal character in the book. This defect is inevitable, since we must never be let into the inner secrets of his murderous mind—if we did, we should know him for what he is and there would be no story. His motives, his hesitations, the dreadful spiritual convulsion that precipitates him from dreaming into doing—all must be taken on trust, and frequently we remain, after all, unconvinced.”

  She contrasted that kind of story with those “told from the murderer’s viewpoint. We see the crime committed and watch, through his eyes, with painful anxiety, while the evidence is piled up against him.” One of the examples she cited was Francis Iles’ masterly Malice Aforethought (1931). “A third method,” she added, “shows us first the crime from the murderer’s point of view and then the detection from the point of view of the detective.” Richard Austin Freeman, as Sayers said, used this approach in The Singing Bone (1912), “and now comes Miss Anne Meredith, with less emphasis on clues and more on character”. Meredith’s sympathies were with the killer, and “because he is what he is, we can understand that callous determination… He combines meanness and magnanimity, both in a heroic degree… the detection is throughout subordinated to the psychology.”

  The book’s American publishers added an exclamation mark at the end of the title to add a touch of melodrama to the vivid red and black dust jacket, and solicited a blurb from Carolyn Wells, one of the most popular crime writers of the era: “It seems to me a Human Document, crammed with interest and personality. And a fascination from which there is no escape until the last page is reached.” A biographical note about the author informed readers that Anne Meredith came “from a legal family on both sides. Had she been allowed her way, she would have become a lawyer herself, but her aunt was sure that ‘no man would marry a lawyer’. So she went to London and spent her time reading up on the law, studying books on detection, and organising a Crime Circle which once a week attempted to solve some unsolved crimes.”

  The biography is interesting as much for what it conceals as the information that it discloses. It was an attempt—from the commercial perspective, eminently sensible—to reinvent the author who had adopted the pseudonym of Anne Meredith. Her real name was Lucy Beatrice Malleson (1899–1973), and her list of novels produced under two different names, J. Kilmeny Keith and Anthony Gilbert, already ran into double figures. She had also achieved enough success to merit election to membership of the Detection Club, which she later served as Secretary; there is an entertaining account in her memoir Three-a-Penny (1940; also published as by Anne Meredith) of her induction into the Club.

  She became a good friend of fellow Club member Cecil John Street (two of whose novels written under the name Miles Burton have been published in the British Library Crime Classics series), and dedicated her memoir to him, or at least to his best-known pseudonym, John Rhode. Detection Club members amused themselves by giving each other’s names to characters in their mysteries, and Agatha Christie duly gave the name Anne Meredith to a woman in Cards on the Table (1936) who has apparently committed murder and got away with it, only to be suspected of another crime.

  Anne Meredith novels continued to appear until the early 1960s, but their connection with crime fiction diminished and ultimately disappeared altogether, and none of the books made quite such an impression as Portrait of a Murderer. The Anthony Gilbert novels, however, became increasingly popular. The reason for this was because, in Murder by Experts (1936), Gilbert introduced the Cockney solicitor with a gift for solving mysteries, Arthur Crook, who became a popular series character. The Keith pseudonym was abandoned, and with it Keith’s amateur sleuth, Scott Egerton, perhaps detective fiction’s only crime-solving Liberal Member of Parliament. An Arthur Crook novel called The Woman in Red (1941) was enjoyably filmed in 1945 as My Name is Julia Ross with a cast including Dame May Whitty, but with Crook removed from the script. The movie was remade in 1987 by Arthur Penn, whose entertaining version, Dead of Winter, starred Mary Steenburgen and Roddy McDowall, and bore even less resemblance to the original.

  Although Anthony Gilbert novels have been republished from time to time over the years, Anne Meredith’s work has long been forgotten. Yet Portrait of a Murderer is notable for its portrayal of character and social comment, and illustrates the truth that, contrary to widespread belief, a good many crime novels written during the Golden Age of Murder between the two world wars were anything but cosy.

  Martin Edwards

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nbsp; www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  Part I

  Christmas Eve

  1. Adrian

  Adrian Gray was born in May 1862 and met his death through violence, at the hands of one of his own children, at Christmas, 1931. The crime was instantaneous and unpremeditated, and the murderer was left staring from the weapon on the table to the dead man in the shadow of the tapestry curtains, not apprehensive, not yet afraid, but incredulous and dumb.

