Introduction and Notes © 2019 by Martin Edwards
‘The Turn of the Tide’ by C. S. Forester reprinted by permission of Cassette Productions Limited on behalf of the Estate of C. S. Forester.
‘A Question of Timing’ by Phyllis Bentley reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop on behalf of the Estate of Phyllis Bentley.
‘The Thimble River Mystery’ by Josephine Bell, reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London on behalf of the Beneficiaries of the Estate of Josephine Bell. Copyright © Josephine Bell, 1950.
‘Man Overboard’ by Edmund Crispin reprinted by permission of Rights Limited on behalf of the Estate of Edmund Crispin.
‘The Queer Fish’ by Kem Bennett reproduced by permission of the Estate of Kem Bennett.
‘Seasprite’ [renamed for this anthology] reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Beneficiaries of the Estate of Andrew Garve. Copyright © Andrew Garve 1963.
‘Death by Water’ from The Appleby File by Michael Innes reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop on behalf of the Estate of Michael Innes.
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Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
The Adventure of the ‘Gloria Scott’
The Eight-Mile Lock
The Gift of the Emperor
Bullion!
The Echo of a Mutiny
The Pool of Secrets
Four Friends and Death
The Turn of the Tide
The Swimming Pool
A Question of Timing
The Thimble River Mystery
Man Overboard
The Queer Fish
The Man Who Was Drowned
Seasprite
Death by Water
Back Cover
Introduction
Welcome to an anthology which plumbs the murky depths of murder and mystery. Readers are invited to dip into a collection of sixteen crime stories which are connected, in one way or another, with water. The contributors range from the legendary Arthur Conan Doyle, through once-famous names such as E. W. Hornung and R. Austin Freeman, and Golden Age doyens Michael Innes and Edmund Crispin, to those relatively unknown figures, James Pattinson (not to be confused with the American bestseller James Patterson) and Kem Bennett.
Deep Waters is the thirteenth themed anthology to appear in the British Library’s Crime Classics series; the books aim to illustrate the range of writing in the genre and the varied and often ingenious ways in which different authors tackle a particular subject or type of story. Here we have crime on the high seas, naturally, but there are also mysterious goings-on associated with a river, a canal, even the humble swimming pool.
The first victim to be fished from a watery grave in a detective story was, to the best of my knowledge, Marie Roget in 1842. Her corpse was found in the River Seine in ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’, the second of three stories to feature that brilliant sleuth, Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. Edgar Allan Poe based the story on a real life tragedy concerning the murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, known as ‘the beautiful cigar girl’ whose remains were found in the Hudson River. The case remains officially unsolved, but Poe’s tale pioneered ‘armchair detection’ as well as the technique of basing a work of detective fiction on an actual crime.
Since then, crime writers across the world have employed an infinite variety of approaches in producing mysteries with a water-related setting. British authors have been responsible for many notable examples, in novels as well as in short stories. Is it because the British are an island race that they have shown a particular enthusiasm for writing about crime on the ocean wave, as well as closer to home? Whatever the answer, several of the authors featured in this collection had a genuine passion for sailing and the sea. Conan Doyle and C. S. Forester are well-known examples from the past; others include two writers who lived into the twenty-first century, James Pattinson and Andrew Garve.
Mystery writers have long made effective use of a maritime background for a crime scene. Take cruising, for instance. This was once exclusively a pastime of the rich, and stories set on cruises enabled readers to experience vicariously the glamour of shipboard life and exotic foreign destinations while puzzling over a murder mystery. One of the acknowledged masterpieces of Golden Age fiction is Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, in which Hercule Poirot solves the murder of wealthy Linnet Doyle. The novel appeared in 1937; four years earlier, Christie had published a short story with the same title, but featuring a different detective, Parker Pyne. Christie loved sailing, and in 1922 had embarked on a ten-month voyage around the world as part of a trade mission promoting the British Empire Exhibition; her letters and photographs from this remarkable journey were brought together ninety years later in The Grand Tour.
Freeman Wills Crofts, her colleague in the Detection Club, was another Golden Age author whose love of travelling on cruise ships is reflected in his fiction. In Found Floating (1937), members of a family which has fallen victim to a mysterious poisoning set off on a cruise to the Greek Islands in search of peace and quiet; unfortunately, one of their number goes missing, and is found in the Straits of Gibraltar. In recent times, novels as diverse as L. C. Tyler’s humorous Herring on the Nile (2011) and Ruth Ware’s bestselling The Woman in Cabin 10 (2016) have illustrated the continuing possibilities of travel by cruise ship for inventive crime writers.
