They Rang Up the Police: A classic murder mystery set in rural England (Inspector Guy Northeast Book 1)

by Joanna Cannan

  They Rang Up the Police

  Joanna Cannan

  © Joanna Cannan 1939

  Joanna Cannan has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1939 by The Rue Morgue Press.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  1

  Friday

  2

  Saturday

  3

  Monday

  4

  Wednesday

  5

  Thursday

  6

  Thursday (continued)

  7

  Friday

  8

  Saturday

  Introduction

  Young Inspector Guy Northeast makes his debut in They Rang Up the Police, the author’s first detective novel, published in England in 1939 and one of only two books in which he was to appear. Northeast arrives at Marley Grange and “its household of unhappy women,” as he was to refer to it later, not long after he had followed up his promotion to Detective Inspector, C.I.D., with a disastrous performance on a case. As a consequence he is enduring a series of dull, routine assignments, here being packed off to Melchester to investigate the disappearance of a middle-aged spinster from her home.

  Northeast, the third son of a Wiltshire farmer, is a big, raw-boned man whose youth, slowness of speech and lack of formal education belie his very real gift for police work. Never in They Rang Up the Police is he given any credit, either by his colleagues or the local citizenry, for his part in solving the crime. Northeast’s character, tentatively sketched in here, is more fully delineated in Death at The Dog (1941), in which the lady novelist Crescy Hardwick helps define him to the reader, explaining that “Education’s all very well for dining-out on, but it can’t make fools wise. A wise lad, Northeast, and wisdom is common sense lit by imagination.”

  Even given his short career, Guy Northeast is one of the more interesting detectives to grace the pages of an English Golden Age mystery novel. It was a period when aristocratic amateurs (Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion), Oxbridge-educated gentleman coppers (Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn and Michael Innes’ John Appleby), and brilliant scientists (R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. John Thorndyke and John Rhodes’ Dr. Priestley) dominated the pages of detective novels. (And then there was the odd little foreigner such as Christie’s Hercule Poirot or the busybody spinster such as Miss Marple or Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver.)

  Guy Northeast, however, rose to his position in the police from the ranks of Britain’s yeoman class, the class that carried the British flag to every corner of the Empire but usually made its appearance in crime fiction only in the role of the long-suffering or blundering second banana to the Great Detective. Northeast is certainly a breath of fresh air in a genre dominated by “nobs.”

  Britain may have been a democracy in the 1930s, but it was far from a classless society, and the Bolshevik threat was on the minds of many upper-crust Brits. Working-class Bolshies like Funge, the chauffeur in They Rang Up the Police, are a common fixture in the crime fiction of the day and are usually portrayed in an unfavorable light, an affectation that almost fatally marred Ngaio Marsh’s 1934 debut, A Man Lay Dead. Cannan presents a much more balanced view. While the monied class heaps scorn on Funge and is more than willing to assign him the role of a murderer, the Cathcarts’ cook remarks that his type often make the best husbands. Although Cannan herself was born into the English intelligentsia, she pokes fun at snobbish high-ranking coppers who refuse to consider that anyone to the manor born could possibly resort to anything as common as murder. Northeast may have little use for higher-ups in the Melchester police, but the lessons of a lifetime are not easily put aside and he, too, occasionally falls into the trap of assigning too much importance to class.

  Northeast also differs from most other fictional detectives of the time in his understanding of how close any of us might come to the scaffold, given the opportunity and the means. He’s come a long way from the 16-year-old farm boy who dreamed of tracking down thieves and killers as a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman.

  Northeast is a complicated character, filled with longings and regrets and saddled with unvoiced ambitions, and it is his personality that lifts They Rang Up the Police above most of its contemporaries. This first mystery lacks the tension created by the interplay between Northeast and his chief suspect, Crescy Hardwick, in its successor, Death at The Dog, a book that prompted the Times of London to compare newcomer Cannan most favorably to her more established contemporaries: “It is perhaps not entirely to the credit of regular writers of this type of fiction that by reason of her skilled writing and brilliant characterization she should at once beat most of them at their own game.”

