The Cornish Coast Murder (British Library Crime Classics)

by John Bude

  This edition published in 2014 by

  The British Library

  96 Euston Road

  London NW1 2DB

  Originally published in London in 1935 by Skeffington & Son

  Introduction © Martin Edwards 2014

  Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library

  ISBN 978 0 7123 6315 0

  Typeset by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  I. MURDER!

  II. THE UNDRAWN CURTAINS

  III. THE PUZZLE OF THE FOOTPRINTS

  IV. STRANGE BEHAVIOUR OF RUTH TREGARTHAN

  V. THE INSPECTOR FORMS A THEORY

  VI. THE MISSING REVOLVER

  VII. CONVERSATION AT THE VICARAGE

  VIII. WAS IT RONALD HARDY?

  IX. COLLABORATION?

  X. THE SINGLE SHOT

  XI. THEFT FROM THE BODY

  XII. THE OPEN WINDOW

  XIII. CORONER'S INQUEST

  XIV. THE NOTE

  XV. COWPER MAKES A STATEMENT

  XVI. THE VICAR MAKES AN EXPERIMENT

  XVII. ENTER RONALD HARDY

  XVIII. PERFECT ALIBI

  XIX. REUNION

  XX. THE LITTLE GREYSTOKE TAILOR

  XXI. THE MYSTERY SOLVED

  XXII. CONFESSION

  XXIII. THE VICAR EXPLAINS

  INTRODUCTION

  MARTIN EDWARDS

  The Cornish Coast Murder, originally published in 1935, marked the crime writing debut of Ernest Carpenter Elmore. Probably thinking that his real name was a bit of a mouthful, and perhaps also to differentiate his detective fiction from his other writing, he opted for the snappier pseudonym of John Bude.

  Like many debut novels, The Cornish Coast Murder had a small print run. There was no paperback edition (paperbacks were in their infancy in those days) and the publisher, a small firm called Skeffington, sold mainly to libraries. As a result, copies in good condition are today almost impossible to find. Anyone lucky enough to chance upon a signed first edition in a fine dust jacket (does any such book exist? I wonder) would possess a rarity of great value. This is partly due to the sheer scarcity of the novel, but also to the fact that in recent years Bude's work has become increasingly admired, and correspondingly more sought after by collectors.

  Why is this? The Cornish Coast Murder provides a number of clues that help to explain Bude's growing popularity, more than half a century after his death. His writing style is relaxed and rather more polished than one would expect from a first-time novelist, and he pays more attention to characterisation and setting than many of his contemporaries. This is because he was, if not an old hand, already a writer who had experienced some success with popular fiction. He had a taste for weird tales, and in 1928, under his real name, he published a book with the rather wonderful title The Steel Grubs. In this novel, a Dartmoor convict comes across some alien eggs which hatch into the eponymous grubs. They eat the iron bars of the convict's cell, and needless to say, that proves insufficient to sate their appetite.

  Bude, born in Maidstone in 1901, was a young man when he wrote The Steel Grubs. A major publisher, William Collins, bought his next novel of the fantastic. The Siren Song appeared in 1930, and although Bude soon became more interested in detective stories, he returned successfully to writing strange fiction under his own name in 1954 with The Lumpton Gobbelings, a fantasy with allegorical elements, in which an English village is invaded by naked little people and splits into two camps, those who are charmed by the newcomers and those determined to eliminate them.

  The choice of a Cornish place name for his crime-writing pseudonym was probably an attempt to emphasise his focus on the setting for his first novel. At the time The Cornish Coast Murder appeared, detective novels with a recognisable and well-evoked rural background were less common than they are today. Perhaps anxious to avoid unintentional libel, authors who wrote rural mysteries often resorted to setting their stories in ‘Midshire’ or ‘Wessex’, a habit that persisted until after the Second World War. Bude was ahead of his time in realising that detective fans would enjoy mysteries with attractive real-life settings other than London. Pleasingly, the fact that the crime scene is on the coast proves central to the murder mystery.

