This edition published in 2014 by
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London NW1 2DB
Originally published in London in 1934 by Skeffington & Son
Reprinted with thanks to the Estate of Mavis Doriel Hay
Introduction © Stephen Booth
Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library
ISBN 978 0 7123 5725 8
Typeset by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd
Printed and bound in England by TJ International
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. MISS PONGLETON ON THE STAIRS
II. THE FRUMPS
III. GERRY BLUNDERS IN
IV. A CONFESSION
V. MR. SLOCOMB ADVISES
VI. THE PRESS DOES ITS DUTY
VII. BASIL ELABORATES
VIII. BASIL APPEALS TO BETTY
IX. BASIL THINKS OF GLOVES
X. TUPPY PERFORMS HIS TRICK
XI. MRS. DAYMER DECIDES TO INVESTIGATE
XII. HUNT THE PEARLS!
XIII. MAMIE TURNS UP
XIV. BETTY DECIDES TO COOK THE EVIDENCE
XV. BASIL REPORTS PROGRESS
XVI. GERRY CAUSES ANXIETY
XVII. DISCOVERIES
XVIII. CLUES IN COVENTRY
XIX. CONSPIRACY!
XX. WHAT NELLIE HEARD
XXI. “SOME VALUABLE INFORMATION”
XXII. MR. SLOCOMB IS SURPRISED
XXIII. COMMENTS BY THE FRUMPS
LIST OF DIAGRAMS
Diagram showing chief places mentioned in the story
Diagram of Belsize Park Underground Station
The Pongleton Family Tree
INTRODUCTION
Among Golden Age mystery writers, Mavis Doriel Hay is one of the most unjustifiably overlooked. Although she published only three novels in the 1930s, her work encompassed many of the themes which would later become familiar to readers. They also range across the genre, from an urban setting in Murder Underground to death in academia, and finally to a classic country house mystery.
Very little has been written about this author until now. She was born in 1894 in Potters Bar, Middlesex, and had a middle-class upbringing, her father being a company secretary in the insurance business. Their home in Epping boasted a governess for the children, as well as a cook and a couple of housemaids. Two of Mavis’s brothers joined the Malayan Civil Service and helped to run the British Empire. Yet the Hay family had more humble origins in previous generations. Mavis’s grandfather was a shoemaker in Shropshire, and her great-grandfather was known as “Landsman Hay,” a Scottish sailor who served below decks during the Napoleonic Wars, and whose memoirs Mavis later edited.
Perhaps it was through her grandfather that Mavis Doriel Hay became fascinated by rural crafts. In the 1920s she had published several books in the Rural Industries of England and Wales series, co-authored with Helen Elizabeth Fitzrandolph. This was an interest which not only lasted to the end of her life, but was to have another major consequence. In 1929, when she was 35 years old, Mavis married her co-author’s brother, Archibald Menzies Fitzrandolph, the son of a wealthy Canadian banker and lumber mill owner.
With her contemporaries Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers at the height of their success, it was during this period that Mavis began to write mysteries. For her debut novel in 1934, she may have taken to heart the advice to “write what you know.” She and Archibald were then living in Belsize Lane, North London, only a few hundred yards from where the murder in Murder Underground takes place. In later books, she went on to invent a fictional Oxford college and the imaginary county of Haulmshire.
P. D. James wrote recently in The Spectator: “The detective stories of the interwar years were paradoxical. They might deal with violent death, but essentially they were novels of escape. We feel no real pity for the victim, no empathy for the murderer, no sympathy for the falsely accused.” She might well have been describing Murder Underground, in which the affluent and unpleasant Miss Euphemia Pongleton meets a grisly end on the stairs of her local Tube station, having been strangled with her own dog lead.
Writers of Golden Age mysteries found it useful to have a murder victim who was universally unpopular. It means the remaining cast do not have to spend much time grieving over the death, but can happily get on with their efforts to unmask the murderer. And in Murder Underground, Miss Pongleton’s fellow guests at the Frampton Private Hotel certainly have plenty of theories. Hay does allow Euphemia’s nephew Basil a bit of sympathy for the victim: “Whatever you may feel about your relations, you don’t like to hear of them being strangled with a dog-leash. It gives me a sort of sick feeling.” But this is essentially a novel of escape, and it is the puzzle which drives the story.