Inventive use of settings on or by the water is made in innumerable British crime stories. A. P. Herbert’s The House by the River (1920) is a splendid early example of the psychological crime story strengthened by its setting on the Thames, as is the much more recent Tideline (2012) by Penny Hancock. Cyril Hare’s Death is No Sportsman (1938) is a Golden Age angling mystery set on the river Didder, a fictionalised version of the river Test. In Colin Dexter’s The Wench is Dead (1989), Inspector Morse, laid up in hospital, investigates an old murder case on the Oxford canal; as with the Marie Roget story, the fiction draws heavily on the facts of a real life crime. C. P. Snow’s enjoyable detective novel Death under Sail (1932) concerns the intrusion of murder into a boating holiday on the Norfolk Broads. Flooding in Fenland makes for a dramatic climax to one of Dorothy L. Sayers’ finest novels, The Nine Tailors (1934), and my own love of the Lake District is reflected in books such
as The Frozen Shroud (2013), set around Ullswater, while the valley of the river Lune provides an evocative setting for several novels by E. C. R. Lorac, starting with Fell Murder (1944). Several authors have made use of the drying-up of lakes or reservoirs as a means of revealing evidence of long-ago crimes; especially accomplished examples include Reginald Hill’s On Beulah Height (1998) and Peter Robinson’s In a Dry Season (1999). The title of Paula Hawkins’s follow-up to The Girl on the Train (2015) speaks for itself: Into the Water (2017) concerns an unexplained death in the mysterious Drowning Pool.
In putting this book together, I’ve benefited from the help of a number of friends and fellow detective fiction enthusiasts. Jamie Sturgeon tracked down for me the obscure stories by Kem Bennett, Phyllis Bentley, and Andrew Garve, while Nigel Moss and John Cooper again provided invaluable advice and support. I would also like to express my continuing appreciation for the support of the team in the Publishing Department of the British Library: my thanks go to John Lee, Abbie Day, Maria Vassilopoulos, and Jonny Davidson, as well as to my former editor Rob Davies, who originally commissioned this book.
Deep Waters offers an eclectic mix of stories. There are cases for classic detective characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Thorndyke; a diverse mix of literary styles, from the careless gusto of Gwyn Evans to the meticulously scientific R. Austin Freeman; and a scattering of long-forgotten mysteries, including one which was turned into a film. This collection has been a pleasure to put together, and I hope readers enjoy immersing themselves in it. Go on now: it’s time to take the plunge…
Martin Edwards
martinedwardsbooks.com
The Adventure of the ‘Gloria Scott’
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) loved the sea. At the age of twenty, after completing the third year of his medical studies, he signed on as ship’s surgeon on the Greenland whaler Hope. His duties as a doctor were undemanding, and he had the time to try his hand at whaling, becoming so proficient that the captain offered him handsome terms if he would act as doctor and harpoonist on the ship’s next voyage. Doyle declined, but after graduating he served as ship’s surgeon on board the SS Mayumba, travelling to the coast of West Africa. In later life, he remained an enthusiastic sailor, and even played cricket on the deck of the RMS Dunottar Castle.
The sea plays a recurrent part in Doyle’s fiction. ‘The Adventure of the Gloria Scott,’ a striking example, was first published in The Strand Magazine in April 1893. This story recounts Sherlock Holmes’s very first case and, together with ‘The Musgrave Ritual,’ is the major source of information for Holmesians about the consulting detective’s early life. Victor Trevor, a central character in the story, is one of only three people in the canon whom Holmes acknowledged as his friend. They met at college, and Holmes’s failure to identify that college has fuelled endless speculation as to where he studied.
‘I have some papers here,’ said my friend, Sherlock Holmes, as we sat one winter’s night on either side of the fire, ‘which I really think, Watson, it would be worth your while to glance over. These are the documents in the extraordinary case of the Gloria Scott, and this is the message which struck Justice of the Peace Trevor dead with horror when he read it.
He had picked from a drawer a little tarnished cylinder, and, undoing the tape, he handed me a short note scrawled upon a half-sheet of slate-grey paper.
‘The supply of game for London is going steadily up,’ it ran. ‘Head-keeper Hudson, we believe, has been now told to receive all orders for fly-paper, and for preservation of your hen pheasant’s life.’
As I glanced up from reading this enigmatical message I saw Holmes chuckling at the expression upon my face.
‘You look a little bewildered,’ said he.
‘I cannot see how such a message as this could inspire horror. It seems to me to be rather grotesque than otherwise.
‘Very likely. Yet the fact remains that the reader, who was a fine, robust old man, was knocked clean down by it, as if it had been the butt-end of a pistol.’
‘You arouse my curiosity,’ said I. ‘But why did you say just now that there were very particular reasons why I should study this case?’
‘Because it was the first in which I was ever engaged.’