  But if They Rang Up the Police doesn’t quite match the standard set in Death at The Dog, it is still a very fine example of the detective fiction of its time, as well-plotted as a Christie but with perhaps a more balanced and realized world view. Although she employs many of the now timeworn conventions of the period, Cannan isn’t content to treat the detective story as a mere game and has one her characters remark: “The bother about detective stories is that they’re not in the least like life. People find a body and make no more fuss than if it was a dead rabbit.”

  Both Northeast books are set in a fictionalized version of rural Oxfordshire, called Loamshire in Death at The Dog, published two years later, but never named in They Rang Up the Police, although the action takes place in the same towns and villages and Northeast works with the same local police, the obstinate Superintendent Dawes and the blustering Chief Constable, Major Carruthers. The Dog, the pub in which the squire is murdered in the second book, is nowhere to be found in They Rang Up the Police, although another pub, the Dog and the Duck, is prominently featured. In both books Northeast is put up at the Red Lion in Melchester, a cheerless establishment with uninviting rooms and indigestible meals, the memory of which stays with him for years to come.

  After Death at The Dog, Cannan deserted detective fiction for nine years. When she finally did take up the genre again it was with a new character, Inspector Ronald Price, who was introduced to the reading public in 1950 in her most famous novel, the frequently reprinted and retitled Murder Included, first published in the United States as Poisonous Relations and twice later reprinted as The Taste of Murder.

  Cannan’s daughter Josephine Pullein-Thompson, herself the author of three crime novels, said her mother dropped Northeast as her sleuth “because he was too nice. She much preferred her hate relationship with the awful Price,” possibly because “it was too difficult to write about good or nice people.” That may be, but Northeast is too complex a character ever to become boring, and the final scene in Death at The Dog will tear at the hearts of all but the most hardened readers. Perhaps Cannan felt that Northeast deserved a little peace.

  “Awful” is a good description for Price, who foreshadows the equally loathsome sleuths Jack Rosher and Inspector Dover, respectively created many years later by Jack S. Scott and Joyce Porter. Critics Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, in their highly opinionated A Catalogue of Crime, praise Cannan’s work but admit that “Price is a caricature” whose “genteel-vulgar traits, speech, and habits” are “deliberately overdone in order to permit a hostile kind of humor at his expense.” In spite
of the success of the first Price book, the other four in the series have never been commercially reprinted in the United States (an edition of The Body in the Beck designed for libraries was published in 1983).

  The locale in They Rang Up the Police and Death at The Dog is a thinly disguised version of rural Oxfordshire, where Joanna Cannan settled with her husband and four children in 1932. “The Dog” is based on a real pub, The New Inn at Kidmore End, which is still in operation and lies near Reading. During the war, especially, the pub was the center of village social life, and Cannan and her family spent many an evening there.

  Before she tried her hand at detective fiction, Cannan’s books dealt primarily with the aftermath of World War I and life in England during the Great Depression, although several of her novels did have elements of crime fiction in them. All show her keen interest in the social mores of the day and how people behave in difficult times.

  During the war, Cannan devoted her energies with great success to writing fiction for young readers. According to daughter Josephine, her mother’s “pony” books changed the horse book genre. “Pre-Cannan the central character had always been the horse or pony,” Josephine said. “She introduced the first human heroine, a pony fanatic called Jean.” Altogether Cannan published nine books for children between 1936 and 1957. She died in 1961 after a long bout with tuberculosis.

  Born in Oxford in 1898, Cannan came to the literary life quite naturally. Gilbert Cannan, the novelist who ran off with Mrs. Barrie, was Joanna’s cousin, and her father Charles was an Oxford don and Dean of Trinity who became Secretary to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press. Many of Charles Cannan’s friends were poets and publishers who made frequent visits to his home.