  Rather than giving rise to a series of books set in the same area, the success of this book prompted Bude to try variations on the theme in his next two novels, The Lake District Murder and The Sussex Downs Murder. Readers who hoped for a major Cornish-based crime series had to wait until the late 1960s, when W. J. Burley began to write books featuring the cop Charles Wycliffe, which were eventually televised with Jack Shepherd in the lead role.

  Bude turned to fictional crime at the height of the ‘Golden Age’ of the genre, between the wars. This book appeared in the same year as Gaudy Night, in which Dorothy L. Sayers sought to elevate the detective story into the ‘novel of manners’, an ambitious project that provoked a division of opinion as to the extent of her success between passionate admirers and fierce detractors which persists to this day.

  Bude's aims were not as lofty as Sayers's; his focus was on producing light entertainment, and although his work does not rank with Sayers's for literary style or with Agatha Christie's for complexity of plot, it certainly does not deserve the neglect into which it has fallen. Here, the detective interest is split between a likeable pair of amateurs, a vicar and a doctor, and the professionals. From his second book onwards, Bude would concentrate on accounts of police work, but the balance he strikes in this story provides a good deal of quiet entertainment, as well as an agreeable sketch of life in pre-war rural England.

  The Cornish Coast Murder launched a long career; in all, Bude wrote thirty books about murder before his tragically early death in 1957. He worked as a stage producer and director, and also played a small but important part in the history of the genre, being among the handful of writers who joined with John Creasey to found the Crime Writers’ Association at a meeting at the National Liberal Club on Guy Fawkes Night, 1953. The CWA now boasts over six hundred members based not only in the UK but across the globe, and its Dagger Awards are renowned, but much is owed to the pioneering efforts of men like Creasey and Bude, who had the vision to see the need for such an organisation, and its long-term potential and value.

  The appearance of this British Library edition of The Cornish Coast Murder will be welcomed not only by collectors who have despaired of ever possessing a copy of their own, but also by crime fiction readers generally. Few will be familiar with Bude's name and work, but the pleasure given by this lively and well-crafted story is likely to tempt many to explore his later work as well. They will not be disappointed.

  THE CORNISH COAST MURDER

  CHAPTER I

  MURDER!

  THE Reverend Dodd, Vicar of St. Michael's-on-the-Cliff, stood at the window of his comfortable bachelor study looking out into the night. It was raining fitfully, and gusts of wind from off the Atlantic rattled the window-frames and soughed dismally among the sprinkling of gaunt pines which surrounded the Vicarage. It was a threatening night. No moon. But a lowering bank of cloud rested far away on the horizon of the sea, dark against the departing daylight.

  The Vicar, who was fond of bodily comfort, sighed with the profoundest satisfaction. Behind him a big log fire crackled in the open hearth. A reading-lamp cast an orange circle over the seat of his favourite chair and gleamed, diluted, on the multi-coloured book-backs which lined most of the room. In the centre of the hearth-rug, placed with exact precision between the tw
o arm-chairs, was a small wooden crate.

  The Vicar sighed again. All was exactly as it should be. Nothing out of place. All ambling along just as it had done for the last fifteen years. Peace, perfect peace.

  He cast a final look out of the bow-window and searched the ink-dark road for some sign of the Doctor's car. He glanced back at the clock. Twenty minutes past seven. Oh, well ... still ten minutes to go before dinner, and the old rascal was never late. Trust Pendrill to be on time when it came to their little Monday evening ceremony. Neither of them would have missed it for the world. In an isolated village like Boscawen, of some four hundred souls, these old-established customs were meat and drink to men of the professional type like Pendrill and the Vicar.

  The Vicar pulled the heavy curtains, shut out the ominous spectacle of what looked like an approaching storm, and settled down with the Spectator to wait for his guest.

  Five minutes later he heard the swish of a car on the drive, a merry tooting as the car passed the window, followed almost immediately by the jangling of the front-door bell.

  The next minute Pendrill was shaking his oldest friend by the hand and complaining about the foulness of the weather.

