The Traitor
Sydney Horler
With an Introduction
by Martin Edwards
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Originally published in London in 1936 by Collins
Copyright © 2015 Estate of Sydney Horler
Introduction copyright © 2015 Martin Edwards
Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library
First E-book Edition 2015
ISBN: 9781464204982 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
The Traitor
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
BOOK I
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
BOOK II
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
More from this Author
Contact Us
Introduction
The Traitor is a spy novel originally published in 1936. At first glance today, it seems a period piece, a reminder of vanished attitudes from a vanished world. But the book was a success in its day, earning praise from reviewers in the U.S. and Australia, and its author was one of Britain’s most famous thriller writers, at the height of his fame. His sales were said to run into the millions.
“Horler for Excitement!” was the marketing slogan adorning the dust jackets of books by Sydney Horler. He knew his readers wanted a pacy narrative, vivid and varied settings (some of them overseas), and plenty of action, and The Traitor delivered. For anyone reading the book in the twenty-first century, there is a bonus. The story allows us a glimpse of the tensions and stresses within British society in the mid-1930s.
The First World War had been bloody and terrifying. Everyone knew someone who had been killed or wounded, and memories of the horrors of the trenches were slow to fade. As Hitler and Mussolini began to throw their weight about on the international stage, renewed international conflict became an increasing risk. Opinion was, however, divided as to how to deal with the aggressors. Some, like George Orwell and Winston Churchill, opposed appeasement, but others found it impossible to contemplate the calamity of another conflict; many were committed pacifists, and the Peace Pledge Union enjoyed massive support. Above all, the 1930s was a decade in which uncertainty and anxiety gradually gave way to fear of a formidable foe.
Against this backdrop, Horler crafted a story with two strands. The first, set in 1918, just before the end of the war, sees young Captain Alan Clinton in Paris, bewitched by the seductive agent Minna Braun, alias “Marie Roget.” He spends the night with her in the hotel Lion d’Or, and his act of folly leads to the loss of over five thousand British lives.
The second part of the story is set seventeen years later, in the turbulent present. Minna Braun has switched allegiance from Germany to Ronstadt, a “new state” of sixty million people ruled over by the supreme dictator Kuhnreich, a Jew-hating fanatic. Ronstadt is, of course, a thinly disguised Germany, and Kuhnreich is Hitler. As his chief of Secret Police tells Minna, “War is coming—and that means that our secret agents must get busy.” Europe has again become a battleground, and Minna is pressed into service once more.
Alan Clinton is now a colonel working for MI5. Other than his old friend Peter Mallory, however, it seems that nobody knows Clinton’s shameful secret. Before long, it is not Alan Clinton but his equally gullible son Bobby who makes a trip to continental Europe and falls prey to Minna’s seductive wiles. Will he betray Britain, and if so, what will be the consequences? The story rattles along to a climax at a military trial which takes place while Bobby’s girlfriend races against time in a desperate attempt to prove that he is no traitor.
The long-term consequences of acts of cowardice or criminal stupidity during the First World War were a recurrent plot element in thriller and mystery fiction over the next twenty years, and featured in notable detective novels such as Philip MacDonald’s The Rasp, Henry Wade’s The High Sheriff, and the Agatha Christie classic And Then There Were None. But although in The Traitor, Horler offers a twist ending and a “least likely suspect” solution of the kind which became very familiar in whodunits written during the Golden Age of Murder, this was a time when sharp distinctions were drawn between thriller writers and detective novelists.
Edgar Wallace (whom Horler much admired), “Sapper,” and Horler himself were prolific and popular thriller writers, but even in the 1930s, their books were as patronised by the literati as they were loved by vast numbers of readers. Dorothy L. Sayers—a highly influential critic, as well as a prominent author of detective stories—questioned their quality, saying in one review: “People sometimes complain that I am harsh and high-hat about thrillers…I give you my word that when I meet the least touch of real originality, or creepy-crawlery, or glamour, or humour, or sheer rollicking cut-and-thrust-and-have-at-’em combativeness in a thriller I hail it with cries of joy. But 99 times out of 100 I find only bad English, cliché, balderdash, and boredom.” She and Horler had no time for each other, and it is fair to say that, while her reputation has endured, and Horler’s has plummeted since his death.
