Acting on Impulse

by Georgette Heyer

  She got a deer in the headlights expression. “I… you know, I think we used to have a list like that.” She turned to her colleague. “Martin, do you remember that list of literary magazines we had? I think it’ll be in the Australian literary magazines file.”

  Martin went off to dig it out, and Kirsty – for such was her name – began an extensive catalogue search for what I was after. “We have so many directories of so many magazines, but I just don’t know if we have…” Her eyes opened wide, as she had a sudden realization. “You know, we have a… there’s a kind of book for advertisers… I can’t recall the title, but it was something like the Newspaper and Magazine Guide…” Feverishly, she began a new search, while Martin proudly handed me a grimy manila folder, slim and dispirited looking with a hand-written label that read “Literary Magazines – Australia.” Not terribly hopeful, I looked inside to find several tissue paper-thin requests that dated back to the 1970s, from the National Library of Australia to assorted institutions asking to know their holdings in the genre, most of which did not seem to have received a reply. A list starkly labelled INCOMPLETE also stared back at me, as did a note about If Revived, a magazine that was issued fourteen times from 1949 – 1959, and the first editor of which was Rupert Murdoch.

  This research was turning up all kinds of fascinating ephemera.

  “The Press Directory!” a triumphant whisper-shout came from Kirsty at her desk, and I ran over to find her requesting the volumes from 1935 and 1938 for me, to be viewed the following day. “It’s a pretty complete listing of the magazines and newspapers in print back then,” she said sunnily. “Good luck!”

  RETURNING the next day, I collected my Press Directory booty and painstakingly copied down the titles of each viable journal that I thought might conceivably play host to a lost Georgette Heyer story. I still couldn’t quite understand why she might have sold the story to a magazine other than the Women’s Weekly, her usual haunt on this side of the world, but she manifestly had not, so it had to be elsewhere.

  My list of likely candidates wasn’t as long as I had feared, but was also not as long as I had hoped. If there weren’t many magazines in which it could have been printed – and surely many of them would be digitized already? – then the chances of finding “On Such a Night” grew exponentially smaller.

  I identified about fifteen publications that might be potential hunting grounds, from Adam and Eve to Woman, and I began eliminating them by the simple expedient of first checking if they had already been digitized, and if they had not, combing through them issue by issue with painstaking and careful precision, one, two, even three rolls of microfilm, each covering at least six months of a publication, per session, ten days in a row. By the end of it, I’d searched nine publications in their entirety (for the most probable period), but some were unavailable at my location, and I’d variously need to travel to the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane and the National Library of Australia in Canberra in order to check those final possibilities off my list.

  In the meantime, I had greatly enjoyed the search, and my immersion in that previous time. I’d loved seeing the articles on the changing roles of women, discovering new writers, seeing the gorgeous outfits on sale for ludicrous prices, and skimming over remarkably familiar-sounding advertorials on “slimming” and make up and “how to keep your man.” (Often all three at once.)

  But with my interstate trips now booked for a couple of weeks away, I decided to return to my radio-based search, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to peruse the Wireless Weekly, in which Dorothea Vautier had so often and prominently been featured. It occurred to me then that I hadn’t actually thought to look further into the magazine the week that “On Such a Night” was broadcast – maybe there’d been some kind of advertisement of the story in its pages? After all, Georgette Heyer was an ever-rising star in women’s fiction at the time – and was already a best-seller in anyone’s language – and so it seemed impossible to me that any story of hers would be given short shrift by any right-thinking editor and consigned either to the back of a magazine, or completely ignored by some lucky radio station’s advertising department.

  It was only as I began to sift through that edition of the Wireless Weekly did I notice an oddity. “On Such a Night” wasn’t only broadcast on Monday, December 6, 1937; it was broadcast every day that week. Not on Saturday and Sunday, but every weekday, from Friday, December 3 through to Thursday, December 7. Now, it would make sense to maybe broadcast a short story multiple times, to give those who missed it a chance to tune in, the kind of thing TV networks used to invariably do before streaming and binge-watching came along and foiled their repeated episode model. But to repeat the story every day across two different weeks? That seemed… odd.