  “Just in time,” said the Vicar jocularly. “I was just going to sample the sherry on my own account. Sit down, my dear fellow, and toast your toes till the gong sounds.”

  The Doctor subsided with a grunt of pleasure and began to sip his sherry.

  “Anything new?” asked the Vicar.

  It was always one of his favourite opening gambits in conversation. He found that it got people talking. Not that Pendrill ever needed priming in this direction. He could sit for hours and talk “shop” without ever displaying the slightest fatigue.

  “Oh, nothing much. The usual round. A cut hand, two rheumatics, a whitlow and a case of measles.”

  “Measles?”

  “Fred Rutherford—one of your cherubic choirboys, I believe. Incorrigible lad. Always causing trouble in the village.”

  The Vicar's chubby face broke into a benign smile.

  “This is more likely to cause elation—at least among the younger generation. I remember we always hailed an epidemic as a godsend when I was a boy. They closed the school.”

  The Doctor nodded. He was always uncertain if he ought to allow levity where his job was concerned. He didn't mind poking fun at the Vicar's choir-boys and charity fêtes, but medical matters were a different pair of shoes.

  The gong throbbed melodiously in the hall.

  “Ah,” said the Vicar, tumbling alert in a moment. “Dinner!”

  He followed his guest's angular frame on his own short waddly legs into the dining-room.

  Later the Doctor returned, as was inevitable, to his own little world of stethoscopes and clinical thermometers.

  “By the way, I was forgetting. Good news for you this time. It looks as if you're booked for a double christening.”

  “Oh?”

  “Mrs. Withers—twins.”

  “Dear me—when?”

  “To-night. I've just come away. I left Mrs. Mullion in charge.”

  “Twins,” mused the Vicar. “Very unusual. I don't seem to remember another set of twins in the village since Mrs. Drear surprised us——let's see? Six years ago.”

  “Seven,” corrected the Doctor. “I attended.”

  The Vicar smiled a little wistfully across the heap of nut-shells which were accumulating on his plate.

  “Still at it,” he said quietly. “Fifteen years of it and it's all going on just the same. Births, marriages, deaths. Major events all of them. I suppose our more successful colleagues, Pendrill, would say we were wasting our lives in a backwater. Nothing ever happens here. Nothing! It all flows along at the same slow pace, though heaven forbid that I should ever see it changed! I love this spot, Pendrill. It's my home—my spiritual home. I wouldn't change my set of parishioners for any other in the whole of Cornwall.”

  “Not even Ned Salter?” asked the Doctor.

  “No! No! Not even Ned. Confound it, my dear chap, I must have one soul left to save. Otherwise what's my job worth? I should grow fat in idleness.”

  “Work,” commented the Doctor as they rose from the table, “seems to have left few ravages on your person. I should suspect a tendency to diabetes if I didn't know you better.”

  They returned to the warmth and cosiness of the study where the Vicar threw a few giant logs on to the fire. He proffered a cigar-box.

  “Try one,” he urged. “Henry Clays.”

  It was all part of the solemn Monday evening ritual. He always proffered Henry Clays and Pendrill always patted his pocket and said, that without disparaging the excellence of the cigars, he preferred his pipe.

  Coffee came in. They sank into their arm-chairs, smoking with the replete comfort of two bachelors who have dined well and now bask in the mellow light of each other's friendship and esteem.

  Presently with a negligent foot the Doctor kicked the little crate on the hearth-rug.

  “I see they're here,” he said, pretending to be quite casual about the matter.

  “As usual.”

  “I think we've got a good lot this time. A very good selection. I took trouble. I always feel when it's my turn that I want to cap the brilliance of your selection the week before.”

  The Vicar made a deprecatory gesture with his hand.

  “May I?” he said, diving into his pocket and taking out a large, serviceable penknife.

  “Of course.”

  With a leisurely hand, as if wishing to prolong the pleasures of anticipation, the Vicar cut the string with which the crate was tied and prised up the lid. Nestling deep in a padding of brown paper were two neat piles of vividly coloured books. One by one the Vicar drew them out, inspected the titles, made a comment and placed the books on the table beside his chair.