The reappearance of The Traitor does, however, give a new generation of spy fiction fans a chance to judge Horler afresh, making up their own minds rather than relying on preconceptions. This is, surely, the great service which the British Library has rendered in retrieving long-forgotten works of popular fiction from its vaults. As many readers will do, I came to this book without ever having read Horler before. I had, however, read plenty of criticism of his work by commentators with even less enthusiasm for his work than Sayers. And whilst the British Library makes no claims for Horler as a literary stylist, the dash and verve of this book give clues as to why he sold so well in his heyday.
Sydney Horler (1888–1954) was a journalist who published his first novel in 1920, and his first thriller, The Mystery of No. 1, five years later. The success of this book prompted him to become a full-time thriller writer, and more than one hundred novels followed. “Tiger” Standish, h
is most popular character, was a freelance secret agent. Horler was an industrious rather than innovative writer, but he developed the knack of keeping his readers gripped, and The Traitor exemplifies the type of British spy thriller that stayed in fashion until the likes of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene took the genre in a new direction.
Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.co
BOOK I
Chapter I
The Messenger
The crossing had been particularly vile, the journey to Paris, if anything, worse, and Alan Clinton, as he stepped from the crowded carriage at the Gare du Nord and stretched his cramped limbs in an ecstasy of abandon, swore with corresponding gusto.
“To hell with this bloody war!” he cried, glaring about him.
“I quite agree with you, Clinton,” said a voice behind his left shoulder.
Who the devil—? He turned quickly. Then he reassured himself with a forced smile. He had never particularly cared for Brian Fordinghame, especially since Fordinghame had apparently run to cover and got himself a safe and cushy job in the Home Branch of Military Intelligence. “M.I.”—it was to laugh: if these gentry who were so cursedly careful of their own skins had served with him in the trenches for the past three years and a half, they’d know a lot more about Military Intelligence than they did at present!
A man of about thirty, lean and fit-looking, with keen, quizzical grey eyes, stood regarding him with a slight smile. Thinking of what he himself was about to do, Clinton felt that those same grey eyes were boring into him; they seemed to have the faculty of looking right through his body into his very soul. It was disconcerting.
The man wearing the green tabs of an Intelligence staff captain now nodded.
“How are you, Clinton?” he asked.
It was perhaps because the sight of green tabs had, during the past twelve months at least, invariably irritated him that the other’s reply was brusque.
“Oh, not so bad. And in any case”—ill temper coming swiftly to the surface, “it’s a lot you know about the war, Fordinghame.”
The other, disregarding the insult, refused to be ruffled. Instead, he smiled once again. It was an attractive smile—attractive in spite of its icy quality.
“Had a good crossing?” he asked.
“Lousy.”
“Where are you going now?”
“My hotel. I want some sleep.”
Fordinghame seemed determined to be friendly—and hospitable.
“I heard you were on this train, and I thought I would come along to the station and ask you to have a bite of food with me.”
“Why?”
“Oh, no reason in particular,” was the non-committal answer; “I just thought I’d like to have your company for an hour.”
The words did something to soften the other’s mood. Clinton’s voice, as he spoke, contained an element of regret.
“Sorry, Fordinghame. I’d like to—but, honestly, I’m dog-tired. I must get some sleep.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Oh—” he paused. “A little place I know. Cheap—that’s a consideration, these days.”
“Yes, indeed,” agreed the staff captain. “Well, another time, perhaps. I shall be in Paris for a few days. When do you go up the line?”
“To-morrow, curse it!”
“Well, good-bye—and good luck!”
The man who had crossed to Paris with important dispatches raised his right hand in a corresponding salute and then walked quickly away to find some sort of a conveyance. In August, 1918, one was lucky to find a decent taxi-cab.
He wasn’t lucky—and this increased his ill temper. The aged driver, who glared at him out of hideous, red-lidded eyes, was almost as much a derelict as the vehicle which—after a considerable argument, conducted with asperity on both sides—commenced to wheeze its way out of the crowded station.
Clinton flung himself back against the malodorous upholstery. The interior of the taxi smelt abominably, and, fresh from home, his nostrils had not yet become accustomed again to the vile stench of war. The fact was, he was thoroughly fed-up—if it hadn’t been for Marie he didn’t know but what.…But that, of course, was madness; and, especially now that he had his present job to do, the idea must not be seriously entertained. This did not prevent him, however, from wishing that a million miles separated him from everything connected with this cursed war. It was a hopeless ambition, for the end seemed as far off as ever. Even in London the never-ending horror had thrust itself upon him at every conceivable turn. In the theatres and music-halls one could not escape it; at the Service clubs the talk was of nothing else; even if one went out to a private dinner party one was pestered with questions about the trenches. The newspapers, the posters on the walls, the hoardings, even the shop-windows—God! How everything reeked of the beastliness!