  2. The Grays

  At the time of his death Gray was in his seventieth year, and had six children living. There had been a seventh, who died as a child, and so long ago that the younger ones scarcely remembered his existence. Only when the bitterness and futility of his parenthood pressed upon the ageing man with a greater sense of weariness than usual did Gray wonder whether the young Philip might not have grown up to be a solace and companion to him. But these moods occurred seldom, and for the most part he, like his children, forgot the little son who had died thirty years ago.

  It was his habit at Christmas-time to invite all his relatives to spend the season at his lonely house at King’s Poplars. The wife of one and the husbands of two of them made their numbers up to nine, while Mrs. Alastair Gray, the dead man’s mother, an old lady of ninety, brought the party up to eleven. There was, in addition, a number of servants, both male and female.

  As was shown at the inquest, Gray was on good terms with none of his children, while more than one had good reason to wish him out of their path. His eldest son, Richard, was at this time a man of two-and-forty, ambitious, dogged, and fierce to achieve his objective, which was place and reputation. He was childless, a fact that greatly distressed and humiliated him, was well known in political life, and had a few years earlier obtained a knighthood. He had been for many years married to Laura Arkwright, a notable woman in society.

  Gray’s eldest daughter, Amy, his only unmarried child, kept his house for him, and was a shrewd and shrewish woman of forty, small, sharp-featured, with reddish hair and thin lips and hands.

  His second daughter, Olivia, was married to Eustace Moore, the unscrupulous but intelligent financier into whose hands Gray had allowed the larger portion of his capital to pass.

  The dead Philip had come next, and after him Isobel, who had made a brilliant but, as it turned out, disastrous marriage several years earlier. Gray had been delighted when Harry Devereux asked for his daughter. The suitor was rich, handsome, and much sought after. He had a reputation for wit and charm that was not wholly misplaced, but he should have married a woman of his own world, not the young, independent, fiercely idealistic Isobel. Within two years his wife acknowledged her folly, but when she endeavoured to escape from its consequences she found herself powerless. Her husband assured her that she would win nothing but obloquy if she attempted to divorce him; and here she realised that he was right. A man of his popularity had women on every hand prepared to defend him. She thought it improbable that he had not guarded himself at every turn and thus she endured for another year. Then she was delivered of a girl-child, who survived her birth seven months. Isobel attributed the baby’s death to a certain brutal action on the part of the father, and spent anguished weeks wondering how she could have averted the tragedy. Finally she asked her father to receive her home, detailing, as best she could, the manner of her life, her intolerable life, in London. Both Gray and Amy wrote, imploring her frantically to consider the position she would occupy if she returned, the manner in which tongues would wag, her own humiliation. They commiserated her on the death of the child, letting it be seen that they thought her request due to mental upset, following her loss, and spoke hopefully of “next time.” Isobel left both letters unanswered, and the household at King’s Poplars heard nothing more of her, until Devereux himself came down to suggest that Isobel should return home, as she was ill, stubborn, persistently refused him his rights, and he feared some desperate act on her part, such as suicide.

  “And you think it would be pleasanter for us to have the scandal of a suicide in the house, rather than yourself?” was Gray’s acid comment.

  Amy said, “It’s a struggle to live as it is, without another mouth to feed.”

  Devereux made it plain that he would allow his wife a handsome allowance so long as she remained at the Manor House. The attitude of father and sister altered at once. A week later Isobel reappeared. The older servants—there was at that time a housekeeper who had known the family for a great many years, who died twelve months later, besides the long-established Moulton—were openly shocked at her appearance. Isobel had always been the independent, the courageous one. She had found herself work in the neighbouring market town, had loved solitude, had read, had gloried in trips to London, had haunted book-shops and art galleries. Isobel Devereux came back white and listless, meekly submissive to her father, and handing over to Amy, without demur, practically all the money with which her husband supplied her. She scarcely counted as a personality, but could be relied upon to perform those casual and thankless household duties that are invariably shirked by others.