  “A very catholic choice,” he concluded. “Let's see now—an Edgar Wallace—quite right, Pendrill, I hadn't read that one. What a memory, my dear chap! The new J. S. Fletcher. Excellent. A Farjeon, a Dorothy L. Sayers and a Freeman Wills-Croft. And my old friend, my very dear old friend, Mrs. Agatha Christie. New adventures of that illimitable chap Poirot, I hope. I must congratulate you, Pendrill. You've run the whole gamut of crime, mystery, thrills and detection in six volumes!”

  The Doctor coughed and puffed earnestly at his pipe.

  A division of the spoils was settled on and three of the volumes were passed over to Pendrill. These would be exchanged for the Vicar's loot on the following Thursday. On Saturday night the whole six would be replaced in the little crate and returned to the lending library at Greystoke; whilst on Friday the Vicar would send off the list for the following week, culling his choice from the various papers and periodicals which invariably littered his desk.

  For years the Doctor and the Vicar had indulged this vicarious though perhaps perfectly common lust for crime stories. It was one of the minor jokes of the parish. They made no attempts to hide their common admiration for those authors who, with spider-like tenacity, weave a web and expect the poor, harassed reader to disentangle the pattern and follow the single thread back to its original source.

  Meeting each other in Cove Street, say on Friday, their conversation would invariably go something like this.

  From the Vicar: “Well, Pendrill, have you got it?”

  “Which?”

  “The Three Toads Mystery, of course. The others were mere child's play.”

  Here Pendrill would wink and look knowing.

  “Did you spot it, Dodd?”

  “I did.”

  “Who?”

  “No—I'm asking you.”

  “I've a very strong suspicion,” the Doctor would then say with the air of a man who hasn't a strong suspicion, but a certain knowledge, “that it was Lucy Garstein.”

  And then a little gusty cry of triumph from the Reverend Dodd.

  “I thought you would. I thought so.”

  And with the look of a man who harbours a
n immense wisdom, a sort of esoteric knowledge, the Vicar would amble pleasantly on his way to take tea with Lady Greenow at Boscawen Grange. Fancy old Pendrill being caught out by a simple red herring like that! The man was cracking up. He wasn't up to the old form of the early twenties. These new, psychological twisters, full of technicalities, were proving a little too difficult for Pendrill. He'd have to be put back on a course of early Conan Doyle.

  Perhaps the Vicar had actually assimilated the tricks of the crime trade a little more ably than his co-reader. He remembered odd twists from earlier books, tiny deviations in evidence, smart methods of detection, cross-examination traps, all the minute bits and pieces which go to make up the author's paraphernalia in the writing of mystery stories. His head, now alas racing rapidly towards balddom, was crammed with the stock-in-trade lore of the professional detective. Often by the exercise of his very acute observation he surprised, even annoyed his parishioners, by sudden references to their movements on a certain day. Dear, no!—he hadn't shadowed them. Nothing so crude. He had by the simplest methods of deduction put two and two together and made four.

  But heaven forbid that the shadow of any crime should ever fall across the grey-stoned cottages, the gorse-dotted commons and cliff-girdled seas of his beloved parish. He preferred to get his excitements second-hand and follow the abstruse machinations of purely imaginary criminals.

  The book ceremony over, the couple fell into desultory conversation. Most of it concerned the sayings and doings of the locality, for neither Pendrill nor the Vicar found much time for recreations and visits outside Boscawen.

  “How about our local man of letters?” asked the Doctor, breaking a long silence. “I haven't seen him about lately. Is he busy?”

  “Very,” replied the Vicar. “Putting the polish on his war novel. Autobiographical, so Ronald confided in me when I met him last. Between ourselves, Pendrill, I don't think that boy looks well. He appears ... well, strained—distraught almost. I dare say it's overwork.”

  “Possible,” was Pendrill's noncommittal reply. “He's a highly strung type of fellow. The war, of course, played havoc with his nerves. But what d'you expect?—he was only a youngster when they sent him to France. It may take him years to live down the stress and shock of the war. This book may help him.”