And now, here he was back in the very centre of things—and within twenty-four hours he would be reporting himself.…That reminded him. With a swift clutch at the heart, his hand closed on the dispatch-case by his side. A wave of relief passed through him. He must be careful. Yes, he must be a damned sight more careful than he would be if he were actually in the trenches, for—if what that Major-General fellow at the W.O. had hinted at was correct—thousands of lives, instead of merely his own, depended on the contents of that case being handed over safely.
The reflection sobered him. And it brought the somewhat consoling knowledge that, if he were fed up himself, millions of other human beings were in the same boat. He must carry on; the job was not yet finished. And, in any case, there was Marie.…
Twenty minutes later, the disreputable taxi drew up before a small but comfortable-looking hotel in a side street off the Boulevard des Capucines. Clinton had stayed at the Lion d’Or before; he had discovered this cosy hostelry some months previously, and he had a particular reason for choosing it now. So far as he had been able to ascertain, it was not frequented very much by Allied officers—a recommendation in itself.
The thought came, as he paid off the gargoyle of a driver, that Fordinghame might possibly have followed him to the place. Of course, the idea on the surface was ridiculous—but he took a keen look around all the same. These espionage fellows took themselves damned seriously, and one couldn’t be too careful. Not that he had anything to bother about—if every Allied officer who slept with a French girl now and then was to be cross-examined…! Yet, all the same, he couldn’t very well get those searching eyes of the Intelligence officer out of his mind. Funny, that Fordinghame should have been at the station at the very moment that he got out of the train. Had he been waiting for him—and, if so, why?
He told himself the next moment not to be such a damned fool. Any one would think he had something to hide—that he contemplated doing something shady.
Shrugging his shoulders, he walked into the hotel.
***
The dinner had been worth eating—which was something to say, in these days—and now Clinton was taking his ease. He was stretched out on a sofa in the private sitting-room he had engaged, when a distant siren brought him to his feet. Wrapped in the contemplation of his thoughts and the comfort induced by the meal, all sense of the war had temporarily slipped from him. But now the strident warning that enemy aircraft were paying another visit to the French capital brought him back to reality with a jerk. He cursed volubly.
The siren shrieked again—this time so loudly that the picture of the Emperor Napoleon with the tricolour draped over it, which was the most prominent furnishing on the opposite wall, seemed to his excited fancy to quiver.
Throwing aside the copy of La Vie Parisienne, Clinton crossed the floor. As he did so, a knock sounded on the door.
“Come in,” he ordered irritably.
A waiter, wearing a much-stained suit, entered nervously.
“You rang, monsieur?”
“Yes,” he returned, “and you’ve taken a pretty long time answering it.”
The man became obsequious.
“A thousand pardons, monsieur, but the hotel is so busy.”
“I dare say. Still,” pointing to the half-empty bottle of wine which had given him annoyance, “this wine’s rotten—that’s why I rang. I want it changed.”
The waiter made a gesture of hopelessness.
“That will be difficult, monsieur. The war makes it very difficult to get good wine.” Another gesture of hopelessness. “All Paris knows that.”
“That may be, but this would take the first prize for muck—take it away.”
The waiter, shrugging his shoulders once more, approached the small table, picked up the bottle and glass and prepared to leave the room.
“I will do my best, monsieur. I am sorry—”
Clinton, looking at the forlorn wretch—the waiter’s sense of hopelessness had struck him during dinner—changed his tone.
“Oh, that’s all right. Cut along now, and be back as soon as you can.”
“Yes, monsieur.” He walked to the door and then turned. A finger that shook pointed to a warning hanging on the wall. “It is necessary to remind you, monsieur, to read that notice. You must be very careful about keeping the curtains drawn. The law against showing any lights is very severe, with terrible penalties, and the siren has just sounded.”
“I heard it myself—I don’t happen to be deaf.”
The waiter seemed inclined to linger. “No doubt by this time you are used to the air bombs, monsieur?”
The British officer laughed. “Well, we’ve had just a few in London, you know, not to mention the trenches. So they’re expecting those Zeppelins here to-night, are they?”
A look of hatred flashed into the sallow face.
“Yes, monsieur; on every night that there is no moon we expect them now. Ah! ces sales Boches! ” A grimy fist was clenched and lifted up.
The Traitor: A British Library Spy Classic (British Library Spy Classics Book 2) Page 1