  But then, fifteen minutes isn’t very long. Perhaps “On Such a Night” was one of Heyer’s longer short stories, and it required five days to complete the thing. Or… maybe even more days?

  I called Jen. “So… this is weird,” I said. “You know how I found ‘On Such a Night’ in the radio listing for that one day in 1937? I’ve now realized it was broadcast every day for that whole week.”

  “What?”

  “So I’m wondering… could it be a short story we already know? Like, one of the longer ones – maybe even ‘Lady, Your Pardon’, which was published in the Women’s Weekly in 1936? You did say that Heyer mentioned in her notes that she didn’t remember a short of that title, and I know you’ve said that ‘Pharaoh’s Daughter’ was the original title of that one, but could it be that ‘On Such a Night’ was her first stab at it—”

  “No,” Jen said definitively. “Because we have correspondence about her deciding what to call it: whether to say ‘Faro’ or ‘Pharaoh’. And we know she was furious with Woman’s Journal editor Dorothy Sutherland for renaming it, although I’ve never found it published there and have always thought that she must have made a mistake, and it must have been the Women’s Weekly editor she should have been angry with. Wait, let me check…” After a moment, she is back, clearly with her primary source material at her fingertips. “Here we are, Georgette’s list of her novel and story sales, typewritten by her, and with notes in her own hand.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yes, it’s quite remarkable. And ‘On Such a Night’… here it is, under short stories. Oh, that’s interesting.”

  “What?”

  “It says here it was sold to the Australian Women’s Weekly.”

  “What?!”

  “‘Serial rights’ to the Australian Women’s Weekly.” A pause. “She—she must have made a mistake… She must have. I’ve been through the whole of it—”

  “Me too!”

  “And so it must have been a different magazine. But why she would have—”

  She trailed off, and there was a helpless silence as we both digested the implications of this.

  “Let me take another look at the Wireless Weekly,” I said, trying to remain positive, “and see what else I can find out about these broadcasts. I’ll call you back.”

  Subsequently, I started digging into the following edition of the Wireless Weekly, and discovered that, actually, “On Such a Night” didn’t just run for five days. It didn’t even run for ten days. I kept going further and further forward in time, until at last I found that the last broadcast of “On Such a Night” on Radio 2GB took place on Friday, January 14, at 11:45 a.m.

  Then I went backward, and found a Wireless Weekly listing for it on Friday, December 24, though no earlier. So not only had it been broadcast over more than one week, it had been broadcast in two separate years. I turned away from Wireless Weekly, and went back to the Telegraph radio programme listings. According to that source, “On Such a Night” by Georgette Heyer was first broadcast on Wednesday, November 17, 1937. And assuming it did indeed run every weekday until January 14, 1938, as the schedules seemed to indicate, then this “short story” was apparently read aloud on no fewer th
an forty-three days over the course of ten weeks. That was over ten hours of airtime dedicated to it—call it at least seven or eight hours, factoring in station ID and a jingle and probably commercials either side.

  So either Dorothea Vautier really liked reading the same short story over and over again for a cumulative eight hours across more than two months.

  Or this was no short story.

  This was a novel.

  I TOOK a look at the Wireless Weekly listing for Monday, January 17, the week after “On Such a Night” would have come to an end. In the same time slot the schedule simply read “Dorothea Vautier – Serial,” but contemporary newspaper listings, and subsequent Wireless Weekly editions, have the title of it as She Went to Paris by Fanny Heaslip Lea, which was read until Thursday, February 24, 1938.

  That slot was not for a short story read over and over. It was for a “Serial.” Hell, after She Went to Paris came to an end, Vautier started reading out Pride and Prejudice for the next couple of months.

  This had to be a book.

  I called Jen, and explained what I had discovered.