  Hildebrand, named for the famous Cardinal, came next, a difficult, striking, handsome figure, sullen and secretive, capable of sudden expansion when he blossomed as unexpectedly and beautifully as a miracle or a flower, but among his own people dark, silent, and morose. From childhood he had caused his father anxiety; he was original, headstrong, and hot-tempered, and had early cut himself off from all sympathetic communication with his family, who were antipathetic to his ideals and intentions, and responded with the utmost ungraciousness (reasonable enough in the circumstances) to his perennial demands for financial assistance. He was seldom mentioned to their acquaintances by any of them, and eked out a wretched, cramped existence with the woman he had chosen to marry and their trail of drab, unattractive children, in a little house near the Fulham cemetery.

  The last child, Ruth, had been married for eight years to Miles Amery, a promising young lawyer whose career had, unfortunately, stopped short at the promise. Richard and Eustace were both enraged and disgusted by this wilful relative, who seemed devoid of ambition, and did not even want to bring kudos to the family into which he had married. He pursued his obscure way with apparent satisfaction, never even aiming at anything higher. He seemed to think that a moderate income and a middle-class house in an unexceptionable district were the culmination of any man’s desire. If you asked him how he was, he said very fit and having lots of fun.

  “Fun!” said Eustace in a sepulchral tone, as Chadband might have said, “Drink!” and believing it every whit as sinful.

  “Fun!” intoned Richard, vexed and outraged at what seemed to him a wanton flinging away of opportunity. “What’s fun?”

  They might well ask. Ruth could have told them. It was the house in St. John’s Wood, and the two little girls, Moira and Pat, and all the satisfactions of their happy, full, rich life with one another.

  3. Richard

  I

  On the morning of Christmas Eve, 1931, that was to close so tragically, Richard Gray and his wife, Laura, travelled to King’s Poplars in a first-class carriage. After a long silence, Richard lifted his haughty, melancholy face from the pages of The Times, and remarked in tones as cold and polished as a brass door-handle, “I beg of you, Laura, to remember my father’s views on the question of tariffs. It is most important that he should not be upset before I have an opportunity of discussing the position with him. You know how heated these political dissensions leave him.”

  Richard invariably spoke as though he carried a reporter in his waistcoat pocket.

  Laura, a tall, handsome woman, very beautifully gowned, said lightly, “You can rely on my discretion. I, too, know how important it is that he shouldn’t be upset. After all, I want to have a title quite as much as you want to buy it for me.”

  Richard frowned and returned to his paper. He considered his wife’s remark in bad taste. Laura had, in fact,
been one of his least profitable investments. As a young man, even before he had completed his term at the University, Richard had decided to make a success of his life. He had worked hard, cultivated a wide acquaintance, travelled, read extensively, taught himself to appreciate golf, spent wet afternoons watching a ball being kicked round and round a slimy field, and even, in certain company, lost money on horses. The result was that, within ten years, he had achieved a reputation. He had started on his political career, and its early honours were falling thick upon him. Flushed with pride and ambition, he extended his circle of acquaintances, and at thirty he met Laura Arkwright. She was three years his junior, handsome, an heiress, possessed an influential circle of relations, was cultured, urbane, and a well-known amateur pianist. She was, in short, in every way suited to be the wife of a rising M.P.

  Richard, well pleased with his perspicacity, awaited the enriching of his life through this new tentacle he had put out. In almost every direction he met with bitter disappointment. Owing to ill-advised speculation, his wife’s fortune was largely dissipated; she gave up her piano-playing comparatively soon after her marriage, on the extraordinary ground that she objected to commercial art. Richard brooded over that for some time—he was already very like his father—and at last was driven by injured curiosity to ask her what she meant. Laura said lightly it meant that she didn’t want to play to his friends any more, and that she’d always been sorry for nice dogs exhibited at shows, another cryptic and absurd remark that Richard failed to understand. But he had had enough of asking for explanations, and took other means of showing his displeasure.

  His greatest disappointment, however, was their childlessness. He had meant to have sons—a daughter or two later, perhaps, since, though daughters were negligible in themselves, they might make advantageous connections for a father by marriage. But they had never even experienced the customary scares and hopes of a young couple. Richard, of course, blamed his wife; sometimes, in very intimate male society, if he felt sufficiently sore, he would acknowledge that she was a cold woman. He was perpetually surprised at the number of quite important people who appeared to think it worth their while keeping up with her, even after she lost her fortune, but supposed they had the sense to realise that she was married to a man who might be precious useful to them one of these days.