Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  Justice triumphs again.

  Another kind of amateur detective, although less prevalent in the British mystery than the series sleuth, is the "oneshot"—a person who becomes involved in a single mystery and must solve it in order to save his/her life/good name or the life/good name of someone he/she cares for. An example is one George Fenchurch (an alias), who joins forces with an undercover agent and romps through the pages of Edward Wood-ward's The House of Terror (1930) en route to the solution of a murder involving a deadly gas. The story stutters back and forth between the Yorkshire moors and northern Spain, is populated with a variety of unbelievable characters, and features homicide and attempted homicide by means of feathered darts tipped with an exotic Malay poison and propelled through a blowgun.

  The real genius of the novel, though, lies in Woodward's portrait of a psychotic dwarf. No other mystery, British or otherwise, can boast of the likes of the "hidden terror of Cleeson Manor"—a drooling, blowgun-wielding, hunchbacked little viilain named Pedmore, servant to old man Dykeminster, who "had picked him out of the stews of Shanghai, and learning secrets, had kicked him into submission." Sprinkled throughout the narrative are such masterful descriptions as these:

  For a second, before his eyes became accustomed to the dim light the dwarf stood bent forward in an attitude of alterness [sic], the huge hump on his twisted back looking like a heavy load, his long arms and great hands hanging a little forward as though prepared to grasp and crush anyone who challenged him.

  Then he saw Alicia, and a maniacal snarl of rage came from the red cave of his mouth, whilst a glare of diabolical fury blazed in his eyes. . . . He made a staggering step forward, and, as Alicia, her volition returning, started to her feet, he hovered and a malicious leer came into his expression as his hand crept into one of the side pockets of his coat.

  "So you think you have trapped me, do you?" he grated. "Think you have Pedmore, the dirty dwarf, by the heels at last, do you. . . . Ha-ha-hal. - . Pretty Miss. Rich young lady, take a dainty step towards me and see what happens to your beauty. . . ."

  Spinning round, his brain and judgment shaken, Lattimer saw Pedmore standing, openly laughing at him, his ungainly body shaking with amusement, his great head lolling sideways in his malicious mirth. The coat he had discarded . . . was evidently the only garment he had worn over his shoulders, for now he was stripped to the waist, and Lattimer saw the sun playing on his great biceps and massive, hairy torso.

  In his transports of vainglorious mirth at his own agility Pedmore was for a moment off his guard, and seizing his chance, Lattimer rushed forward, hoping to get a sure shot at the little swine before he could lift the long blow-pipe he carried, to his mouth. He had covered a dozen yards before the dwarf saw his intention, and then as Lattimer fired, he ducked and jumped sideways; and with the speed of a darting swallow, zig-zagged away.

  But the most memorable passage in the book is this one:

  Fury had come to the dwarf's face; saliva gleamed on his heavy underlip, and his eyes under their black pent-house brows, were red-rimmed and fierce.

  "He comes here to-night, master," he croaked. "I've had word."

  A crafty expression glimmered across Dykeminster's face.

  "Then he'll get what he deserves as soon as he passes the lodge-gates," he said with a gross chuckle.

  Pedmore hopped from one mis-shapen foot to the other; and again he tapped Dykeminster's arm with the fractious gesture of a petulant child.

  "But the warning, master! . . . The letter! Don't forget that! I feel it in my hump that something is going to happen!"

  The most popular of all detectives in British mysteries seems to be the police official—either a member of Scotland Yard or a local constable of some repute. One such heroic copper is Detective-Inspector Frederick Jubilee "Jumper" Cross of the CID, who, with his sergeant Johnny Lamb, investigates and solves several late-thirties and early-forties mysteries by John Donavan (a pseudonym of Nigel Morland, a prolific crime writer and creator of Miss Pym). One of Jumper and Johnny's more notable adventures is Case of the Violet Smoke, published in the United States in 1940 by the ever-reliable Mystery House (a division of Phoenix Press's lending-library rival, Arcadia House).

  The novel opens with a cloud of "villainous violet haze, writhing uneasily like some heavy smoke," which undulates across London. The police trace the origin of this "colored wind" to an old and apparently empty mansion, on one floor of which they discover a violet-hued corpse and on another floor of which is a chemical laboratory. Jumper and Johnny are called in and proceed to uncover a plot that centers around what the jacket blurb calls "a fascinating piece of industrial espionage." This translates to mean an underhanded struggle for control of a major chemical company.

  The unraveling of events, like those in one of Mrs. Bradley's cases, can most charitably be described as plodding. Case of the Violet Smoke may, in fact, be prototypical in its dull dialogue, not-very-thrilling police procedure explained in minute detail, and final explanations that go on for pages in the following fashion:

  "Now then, sir: we had that red stuff tested at Hendon. Their report stated it was a double salt of antimonious iodide and an alkali iodide, which at that moment they hadn't identified. It's not material. There are two points about that. The behavior of antimonious iodide—or antimony iodide—is not very fully discussed in ordinary chemistry books. The knowledge of it, therefore, would not be in the possession of the ordinary man with chemical inclinations. Its alleged unimportance is shown by the fact that in one textbook described as a textbook for a degree course in chemistry, all that's said is that antimony combines readily with the halogens. Iodine is one of them. Antimonious iodide is a compound of antimony and iodine."

  "This looks interesting." Cross's attention was being aroused.

  Cross's, maybe, but not that of most readers.

  The private investigator in British crime fiction tends to follow one of two patterns: Sherlock Holmes, with emphasis on deduction, or a bastardized version of Philip Marlowe and/or Mike Hammer, with emphasis on sex, violence, and the ill-chosen wisecrack. Most proponents of the latter school read like bad British imitations of bad American imitations, but without any special qualities to elevate this or that book to the status of even a minor classic. The practitioners of the former school are much more intriguing. Take, for instance, R.A.J. Walling, the father of that inimitable investigator Philip Tolefree.