  “Then why does she have it listed under her short stories?” she cried, exasperated. The whereabouts of this “lost” Heyer short story had been puzzling her for more than a decade.

  I sighed.

  “I don’t know…” I thought some more. “Wait. Let me go and check all the Heyer stories and novels that the Women’s Weekly published. Then I’ll also check to see if there are any ads for Dorothea Vautier’s radio sessions in the Weekly itself.”

  A minute’s searching in Trove and I came across and an ad in the for the first episode of She Went to Paris that simply read:

  WEDNESDAY, January 19 – 11.45 a.m.: Serial (a modern romance).

  I was exultant. Perhaps, I thought with mounting excitement, the Weekly will have a similar listing for “On Such a Night.” Perhaps we can, if nothing else, at last learn the genre of this long-lost story!

  Less than fifteen minutes of paging through back issues later, searching for the unobtrusive text boxes tucked away toward the back of the magazine in which were listed the programming for the Women’s Weekly Radio Sessions on 2GB each week, and I had my answer. The listing read:

  WEDNESDAY, November 17 – 11.45 a.m.: Serial (romantic thriller).

  Oh my.

  So, not only was it now confirmed that this – which the Wireless Weekly and Sydney newspapers of the time gave under the title “On Such a Night,” and persisted in calling a “story” – was in fact a serial, but also that its genre was “romantic thriller.”

  I started flipping back through the Wireless Weekly, and soon found this confirmatory nugget, in the “Broadcasting Gossip” section of the November 26 issue that I had foolishly overlooked:

  Dorothea Vautier is the latest to join the ranks of serial readers. Each week day at 11.45 a.m. she is reading “On Such a Night” from the pen of the ever-popular Georgette Heyer.

  Had I found that earlier, I would have known we were dealing with a serial and not a short story, despite what Georgette’s notes might erroneously claim. It must be one of the detective novels, I thought in resignation. Or perhaps The Talisman Ring?

  Seriously? Has “On Such a Night” really just been The Talisman Ring this whole time?

  Maddening.

  I applied myself to some simple deduction, in order to figure out which of the novels it could possibly be, going back through the Women’s Weekly’s enormous Heyer-based output.

  Death in the Stocks was printed, in an abridged form, as a “book-length novel” in the Women’s Weekly in June of 1935, and The Unfinished Clue received the same treatment in August of that same year. Those would both tally with the 1935 sale date of this so-called On Such a Night – but Heyer’s notes, according to Jen, had said “serial rights,” and neither of those were serialized.

  Behold, Here’s Poison! was, however, printed in instalments from November 23, 1940 – February 1, 1941, having been published in book-form in 1936, which would kind of fit in with all the available dates – might Heyer might have pre-sold the rights to that novel to the Weekly in 1935, and then changed the title before the book’s publication? (“No,” said Jen. “The Shakespearean allusion of the title was always very important to that book.”)

  And the question must be asked: does “On Such a Night” even work with that novel, as a title? And can the novel we know as Behold, Here’s Poison! really be classed as a “romantic thriller”?

  Looking at what the Women’s Weekly had to say about the serials when they published them, they stigmatized Behold, Here’s Poison as merely a “mystery serial”, while The Talisman Ring, which was serialized in the magazine from December 5, 1936 – February 13, 1937, is variously called “our thrilling new serial”, “our brilliant serial of romance and adventure in an old-world setting” (catchy!), “our romantic serial of love and adventure” and “our splendid adventure-romance serial.”

  Although, An Infamous Army, also advertised as “thrilling”, was likewise serialised in the Weekly, beginning January 22, 1938, just a week after this alleged On Such a Night concluded, but since it was not published until 1937, it seems a stretch that even so clever a rights-seller as Heyer could have meant that when she referred to the 1935 sale.

  Unless she made a mistake with the sale date, as well.