I had often endeavoured to elicit from my companion what had first turned his mind in the direction of criminal research, but I had never caught him before in a communicative humour. Now he sat forward in his armchair and spread out the documents upon his knees. Then he lit his pipe and sat for some time smoking and turning them over.
‘You never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?’ he asked. ‘He was the only friend I made during the two years that I was at college. I was never a very sociable fellow, Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and working out my own little methods of thought, so that I never mixed much with the men of my year. Bar fencing and boxing I had few athletic tastes, and then my line of study was quite distinct from that of the other fellows, so that we had no points of contact at all. Trevor was the only man I knew, and that only through the accident of his bull-terrier freezing on to my ankle one morning as I went down to chapel.
‘It was a prosaic way of forming a friendship, but it was effective. I was laid by the heels for ten days, and Trevor used to come in to inquire after me. At first it was only a minute’s chat, but soon his visits lengthened, and before the end of the term we were close friends. He was a hearty, full-blooded fellow, full of spirit and energy, the very opposite to me in most respects; but we found we had some subjects in common, and it was a bond of union when I learned that he was as friendless as I. Finally, he invited me down to his father’s place at Donnithorpe, in Norfolk, and I accepted his hospitality for a month of the long vacation.
‘Old Trevor was evidently a man of some wealth and consideration, a J.P. and a landed proprietor. Donnithorpe is a little hamlet just to the north of Langmere, in the country of the Broads. The house was an old-fashioned, wide-spread, oak-beamed, brick building, with a fine lime-lined avenue leading up to it. There was excellent wild duck shooting in the fens, remarkably good fishing, a small but select library, taken over, as I understood, from a former occupant, and a tolerable cook, so that it would be a fastidious man who could not put in a pleasant month there.
‘Trevor senior was a widower, and my friend was his only son. There had been a daughter, I heard, but she had died of diphtheria while on a visit to Birmingham. The father interested me extremely. He was a man of little culture, but with a considerable amount of rude strength both physically and mentally. He knew hardly any books, but he had travelled far, had seen much of the world, and had remembered all that he had learned. In person he was a thick-set, burly man with a shock of grizzled hair, a brown, weather-beaten face, and blue eyes which were keen to the verge of fierceness. Yet he had a reputation for kindness and charity on the countryside and was noted for the leniency of his sentences from the bench.
‘One evening, shortly after my arrival, we were sitting over a glass of port after dinner when young Trevor began to talk about those habits of observation and inference which I had already formed into a system, although I had not yet appreciated the part which they were to play in my life. The old man evidently thought that his son was exaggerating in his description of one or two trivial feats which I had performed.
‘“Come now, Mr Holmes,” said he, laughing good-humouredly, “I’m an excellent subject, if you can deduce anything from me.”
‘“I fear there is not very much,” I answered. “I might suggest that you have gone about in fear of some personal attack within the last twelve months.”
‘The laugh faded from his lips, and he stared at me in great surprise.
‘“Well, that’s true enough,” said he. “You know, Victor,” turning to his son, “when we broke up that poaching gang, they swore to knife us; and Sir Edward Hoby has actually been at
tacked. I’ve always been on my guard since then, though I have no idea how you know it.”
‘“You have a very handsome stick,” I answered. “By the inscription, I observed that you had not had it more than a year. But you have taken some pains to bore the head of it and pour melted lead into the hole, so as to make it a formidable weapon. I argued that you would not take such precautions unless you had some danger to fear.”
‘“Anything else?” he asked, smiling.
‘“You have boxed a good deal in your youth.”
‘“Right again. How did you know it? Is my nose knocked a little out of the straight?”
‘“No,” said I. “It is your ears. They have the peculiar flattening and thickening which marks the boxing man.”
‘“Anything else?”
‘“You have done a great deal of digging, by your callosities.”
‘“Made all my money at the gold-fields.”
‘“You have been in New Zealand.”
‘“Right again.”
‘“You have visited Japan.”
‘“Quite true.”
‘“And you have been most intimately associated with someone whose initials were J. A., and whom you afterwards were eager to entirely forget.”
‘Mr Trevor stood slowly up, fixed his large blue eyes on me with a strange, wild stare, and then pitched forward on his face among the nutshells which strewed the cloth, in a dead faint.
‘You can imagine, Watson, how shocked both his son and I were. His attack did not last long, however, for when we undid his collar and sprinkled the water from one of the finger glasses over his face, he gave a gasp or two and sat up.
‘“Ah, boys!” said he, forcing a smile. “I hope I haven’t frightened you. Strong as I look, there is a weak place in my heart, and it does not take much to knock me over. I don’t know how you manage this, Mr Holmes, but it seems to me that all the detectives of fact and of fancy would be children in your hands. That’s your line of life, sir, and you may take the word of a man who has seen something of the world.”
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