Quick Curtain
Alan Melville
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Originally published in 1934 by Skeffington
Reprinted by kind permission of Eric Glass Ltd on behalf of the Estate of Alan Melville
Copyright © 2015 Estate of Alan Melville
Introduction copyright © 2015 Martin Edwards
Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library
First E-book Edition 2017
ISBN: 9781464208713 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
Quick Curtain
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
Grosvenor Theatre
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
More from this Author
Contact Us
Introduction
Quick Curtain is a witty detective story, originally published in 1934. It is one among many books that enjoyed brief popularity during the Golden Age of Murder between the two world wars but subsequently fell out of sight. The author, Alan Melville, was a successful playwright and man of the theatre, and he uses his knowledge of backstage life to good effect in this breezy whodunit.
Reviewing this novel for the Sunday Times, the eminent crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers noted that Melville “gets great enjoyment out of scarifying all the leading lights of the profession, from producer to dramatic critic”. She was troubled that Melville “blows the solemn structure of the detective novel sky-high”, but his aim was to have fun with the genre. He supplies a storyline with a twist at the end, but the real pleasure of the book comes from his satiric darts.
Blue Music is a “musical comedy operetta”, written by Ivor Watcyns, starring Brandon Baker and Gwen Astle, and produced by that master of publicity Douglas B. Douglas. The slender plot revolves around the shooting of the leading man, but when the show opens at the Grosvenor Theatre to a packed house, Brandon Baker is killed by a real bullet. When another member of the company is found dead, initial appearances suggest a straightforward case of murder followed by suicide. But there is, of course, more to it than that.
The audience includes Inspector Wilson of Scotland Yard and his son, an enthusiastic young reporter. They make an amusing variant on the Holmes–Watson pairing of sleuth and sidekick, although it has to be said that Wilson’s detective work is scarcely as brilliant as Sherlock’s. Melville enjoyed playing fast and loose with conventions of the genre as much as he relished teasing theatre folk. Sayers noted that his satire included “several thinly veiled personal attacks”, but for a modern reader, the amusement lies not in personalised specifics, but in his guying of types. An excellent example is the drama critic who, relying on the predictability of so many shows, hardly bothers to watch the musical comedies he reviews.
Sayers took reviewing seriously, and she chose to assess this book in the context of an analysis of the way different crime writers treated police procedure. This may explain her reservations about a detective story that she regarded as a “leg-pull.…This happy policeman…never turns in a report, acknowledges no official superiors, bounces into country police stations and bullies the constables without reference to the local authorities, and does all his detecting from his private house with the sole aid of his journalist son. Light entertainment is Mr. Melville’s aim, and a fig for procedure!”
Melville was not, of course, aiming for realism in his presentation of police work, and in any event, humorous detective novels are not to every taste. Sayers said, with a hint of disapproval, that Melville regarded “all this detective business as a huge joke”, but the real challenge for anyone who attempts to write a witty whodunit is: how to sustain the joke? Even the great P.G. Wodehouse, who loved detective fiction, concentrated on writing short stories with a mystery element rather than full-length novels, when dabbling in the genre from time to time. In fact, Melville’s humour has worn better over the past eighty years than many would have expected. Admirers of this book include the eminent American scholar of the genre, Allen J. Hubin, who described it a few years ago as “amusing and satirical and worth tracking down…it all fits together so neatly, even if rather messily for another member of the cast…”
Alan Melville was the pseudonym of William Melville Caverhill (1910–1983), whose varied CV included a stint as a BBC radio producer, scriptwriting (he adapted some of A.P. Herbert’s Misleading Cases), and countless appearances on television in the 1950s and 60s, sometimes as an actor, but more often as a presenter or celebrity guest. His first boss at the BBC was Eric Maschwitz who, under the pen-name Holt Marvell, collaborated with another BBC insider, John Gielgud’s brother Val, on a successful whodunit, Death at Broadcasting House, which was subsequently filmed. In that novel, a radio actor is strangled while recording a play, and Melville borrows the idea of “murdering in public” for his novel, written shortly afterwards.
Melville’s love of the theatre came to the fore with innuendo-laden lyrics for Ivor Novello’s final musical Gay’s the Word; recently revived, the show was described by the Guardian as “a camp curiosity that makes Salad Days look positively astringent”. Melville’s other successes on stage included Dear Charles, a comedy adapted from a French play, which was a hit in the 1950s with Tallulah Bankhead in the lead role; a twenty-first-century revival featured Joan Collins. Simon and Laura was an early stage satire targeting soap operas; it helped to establish Ian Carmichael’s reputation as an exponent of light comedy, and was later filmed.
Satire tends to be ephemeral, and so was much of Melville’s work, for all its popularity. Yet his detective novels, written in a short burst of energy when he was in his twenties, do not deserve the total neglect into which they have fallen. They are dated, yes, but they possess a certain charm. The British Library’s revival of this book, and Death of Anton, offers a new generation a chance to appreciate the work of a writer with a genuine talent to amuse.
Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com
Grosvenor Theatre
Tuesday, June 18th, at 8.30 p.m. prompt
Subsequently at 8.45 p.m.
Matinées Wednesdays & Saturdays at 2.30 p.m.
DOUGLAS B. DOUGLAS
presents
BLUE MUSIC
A Musical Comedy Operetta
Words and Music by IVOR WATCYNS
Additional Numbers by CARL CARLSSON
Cast:
Mimi — Josephine Craig
Prime Minister — Edward Williams
Serge — John Riddell-White
Otto — Arthur Daneligh
Proprietor of the “Blue Music
” Café — George Gianelli
Count von Arankel — C. Fisher Thomson
Suzette — Constance Owens
Marie, her maid — Phyllis de la Mare
Madame du Cregne — Millicent Davis
Abdul Achmallah — Douglas Martin
Phillipo, a rebel leader — J. Hilary Foster
Hiram P. Whittaker — George Fuller
Coletta, a native dancer — Eve Turner
and
Kay — Gwen Astle
Jack — Brandon Baker
mr. douglas’s 110 ladies and gentlemen of the chorus. the twenty-four ballet whos.
augmented orchestra
The entire production under the personal supervision of
Douglas B. Douglas
Chapter One
M. René Gasnier’s bald pate loomed suddenly over the rail of the orchestra pit. M. Gasnier smiled to a few complete strangers in the stalls, opened his score, pulled down his cuffs, tapped on his desk with the tip of his baton, reminded his first violins that the double pianissimo sign called for some slight restraint in their playing, and launched his orchestra out on the overture and introduction to Act One.
Blue Music, as a glance at the programme will have told you, was a Douglas B. Douglas production. Not that it was at all necessary to pay sixpence for a programme to learn that bit of news. London, and, indeed, the whole country, knew it pretty well off by heart by this time. Mr. Douglas was a master of publicity.
Not the loud, blatant kind of publicity that hits you in the eye, yells at you, knocks you over, and ruins green fields that once were beautiful. The other kind: the softer, subtler variety. The kind that had London rumouring, long before Blue Music was ever written, that D.B.D.’s latest show was a hundred-per-cent knockout. The kind of publicity that got people really interested. That made them talk about Mr. Douglas’s show, write to their cousins in Canada about Mr. Douglas’s show, discuss Mr. Douglas’s show at company annual general meetings and Dorcas Society outings. The kind, in fact, that made everyone become publicity agents themselves for and on behalf of Mr. Douglas without actually knowing it.
Mr. Douglas always believed in a preliminary canter at Manchester. A very good idea, that. Not only did it provide an added dollop of publicity (for most of the London papers sent down their critics to Manchester for a provincial skirmish), but it saved a lot of money.
Mr. Douglas thought a man several varieties of idiots if he went to all the trouble and expense of having endless rehearsals in an empty theatre if the good people of Manchester could be persuaded to come and witness those rehearsals at eight shillings and sixpence a stall. And, afraid of being thought unappreciative of something that was obviously going to be a success in London, Manchester paid its eight-and-sixpence like a man and applauded vigorously.
And London, equally afraid of being thought behind a place like Manchester in the way of appreciating a good thing, paid its two-pounds-ten on the opening night in town and applauded rather more vigorously. Everyone was pleased. Manchester was pleased at getting its rehearsal before anyone else—although, of course, it was billed not as a rehearsal but as a “world première”. London was pleased at getting a Douglas B. Douglas production that had been licked into shape and had the few blemishes removed in its little sojourn in the provinces.
And Mr. Douglas B. Douglas was very pleased indeed. The only fly in a very satisfying brand of ointment was that he had to turn away two thousand and fifty-eight applications for first-night seats at two-pounds-ten. That was unfortunate. But Mr. Douglas bore up wonderfully well over it, and kept his stall prices for the opening fortnight of the show up to thirty shillings—and that for a seat which any normal-minded person would have recognized immediately as the third or fourth row in the pit.
Tuesday, June 18th, you will have noticed, was the great day. On Sunday, June 16th, when most of the Blue Music company were still in Manchester and finding out the truth of all those jests about the provincial Sabbath, seven grim females parked seven rickety camp-stools outside the gallery entrance of the Grosvenor Theatre.
They were joined a little later in the evening by four more females and a lone male. They unpacked sandwiches and munched. They uncorked thermos flasks and drank hot coffee out of the aluminium tops of the flasks. They discussed with one another Mr. Douglas, Miss Astle, Mr. Baker, Mr. Douglas’s past successes, Miss Astle’s last divorce, Mr. Baker’s profile—both the port and the starboard view. They half slept. They suffered endless agonies on their stupid, unreliable camp-stools; they each contracted stiff necks and shooting pains in the lower reaches of the spine; they were photographed for their pains by a man in a dirty waterproof and appeared on the back page of the Daily Post under the title “Gallery Enthusiasts’ Three-Day Wait for New Douglas Show”. They were still there on Tuesday morning, proudly in the van of a fair-sized queue. The lone man who had arrived late on the Sunday night felt his chin and decided to go and have a shave, leaving his precious site guarded by a street entertainer for the sum of threepence.