  Joanna’s sisters also embraced the literary life. Dorothea married John Johnson, printer to the Oxford University Press, but didn’t write herself, while another sister, May Wederburn Cannan, was a noted World War I poet who was engaged to Bevil Quiller Couch, son of Q., who, having barely survived the fighting, died of the black flu shortly after the armistice. With her sisters (to whom she gave most of the credit) Joanna helped edit at the age of ten The Tripled Croton: A Book of English, Scotch and Irish Verse for the Age of Six to Sixteen.

  All four of her own children became writers. In addition to her crime fiction, Josephine Pullein-Thompson has written numerous books for older children while Christine, the most prolific, has written for a younger age group. In addition to books for children, Diana also wrote a biography of Gilbert Cannan and two other books for adults. Like their mother and aunts, Josephine and her twin sisters collaborated as teenagers during the war on a book for children. Publication was held up until 1946 due to paper shortages. Joanna’s only son, Denis, is a playwright whose first play was performed at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow after he returned from the war. His second play was directed by Laurence Olivier and was a West End success and went on to New York. Joanna Cannan would no doubt be pleased that her children continue to carry on the family’s longtime love affair with words.

  Why Joanna Cannan’s mysteries haven’t been more successful in the United States is something of a mystery itself. Perhaps it’s because Northeast was too realistic a character for a time when readers were looking for distractions from the war, while the unlikable Price might have been a hard sell for an American audience used to sophisticated and well-mannered British sleuths. That was unfortunate. Cannan’s books deserve a place on the bookshelves alongside the works of Tey, Allingham, Sayers, Marsh, Brand and Heyer. She’s that good.

  This is the first American edition of They Rang Up the Police, which, like several of the Inspector Price mysteries, was never published outside of England and consequently has been extraordinarily difficult to find on the antiquarian market. We hope the present volume and its successor, Death at The Dog (also available from the Rue Morgue Press), will help to introduce modern readers to this very talented and much under-appreciated practitioner of the literate English village mystery.

  Tom & Enid Schantz

  July 1999

  Boulder, Colorado

  1

  Friday

  “Shall I turn on the wireless, darling?”

  “Not on my account,” said Mrs. Cathcart. “This book is quite interesting.”

  “Is it the one I chose?” asked Delia.

  “Yes, darling. It was very clever of you to pick such a nice murder. The last one the girl recommended was so dry that I had to skip most of it.”

  “The bother about detective stories is that they’re not the least like life. People find a corpse and make no more fuss than if it was a dead rabbit,” said Delia.

  “I know. I can’t think how some of these writers get their tales printed.”

  “I expect,” said Delia, who was the most worldly of the Cathcarts, “that they have friends who are printers.”

  “Or publishers,” said the more highbrow Sheila.

  “But,” said Mrs. Cathcart, “if any of you girls would like the wireless…?”

  Delia said, “You, Sheila?”

  “No, darling. It’s only jazz. But perhaps Nancy…?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything I want to hear,” said Nancy. ‘“But if anyone else…?”

  “I heard the tennis results,” said Delia, “before dinner. There seems to have been quite an incident during one of the matches. One of the players made a frightful fuss about this, that and the other. Very unsporting!”

  Neither Sheila nor Nancy was interested in sport and, though Nancy was only sewing and Sheila staring into space, it almost seemed as if Delia’s remark would provoke no comment. But, as Mrs. Cathcart used to explain to admirers of the harmonious daily life of this household of women, it’s illogical, it’s unintelligent to cast off your good manners just where they are most needed. Perhaps she was old-fashioned: at Marley Court the Ladies Patricia and Angela bickered incessantly; Marley Rectory was a bear garden: but she had brought up her girls to be as courteous and considerate to each other as they were to strangers, and now, engrossed as she was, she lifted her wispy gray head and agreed with Delia: “Dreadfully unsporting!”