The treatment of the police is interesting in Hay’s work. Readers of Golden Age mysteries are accustomed to a depiction of local bobbies as clodhopping yokels, and Hay nods towards this tradition with her description of a policeman on surveillance duty as “a fishy-looking fellow with police feet.” But an evolution seems to have been taking place in this novel, even as Hay was writing it. In the early chapters, she relates her characters’ amateur speculations rather than record their interviews with the police. Inspector Caird is an invisible presence, summoning people to answer questions, then disappearing from the Frampton with a bang of the front door. But the inspector makes a rather unexpected appearance halfway through the book, “approaching unobtrusively,” as if slipping into the story against the author’s intentions. And he is an intelligent, sympathetic policeman too, though of course the murderer is finally unmasked by the efforts of the amateur sleuths.
Notable among these sleuths is the rather Marple-like figure of Mr Blend, who divides murders into “tidy” and “messy.” “It’s the little details that count,” he says, and: “It struck me I’d heard of something of the same sort before, but I couldn’t quite place it somehow.” Like Miss Marple, his recollection of an earlier experience leads to a vital clue, but it is a clue which might ring a bell for readers of contemporary serial killer novels.
This is a London novel, yet Hay approaches her setting as though it is a more rural location. In the manner of many mysteries of the time, Murder Underground demands concentration on timings and the whereabouts of suspects. But many readers will be delighted by the inclusion of maps – the layout of Belsize Park underground station, and even the Pongleton family tree.
Mavis Doriel Hay went straight on to write her second mystery, Death on the Cherwell, picking up on themes which were both contemporary and still have resonance today. Sadly, after her third novel was published in 1936, Mavis’s career as a mystery writer came to a premature end. By 1937 the Second World War was approaching, and her family would be ripped apart, like so many others. Perhaps, by then, she no longer found murder mysteries to be an effective escape from the horrifying realities of the world.
Though she continued to write, Hay returned to her first love – rural crafts. It would have been interesting to see what else she might have produced, since her surviving novels bear comparison to some of the best work published in that period. Readers will appreciate the opportunity to discover her writing in this new British Library edition.
Stephen Booth
MURDER UNDERGROUND
CHAPTER ONE
MISS PONGLETON ON THE STAIRS
DOZENS of Hampstead people must have passed the door of the Frampton Private Hotel—as the boarding house where Miss Euphemia Pongleton lived was grandly called—on a certain Friday m
orning in March 1934, without noticing anything unusual. When they read their evening papers they must have cursed themselves for being so unobservant, but doubtless many of them made up for it by copious inventiveness and told their friends how they had sensed tragedy in the air or noticed an anxious look in Miss Pongleton’s eyes.
Actually there was nothing to attract the attention of the casual passer-by in the usual morning exodus of the Frampton boarders. Young Mr. Grange and middle-aged Mr. Porter, both quite unremarkable, stepped briskly out at about half-past eight and took the road to Hampstead underground station. Shortly before nine Betty Watson, trim and alert, opened the door and stood there rather impatiently, gazing alternately at the sky and back into the hall of the Frampton. Punctually at nine Miss Euphemia Pongleton herself pottered fussily out, hugging an enormous handbag and looking perhaps rather shabbier and more out-of-date than usual. Betty informed her that it was a nice morning, in response to which Miss Pongleton wrinkled her nose as if she didn’t like the smell of it. At the end of Church Lane she turned to the right and doddered slowly down the hill towards Belsize Park underground station.
Before Miss Pongleton was out of sight Cissie Fain came bounding out, pulling on her gloves, and she and Betty followed Miss Pongleton almost at a run, but turned to the left, up the hill, at the end of Church Lane. Five minutes later Mr. Joseph Slocomb, swinging his neatly-rolled umbrella, sallied forth sedately.