  What is so frustrating about this is that, announcing the change to their programming that came about on Wednesday, November 17, the day “On Such a Night” began to air, the Weekly makes a big deal about the new 2:45pm “Homemaker” segment, hosted by one Mrs. Eve Gye, but annoyingly off-handedly mentions “another new feature will be a serial” and mentions the time, but nothing about the title chosen for this first-time honour.

  Months later, Pride and Prejudice gets namechecked. But Heyer, who at this point had had no fewer than four short stories – “Runaway Match,” “Lady, Your Pardon” (aka “Pharaoh’s Daughter”), “Love is a Hazard” (aka “Hazard”) and “Pursuit” – published in the Weekly, had had three of her novels serialized and two others published in full (if abridged) form, barely rates a mention.

  It’s like they were actively trying to confuse us.

  I CALLED Jen with my working theory. I told her that I thought that when Heyer sold the serial rights to Death in the Stocks – which is both thrilling and quite romantic, given all the pairing off that goes on – to the Australian Women’s Weekly, she’d decided to use the title On Such a Night. Then either she or her publishers went with Death in the Stocks instead – retitled Merely Murder, in the US – but in her accounting she continued to refer to it by its original name. The Weekly, meanwhile, had decided not to serialize the book, after all, but to print it as an abridged full-length novel, so they had to purchase the rights again, this time to print it in its entirety, and therefore under its new title. But they still had the serial rights to it as On Such a Night, so when they broadcast it on the radio, they used the original title instead of the updated version—perhaps for legal reasons; perhaps because radio standards and practice wouldn’t allow the word “death” to be bandied about in an 11:45 am timeslot; or perhaps it was even a ploy to trick people into listening to it, thinking it was a new Heyer story they had yet to read – like when Envious Casca was recently reissued under the title A Christmas Party for no discernible reason.*

  At that point, Jen was flabbergasted, but also resigned. It seemed an elegant enough theory that fit all the facts, except for the title change, which Jen couldn’t quite buy. “I don’t think Georgette would have allowed a title change,” she said.

  “She did in the American version,” I contended. “Not to mention how The Corinthian became Beau Wyndham over there, as well.”

  “True.”

  A DAY later, Jen called me. She’d gone into full literary detective mode, and trawled back through the Heyer Archive – both the cache of letters held by the University of Tulsa and the papers given over to her by Heyer’s son Richard –
to see if she could help confirm my hypothesis.

  Instead, she blew it out of the water.

  “I think it’s They Found Him Dead,” she said excitedly.

  “Really? But, the Women’s Weekly never published it as a serial. Why would they have broadcast it on the radio?”

  A faint buzz grew at the back of my brain, about that particular book and the UK’s Woman’s Journal, which I remembered from Jen’s Heyer biography. As I recalled, it had not been serialized there, but was supposed to be, and there had been some hard feelings as a result.

  “Well, listen to this letter Heyer wrote to her agent in January of 1936,” said Jen.

  Here is that letter – which is partially quoted in Jen’s Heyer biography – printed in full:

  15th January 1937

  Dear Norah

  I’ll sign the contract & send it back to you as soon as Ronald has seen it. It looks to me a very fair sort of an agreement, & I suspect your hand has been at work on some of the clauses. I will also send you back the proofs so that you will get them on Monday.

  I have been thinking over the situation with regard to the serial rights, & I think Miss Sutherland might well be jolted. She really is not treating me at all fairly. When you consider that I rushed the book on so that she might receive it early in December, & further made alterations in the story at her request, & handed them in three days before Christmas, her dilatoriness is not only inconsiderate but extremely rude into the bargain. I do not wish to hear from her that the altered succession is to blame. I don’t doubt that it has given her a lot of work to do, but I can hardly believe that her papers are to be allowed to lapse because of it. Presumably they are all appearing just as usual. Saving your presence, she is treating me to a startling example of the folly of Woman at the Helm. A bigger example of incompetence than this going into a flat spin would be hard to come by. All she has to do is to read through the first 4 chapters, as corrected by me (or to delegate this task to a subordinate) which will occupy perhaps half an hour of her valuable time.