Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries Read online

  Resorting to Murder

  Holiday Mysteries

  Edited and Introduced

  by Martin Edwards

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Introduction and notes copyright © 2015 Martin Edwards

  ‘Where is Mr Manetot?’ by Phyllis Bentley reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Phyllis Bentley. ‘Razor Edge’ reprinted courtesy of The Marsh Agency Ltd on behalf of the Society of Authors. ‘Holiday Task’ from Murder in Miniature by Leo Bruce reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Leo Bruce. ‘Cousin Once Removed’ reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of the Executors of the M. F. Gilbert Estate. Copyright © Michael Gilbert 1953.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library

  First E-book Edition 2015

  ISBN: 9781464203763 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

  Resorting to Murder

  Copyright

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot

  A Schoolmaster Abroad

  Murder!

  The Murder on the Golf Links

  The Finger of Stone

  The Vanishing of Mrs Fraser

  A Mystery of the Sand-Hills

  The Hazel Ice

  Razor Edge

  Holiday Task

  A Posteriori

  Where is Mr Manetot?

  The House of Screams

  Cousin Once Removed

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Introduction

  Holidays offer us the luxury of getting away from it all. So, in a different way, do detective stories. Yet another means of enjoyable escapism involves taking a glance at the past, especially where it seems (if perhaps deceptively) to have been a simpler time than the present. Resorting to Murder is an anthology which combines these three forms of pleasure-taking. It presents vintage stories written over a span of roughly half a century, and which have the backdrop of a holiday. This straightforward unifying theme is counterpointed by the stories’ sheer diversity.

  Holiday mysteries are as popular today as they have ever been, probably because they are as infinitely variable as holidays themselves. Look at the body of work of today’s crime writers, British or foreign, and you will find that holidays play a part in rather more stories than you might expect. Why is this? I can suggest a couple of reasons. First, when authors themselves visit an unfamiliar and intriguing location on holiday, it often serves to inspire them to write. Second, our lives change pace on holiday. We are more receptive than usual to fresh experiences. And sometimes, people take risks on holiday that lead them into danger, and even into crime.

  This book focuses on the work of British writers, although with a wide variety of settings. But the holiday mystery has an appeal internationally to readers and writers alike. To take one story almost at random, Patricia Highsmith’s The Two Faces of January illustrates how a crime committed on holiday can fascinate readers and movie audiences over a fifty-year span. The book, first published in 1964, but not filmed until 2014, derives not only its storyline but also much of its power from the premise that the conman Chester and his wife are two Americans enjoying Greece when they become embroiled in murder and a strange relationship with a fellow American. Chester is a long way out of his comfort zone, and his sense of isolation contributes to the panicky decisions he makes, with fatal consequences.

  There is nothing new about the holiday-based mystery. A notable, if eccentric, example is B. C. Skottowe’s Sudden Death (1886) in which crucial action takes place during an extended visit to Homburg made by the wealthy narrator, Jack Buchanan. The exotic (by Victorian standards) foreign setting adds to the air of mystery that pervades a strange book boasting an ahead-of-its-time subtext about sexual ambiguity. Skottowe’s more illustrious contemporaries, Arthur Conan Doyle and E. W. Hornung, also explored the holiday mystery, as this anthology reveals.

  The post-war turmoil experienced in Britain after the Armistice was succeeded by the misery of an economic slump, and then by the growing threat posed from overseas by Nazism and Fascism. It is no coincidence that the 1920s and the 1930s became the Golden Age of Murder, when novelists such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley crafted complex and original puzzles of whodunit, howdunit, and whydunit that tested readers’ wits and earned their authors fame and fortune. There was something unashamedly escapist about much detective fiction written during the Golden Age, but it is also true to say that the better books reveal far more about the society of the time than critics have acknowledged. That escapism regularly took engaging but wildly unlikely forms, with impossible crimes taking place within locked rooms, vital clues being hidden by way of complex cryptograms, and mysterious ‘dying messages’ uttered by murder victims who could never bring themselves to take the more obvious step of simply naming their killers.

  Christie and her colleagues found that stories with holiday settings helped to create a sense of distance and unreality that made it possible to dispense with (or at least limit the use of) their creakier plot devices. Sayers’ The Five Red Herrings sees Lord Peter Wimsey visiting an artists’ colony in Galloway, where she and her husband had enjoyed several holidays, and the real-life background lends a welcome touch of authenticity to an otherwise prosaic mystery. More vivid is Have His Carcase, which opens with the novelist Harriet Vane’s walking tour through the south of England being rudely interrupted by her discovery of a man’s corpse. The dead man proves to be a foreign gigolo who has been working locally, at a hotel, the Resplendent, whose ambience Sayers captures wonderfully.