Mr. Basil Pongleton’s departure from his lodgings in Tavistock Square, a little later on the same morning, was less sedate. He was obviously in a hurry; yet it was after ten o’clock when he passed almost directly beneath the Frampton, whizzed along through the tunnel in the direction of Golder’s Green. The underground train which he took from Warren Street at about 9.25 would have passed that spot nearly half an hour earlier, and his subterranean wanderings on that morning were to cause him a good deal of trouble.
As he sat in the train he held before his eyes a copy of The Times which he had bought specially so that he might be able to make some suitable remarks to his aunt, Miss Euphemia Pongleton (quite forgetting that she disapproved of spending tuppence on a newspaper, even for the benefit of getting the standard point of view). But he was too agitated to understand anything that he read. His sight laid hold of the single sentence: The death penalty is a subject on which every citizen ought to form a reasoned opinion, free from sentimental bias, and went over it again and again without being able to convey the sense of it to his mind. The bowler hat flung on the seat beside him seemed to have no connection with him; it was strangely out of keeping with his blue shirt and vaguely artistic appearance.
At the same time Mr. Crampit, a cheap dentist in Camden Town, was beginning to be a little put out by the lateness of his important patient, Miss Euphemia Pongleton, for her ten o’clock appointment. She usually came at least fifteen minutes before the time booked, in order to settle herself before the ordeal. Mr. Crampit was wondering if it would be safe to squeeze in old Mrs. Boddy, who was moaning with distress in his waiting-room.
Mr. Slocomb was, in accordance with the usual order of events, the first of the boarders to return to the Frampton that evening. He found the household in a very unusual state of agitation. In the “lounge hall”—where a couple of unused rickety wicker chairs attempted to justify the epithet “lounge”—he met the maid, Nellie, carrying a pile of plates.
“Oh, sir!” she gasped. “’V’you ’eard?”
He held up his evening paper gravely. “Yes; I have just read it in the Standard. A dreadful affair! That poor old lady!”
“An’ my poor B-Bob!” spluttered Nellie, tears shining in her eyes. “’E’s bin took by those p’lice. ’E couldn’t ’ve done sich a thing, though the ol’ lady did say she’d tell on ’im.”
“Now, now; what’s all this?” enquired Mr. Slocomb with paternal concern. “Do you mean to say your young man has been arrested for the murder of Miss Pongleton on the underground stairs?”
He had followed the girl into the dining-room on the right of the hall, where she set down the plates and extracted a handkerchief from the region of her knees in order to blow her nose defiantly.
“They took ’im this arternoon; ’is sister Louie come an’ tell me ’bout it. Seems the ol’ lady ’ad that brooch on ’er with ’is name on a paper, an’ ’e bein’ down in that toob station a-course it looks black for ’im; an’ ’e may be weak, but brutal ’e never was, an’ I know ’e couldn’t’ve done any such thing, not if ’e wanted to which ’e wouldn’t.”
Nellie gave way to convulsive sobbing punctuated by loud sniffs.
“Now look here, my girl,” said Mr. Slocomb kindly, patting her shoulder. “If your young man is innocent he’ll be all right. British justice is deservedly respected all the world over.”
“But the p’lice, they’re something chronic; they’ll worm anything out of you,” blubbered Nellie.
“Don’t get any wrong ideas about our excellent police force into your head,” Mr. Slocomb admonished her. “They are the friends of the innocent. Of course this is very unfortunate for your young man, but surely——”
“There ’e is, my poor Bob, in a nasty cell! Oh, sir, d’you think they’ll let me see ’im?”
“Well, really——” began Mr. Slocomb; but the conversation was interrupted by a strident call.
“Nellie! Nellie! What are you about? Pull yourself together, girl! We have to dine even if...”
Mrs. Bliss, the proprietress of the Frampton, flowingly clothed in black satin, paused in the doorway. “Dear me, Mr. Slocomb; you must be wondering what’s come to me, shouting all over the house like this! But really, my poor nerves are so jangled I hardly know where I am! To think of dear Miss Pongleton, always so particular, poor soul, lying there on the stairs—dear, dear, dear!”