At seven-thirty, when the gallery early doors were opened by a massive royal-blue and yellow-braided commissionaire, they staggered inside the theatre, past the box-office, up the Everest of stairs, and flopped wearily on to the unsympathetic seats of the Grosvenor gods. Bleary, dirty, sore, and ill-tempered. Nitwits, you say. And you are perfectly right. But you forget that this was a Douglas B. Douglas production.
What is there, you wonder, about a Douglas B. Douglas show that makes normally intelligent and sober individuals behave in this extraordinary way—some of them paying a working-man’s weekly wage for a bad seat in row M to witness the first night, and others—if they cannot afford this—leaving their homes and husbands and children for three days so that they may end up in the front, instead of the second front, row of the gallery?
Well, first there is the fact that nobody is quite sane on a first night. The players themselves alternately shower one another with passionate kisses and then instigate libel proceedings against one another. The audience, on their side of the heavy red curtain, are equally affected. Their sense of what is a long period of time, or of what is a large sum of money, is, as we have seen, warped and twisted by the importance of the occasion. So is their sense of what is good and what is rotten.
The god of the gods, the hero of the show, opens with a wrong entrance and is wildly cheered for five minutes. The leading lady sings her big number on a key quite unconnected with that in which the orchestra is playing the accompaniment, and the house rises to demand seven encores. The low comedian, realizing that his material is definitely on the thin side, introduces most of the old gags he put over when he made his first big success at the Gaiety in 1909, and the audience collapses under its seats, helpless with mirth.
So it is that very often those wise men, the dramatic critics, end their notices the following morning with the remark: “It is only fair to add that, in spite of the above remarks, the entertainment appeared to meet with the approval of the first-night audience.”
There is that, then, about a Douglas B. Douglas first night—or about any first night, for that matter. There is also Mr. Douglas B. Douglas himself. They say that nothing succeeds like success, and certainly nothing succeeded like Mr. Douglas’s successes. Even his failures—he had had quite a few—were brilliant failures. Mr. Douglas was a short, squat man with a total absence of hair and a flair for picking legs, spotting personality, and persuading the public that something merely mediocre was something simply sensational.
In his day he had been most things. Bell-boy at nine, porter in a railway station at fifteen, steward on an Atlantic liner at twenty. At twenty-one Mr. Douglas had found his true vocation, joining the Henry Phillips West End Repertory Players when that company were on their beam-ends in the not exactly cheering town of Gateshead. Mr. Douglas had made a notable success of his first part on the following Monday, Tues
day and Wednesday, serving the sherry as the butler in Interference as if he had been on the boards for years instead of hours. On the Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the same week (Gateshead demanding a bi-weekly change of repertoire) Mr. Douglas had scored an even greater success as a monk in The Rosary. On the Sunday after The Rosary Mr. Douglas had drawn the company around him, explained in a few well-chosen phrases exactly what was wrong with them, had offered his services as producer and general manager at a salary of three pounds ten per week, and had launched the West End Repertory Players out on their first stretch of calm water. From that date, Mr. Douglas had rarely looked back. When he did, it was always with a pleasing sense of satisfaction.
There was also Mr. Brandon Baker. Brandon Baker was an idol of the gods, a household god of the orchestra stalls. He had been so now for nearly thirty years, but no one bothered to think that kind of thing out, for Mr. Baker kept himself very Juvenile Leadish with the aid of massage, mud-packs, Turkish baths, and a resetting of his permanent wave at least twice a month. It was his profile that did the trick. It used to be the profile and the waist combined, but now—massage or no massage—it was the profile alone. There was no getting away from the fact that Mr. Baker’s was an uncommonly good profile. Particularly the west side, which Mr. Baker was always very careful to place towards the footlights. (There had been quite a number of occasions in his career when Brandon Baker had thrown up an otherwise good part because some inconsiderate fool of a producer had demanded that the east side be shown to the audience all through a long love-scene.)
If you had bothered to take a census of those seven determined females who parked their camp-stools outside the gallery entrance on the Sunday night, it is almost a certainty that you would find all of them to be members of the Brandon Baker Gallery Club. Membership—slightly over two hundred thousand, scattered all over the world. Mr. Baker employed three secretaries to sign the autograph books of the two hundred thousand. They met—the two hundred thousand, not the secretaries—at various festivals in the year, such as Mr. Baker’s birthday or the anniversary of Mr. Baker’s first success or the night of Mr. Baker’s five hundredth performance in Hotter Than Hell, and went through quite a complicated system of devotional rites. A valuable asset, a profile.
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