  Christie loved holiday mysteries, and Hercule Poirot’s travels had an uncanny habit of leading him into close encounters with murder most ingenious. Peril at End House and Evil Under the Sun are set in tourist destinations in the south of England, but her most memorable holiday mysteries were set overseas. Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile remain two of the most successful whodunits ever written. Christie never lost enthusiasm for holiday mysteries; as late as 1964, she took Miss Marple away from St Mary Mead to an exotic island on the other side of the world, and a televised version of A Caribbean Mystery enjoyed as much success as the book when it was screened in 2013.

  This anthology contains its share of stellar names from the past—Arnold Bennett and G. K. Chesterton, for instance—and stories that have won acclaim over the years, but I was also keen to unearth previously hidden gems. ‘Razor Edge’ by Anthony Berkeley—whose brilliance with plot had even Christie in raptures—is represented by a story so (undeservedly) obscure that even the British Library did not have a copy. The stories by Phyllis Bentley and Helen Simpson are almost equally rare, despite the success which both writers achieved, while those by H. C. Bailey, Leo Bru
ce and the little-known Gerald Findler have seldom been reprinted.

  The stories in Resorting to Murder are presented broadly (but not precisely) in chronological order, reflecting the way in which the holiday mystery evolved over the years. My hope is that readers will find the book is rather like the best kind of holiday—enjoyable and relaxing, with nice touches of the unexpected, and offering memories to look back on with a good deal of pleasure.

  Martin Edwards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) needs no introduction to enthusiasts for classic detective fiction. This story of the Cornish horror was one of the later Sherlock Holmes stories, following the great man’s dramatic escape from doom at the Reichenbach Falls, and was first published in 1910, although set thirteen years earlier. As so often happens to holidaying sleuths, Holmes’ rest-cure is interrupted by crime.

  Conan Doyle’s unforgettable portrait of the eccentric but brilliant consulting detective is at the heart of our eternal fascination with Holmes, but it is not the only reason why the stories have stood the test of time. Conan Doyle’s taste for the macabre and sensational is on display here, and proves as enticing as ever. And, without wasting too many words on description, he captures both the splendour and the menace of his Cornish setting.

  ***

  In recording from time to time some of the curious experiences and interesting recollections which I associate with my long and intimate friendship with Mr Sherlock Holmes, I have continually been faced by difficulties caused by his own aversion to publicity. To his sombre and cynical spirit all popular applause was always abhorrent, and nothing amused him more at the end of a successful case than to hand over the actual exposure to some orthodox official, and to listen with a mocking smile to the general chorus of misplaced congratulation. It was indeed this attitude upon the part of my friend and certainly not any lack of interesting material which has caused me of late years to lay very few of my records before the public. My participation in some of his adventures was always a privilege which entailed discretion and reticence upon me.

  It was, then, with considerable surprise that I received a telegram from Holmes last Tuesday—he has never been known to write where a telegram would serve—in the following terms:

  Why not tell them of the Cornish horror—strangest case I have handled.

  I have no idea what backward sweep of memory had brought the matter fresh to his mind, or what freak had caused him to desire that I should recount it; but I hasten, before another cancelling telegram may arrive, to hunt out the notes which give me the exact details of the case and to lay the narrative before my readers.

  It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes’s iron constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own. In March of that year Dr Moore Agar, of Harley Street, whose dramatic introduction to Holmes I may some day recount, gave positive injunctions that the famous private agent lay aside all his cases and surrender himself to complete rest if he wished to avert an absolute breakdown. The state of his health was not a matter in which he himself took the faintest interest, for his mental detachment was absolute, but he was induced at last, on the threat of being permanently disqualified from work, to give himself a complete change of scene and air. Thus it was that in the early spring of that year we found ourselves together in a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, at the further extremity of the Cornish peninsula.

  It was a singular spot, and one peculiarly well suited to the grim humour of my patient. From the windows of our little whitewashed house, which stood high upon a grassy headland, we looked down upon the whole sinister semicircle of Mounts Bay, that old death trap of sailing vessels, with its fringe of black cliffs and surge-swept reefs on which innumerable seamen have met their end. With a northerly breeze it lies placid and sheltered, inviting the storm-tossed craft to tack into it for rest and protection.

  Then come the sudden swirl round of the wind, the blustering gale from the south-west, the dragging anchor, the lee shore, and the last battle in the creaming breakers. The wise mariner stands far out from that evil place.