Nellie had slipped past Mrs. Bliss and scuttled back to the kitchen. Mr. Slocomb noticed that Mrs. Bliss’s black satin was unrelieved by the usual loops of gold chain and pearls, and concluded that this restraint was in token of respect to the deceased.
“Yes, indeed, Mrs. Bliss, you must be distraught. Indeed a terrible affair! And this poor girl is in great distress about young Bob Thurlow, but I would advise you to keep her mind on her work, Mrs. Bliss; work is a wonderful balm for harassed nerves. A dreadful business! I only know, of course, the sparse details which I have just read in the evening Press.”
“You’ve heard nothing more, Mr. Slocomb? Nellie’s Bob is a good-for-nothing, we all know”—Mrs. Bliss’s tone held sinister meaning—“but I’m sure none of us thought him capable of this!”
“We must not think him so now, Mrs. Bliss, until—and unless—we are reluctantly compelled to do so,” Mr. Slocomb told her in his most pompous manner.
“And Bob was always so good to poor Miss Pongleton’s Tuppy. The little creature is very restless; mark my words, he’s beginning to pine! Now I wonder, Mr. Slocomb, what I ought to do with him? What would you advise? Perhaps poor Miss Pongleton’s nephew, young Mr. Basil, would take him—though in lodgings, of course, I hardly know. There’s many a landlady would think a dog nothing but a nuisance, and little return for it, but of course what I have done for the poor dear lady I did gladly——”
“Indeed, Mrs. Bliss, we have always counted you as one of Tuppy’s best friends. And as you say, Bob Thurlow was good to him, too; he took him for walks, I believe?”
“He always seemed so fond of the poor little fellow; who could believe ... Well! well! And they say dogs know! What was that saying Mr. Blend was so fond of at one time—before your day, I daresay it would be: True humanity shows itself first in kindness to dumb animals. Out of one of his scrap-books. Well, the truest sayings sometimes go astray! But I must see after that girl; and cook’s not much better, she’s so flustered she’s making Nellie ten times worse. She can’t keep her tongue still a moment!”
Mrs. Bliss bustled away, and Mr. Slocomb, apparently rather exasperated by her chatter, made his escape as soon as she
had removed herself from the doorway.
As Mrs. Bliss returned to the kitchen she thought: “Well, I’m glad he’s here; that’s some comfort; always so helpful—but goodness knows what the dinner will be like!”
CHAPTER TWO
THE FRUMPS
DINNER at the Frampton that evening was eaten to the accompaniment of livelier conversation than usual, and now and again from one of the little tables an excited voice would rise to a pitch that dominated the surrounding talk until the owner of the voice, realizing her unseemly assertiveness on this solemn evening, would fall into lowered tones or awkward silence. The boarders discussed the murder callously. One’s fellow-boarders are apt to appear in the foreground of one’s daily view unpleasantly larger than life but rather less than human.
Cissie Fain and Betty Watson, who shared a table and worked in the same office in the City, jabbered excitedly. Cissie was fair and round-faced with a slightly petulant mouth and innocent blue-grey eyes.
“It was nothing to do with the brooch that took Pongle to town this morning,” she announced, tossing her fashionably long curls.
“It didn’t take her to town,” objected Betty, whose literal accuracy was invaluable to her firm. She was quieter in her manners than Cissie, brown-haired and brown-eyed; perhaps not so pretty but with more decisive features.
“Well, it was taking her and it would have taken her if she hadn’t been ‘took’ on the way, as poor Nellie would put it,” continued Cissie shrilly. “It was an appointment with the dentist. Too sordid!”
“You don’t suppose the dentist throttled her on the underground stairs because he couldn’t bear the idea of looking down her throat again?” enquired Betty.
“Don’t be so asinine! I mean there is no reason why Bob should be so desperately anxious to stop her journey.”
“But how d’you know Pongle wasn’t going on afterwards to see the police about that brooch?”
Murder Underground (British Library Crime Classics) Page 1