  Sheila, who had been lying back in the big armchair, sat suddenly forward.

  “Oh, but darling, don’t you think there was some excuse for her? She must have been all wrought up.” Sheila’s pale eyes blinked behind her thick-lensed glasses. “Like an artist.”

  “An artist,” echoed Delia, but with scorn in the place of Sheila’s breathless reverence. “I suppose your idea is that a player who wins a championship automatically develops an artistic temperament. But I don’t believe there is such a thing as an artistic temperament. It’s not temperament, darling; it’s temper.”

  “Yes,” said Sheila, “it may be.” She blinked rapidly and brought out, “But in an artist one excuses temper.”

  “But why, darling?”

  “Oh,” said Sheila, shy of explaining herself; “oh, because artists aren’t like other people. I don’t mean that they’re superior, darling. As human beings they’re definitely inferior, I’m sure. I was a reed and the wind blew through me…”

  Nancy looked up from her sewing. Delia hadn’t changed for dinner; she had been schooling a young horse in the paddock until it had been time to listen to the Wimbledon results, and then it had been dinner time; and she was wearing jodhpurs, a shirt and a horsey tie. But Mrs. Cathcart had changed into a loose coat of purple velvet, a black satin skirt and a necklace of uncut amethysts, and Sheila and Nancy wore silk afternoon dresses, their “garden party frocks” of the year before. Sheila’s dress was green. She liked to wear greens and browns, partly because greens and browns made her think of beech woods and beech woods made her think of music, and partly out of consideration for her one beauty — her flaming auburn hair. Nancy’s dress was of bright flowered silk, to the casual eye indistinguishable from the material which she was sewing. Nancy was pale and of an angelic fairness; she was small-boned and shorter than either of her sisters; had
she chosen dark colors and heavy materials, her fairness and fragility would have been striking: as it was, she looked faded. She was thirty-eight — five years younger than Delia — but, though Delia’s solid face was lined and weather-beaten, you didn’t think, looking at her, how time passes and where’s Helen, where’s Thais? You thought that when you looked at Nancy and then, if you were old and had done most things, or young and meant to do everything, you cracked a joke at the expense of “the Cathcart girls.”

  Nancy opened her mouth to say something, but at the same time Delia began to speak, and her voice was the louder. She said, “Well, darling, we’re none of us artists, so we needn’t argue. But I must say I shouldn’t mind being a reed and the wind blowing through me on a night like this.”

  She rose a little stiffly and walked to the window pushing back the serviceable hairnet, which kept her brown head neat and masculine, so that it left a hot red line across her forehead. Marley Grange is sheltered from the Melchester road by laurels and conifers, and in the drawing room only the bay window at the east end commands a view. You look across the tennis lawn and the paddock, where Delia’s bay hunter, Skylark, was eating his head off, to the wide open pasture which rises to Marley Clump, five tall beeches standing in a confidential circle, lily-green in spring time, secret-green in summer, sun-gold in October, and in winter, stripped of their disguises, gray as wizards’ spells. The round midsummer moon was rising now above the beeches; baby rabbits boxed and scuttered across the darkening pasture; a man and a girl emerged from the shadow of the Clump and loitered down the chalky thread that led diagonally across the hill.

  Delia began to talk about her horses. “I must say I was worrying over this dry weather; there’s scarcely any grass. But it doesn’t seem to matter to Skylark. The old wretch is as fat as a pig. By the way, I wish you dear people would lay off feeding sugar knobs to Flavia. I want her to realize that sugar comes as a reward when she’s done something properly. I can’t do that if she’s getting it every time any of you pass the stable.” Delia was good to her horses, but she didn’t spoil them or sentimentalize over them. She fed them well, worked them hard, petted them if they behaved and beat them if they didn’t, and when they got too old and slow for her, she advertised them scornfully for sale as suitable mounts for nervous ladies or elderly men.