  On the land side our surroundings were as sombre as on the sea. It was a country of rolling moors, lonely and dun-coloured, with an occasional church tower to mark the site of some old-world village. In every direction upon these moors there were traces of some vanished race which had passed utterly away, and left as its sole record strange monuments of stone, irregular mounds which contained the burned ashes of the dead, and curious earthworks which hinted at prehistoric strife. The glamour and mystery of the place, with its sinister atmosphere of forgotten nations, appealed to the imagination of my friend, and he spent much of his time in long walks and solitary meditations upon the moor. The ancient Cornish language had also arrested his attention, and he had, I remember, conceived the idea that it was akin to the Chaldean, and had been largely derived from the Phoenician traders in tin. He had received a consignment of books upon philology and was settling down to develop this thesis when suddenly, to my sorrow and to his unfeigned delight, we found ourselves, even in that land of dreams, plunged into a problem at our very doors which was more intense, more engrossing, and infinitely more mysterious than any of those which had driven us from London. Our simple life and peaceful, healthy routine were violently interrupted, and we were precipitated into the midst of a series of events which caused the utmost excitement not only in Cornwall but throughout the whole west of England. Many of my readers may retain some recollection of what was called at the time ‘The Cornish Horror,’ though a most imperfect account of the matter reached the London press. Now, after thirteen years, I will give the true details of this inconceivable affair to the public.

  I have said that scattered towers marked the villages which dotted this part of Cornwall. The nearest of these was the hamlet of Tredannick Wollas, where the cottages of a couple of hundred inhabitants clustered round an ancient, moss-grown church. The vicar of the parish, Mr Roundhay, was something of an archaeologist, and as such Holmes had made his acquaintance. He was a middle-aged man, portly and affable, with a considerable fund of local lore. At his invitation we had taken tea at the vicarage and had come to know, also, Mr Mortimer Tregennis, an independent gentleman, who increased the clergyman’s scanty resources by taking rooms in his large, straggling house. The vicar, being a bachelor, was glad to come to such an arrangement, though he had little in common with his lodger, who was a thin, dark, spectacled man, with a stoop which gave the impression of actual, physical deformity. I remember that during our short visit we found the vicar garrulous, but his lodger strangely reticent, a sad-faced, introspective man, sitting with averted eyes, brooding apparently upon his own affairs.

  These were the two men who entered abruptly into our little sitting-room on Tuesday, March the 16th, shortly after our breakfast hour, as we were smoking together, preparatory to our daily excursion upon the moors.

  ‘Mr Holmes,’ said the vicar in an agitated voice, ‘the most extraordinary and tragic affair has occurred during the night. It is the most unheard-of business. We can only regard it as a special Providence that you should chance to be here at the time, for in all England you are the one man we need.’

  I glared at the intrusive vicar with no very friendly eyes; but Holmes took his pipe from his lips and sat up in his chair like an old hound who hears the view-halloa. He waved his hand to the sofa, and our palpitating visitor with his agitated companion sat side by side upon it. Mr Mortimer Tregennis was more self-contained than the clergyman, but the twitching of his thin hands and the brightness of his dark eyes showed that they shared a common emotion.

  ‘Shall I speak or you?’ he asked of the vicar.

  ‘Well, as you seem to have made the discovery, w
hatever it may be, and the vicar to have had it second-hand, perhaps you had better do the speaking,’ said Holmes.

  I glanced at the hastily clad clergyman, with the formally dressed lodger seated beside him, and was amused at the surprise which Holmes’s simple deduction had brought to their faces.

  ‘Perhaps I had best say a few words first,’ said the vicar, ‘and then you can judge if you will listen to the details from Mr Tregennis, or whether we should not hasten at once to the scene of this mysterious affair. I may explain, then, that our friend here spent last evening in the company of his two brothers, Owen and George, and of his sister Brenda, at their house of Tredannick Wartha, which is near the old stone cross upon the moor. He left them shortly after ten o’clock, playing cards round the dining-room table, in excellent health and spirits. This morning, being an early riser, he walked in that direction before breakfast and was overtaken by the carriage of Dr Richards, who explained that he had just been sent for on a most urgent call to Tredannick Wartha. Mr Mortimer Tregennis naturally went with him. When he arrived at Tredannick Wartha he found an extraordinary state of things. His two brothers and his sister were seated round the table exactly as he had left them, the cards still spread in front of them and the candles burned down to their sockets. The sister lay back stone-dead in her chair, while the two brothers sat on each side of her laughing, shouting, and singing, the senses stricken clean out of them. All three of them, the dead woman and the two demented men, retained upon their faces an expression of the utmost horror—a convulsion of terror which was dreadful to look upon. There was no sign of the presence of anyone in the house, except Mrs Porter, the old cook and housekeeper, who declared that she had slept deeply and heard no sound during the night. Nothing had been stolen or disarranged, and there is absolutely no explanation of what the horror can be which has frightened a woman to death and two strong men out of their senses. There is the situation, Mr Holmes, in a nut-shell, and if you can help us to clear it up you will have done a great work.’