  Walling, a British journalist and newspaper editor who began writing mysteries as a hobby in his late fifties, was a popular writer during his time. (His first book was published in 1927, his last posthumously in 1949.) He was not only popular in England but in the United States, where he received a certain amount of critical acclaim. The New York Times stated in 1936 that Walling had considerable skill in weaving mystery plots; the Saturday Review of Literature decided that he wrote suavely baffling stories; the eminent critic Will Cuppy rhapsodized about one of the early Tolefree stories, "We don't wish to seem pontifical, but if we were asked for an elegant example of modern bafflement, we'd name The Corpse with the Floating Foot on six or seven Counts, such as style, suspense, general interest, and miscellaneous. Absolutely required reading."

  One can't help but wonder, after reading this and other of Walling's literary endeavors, at the levels of mystery reviewing and popular taste a generation ago. Walling may have concocted mildly diverting plots (sometimes), but the effort required to read far enough to unravel them seems prohibitive in most cases. The fact of the matter is that R.A.J. Walling wrote some of the dullest mysteries ever committed to paper—far duller than those of Gladys Mitchell and John Donavan. It may even be said that he elevated dullness to a fine art. No greater soporific has been invented by the pharmaceutical companies than ten or fifteen pages of a Philip Tolefree opus.

  In the first place, Tolefree is a twit. Detectives who are twits are not uncommon in British mysteries, or in American mysteries, either; but a private detective who is a twit is uncommon.
And Tolefree is a twit of gargantuan proportions.

  This is how he talks:

  "You're a vandal, Pierce," said Tolefree. "You've feloniously broken and entered my ivory tower. Never mind. I'd have been bored in another half hour. How'd you find me out? Sit down, my dear fellow. Cigarette? Pipe? Well, carry on. What's the trouble now? Or did you come for the sake of my beautiful eyes?" (The Corpse Without a Clue)

  And this is how he thinks:

  "Money, money, money!" Tolefree found the refrain echoing in his head when . - . the train slid alongside the platform at Paddington; "plures pecunia strangulat–I wonder, now!" (The Corpse with the Blue Cravat)

  A remarkable girl, thought Tolefree, while he rubbed up his small talk. (By Hook or Crook)

  And this is how he acts:

  Careful to disturb nothing, he crouched, sniffing at the face and the clothes [of the dead man]. He put a finger on the sleeve of the coat. He lifted it off the grass a little. He took a magnifying glass to examine the wound. He walked around peering at the ground. . . . (The Corpse With the Eerie Eye)

  Tolefree is also inordinately fond of quoting obscure Latin phrases, usually without benefit of translation for those of us plebeians who either did not study Latin in school or did study it but failed to make it a second language.

  "I've always found candor a good card, Mr. Quigley," said Tolefree, falling into step beside him.

  "Ah?" said the young man. He looked down quizzically upon him. "You haven't read Tacitus on Vitellius."

  "Haven't I? Let me see—but yes, I have." Tolefree mused. "You mean, 'Inerat tamen simplicitas ac liberalitas'—gosh! that's a good come.back!" (The Corpse in the Coppice)

  Other of Tolefree's traits include the pseudo self-deprecating remark:

  "It's very serious indeed," said Tolefree. "And if I'm not Public Jackass Number One, it'll be more serious yet." (The Corpse With the Grimy Glove)

  And the pointed homily:

  "A politician's unlike other people—he's got to keep away from wet tar if he wants to stick to his seat." (The Corpse With the Grimy Glove)

  And exchanging clichéd similes and metaphors with other characters:

  "Very well. You'll be as happy as a fisherman in the Mayfly season, won't you? But I think you've hooked a sunken log, Tolefree."

  "Never mind, sir. It's not the kill that counts but the cast." (The Corpse Without a Clue)

  ". . . What's biting you?"

  "A nasty little insect of the hunch species."

  "Very well—produce the beast. I suppose, by the way, its family name isn't Raleigh bug, is it?" (The Corpse Without a Clue)

  Although Tolefree operates out of a London apartment, most of his cases seem to take him into the countryside, to places like Goonbarrow Downs (The Corpse With the Eerie Eye), where he becomes embroiled in the murder of a man with horrible gray eyes that "failed to betray the astonishment commonly seen in people who met violent death. They were eerie. The pupils seemed scarcely larger than pin-heads. . • ." He solves this and other cases in the accepted Sherlockian manner of detection and deduction, plus an inexhaustible fund of knowledge both esoteric and ephemeral. Another of the reasons he is so successful at unmasking murderers may be traced to a familiarity with such matters and motives as skeletons in closets, hidden relationships, peculiar wills, strange disappearances, and Nazi infiltrators, since nearly all his investigations seem to uncover one or any combination of these.

  On some detective sojourns, he is accompanied by a Watson named Farrar, who is inclined to drool over Tolefree's brilliance. In other books, the narrative is presented in the third person, in which event everyone (including Tolefree) is inclined to drool over Tolefree's brilliance. These other characters all have names like Garstang, Blenkinsop, Snagley, Grazebrook, Cornwood, Calderstone, Mapperley, Horridge, Quigley, Limpenny, Treglohan, Clodgey, Coverdale, Pugsley, and Sir Benjamin Hex—and are generally upper-class folk who own large estates, play croquet, enjoy killing animals for sport, mistreat their servants, and bore each other (and the reader) with stuffy observations on politics, history, tradition, and moral decay.

  Plodding though Walling's prose may be, it is not devoid of an occasional bit of flare. Every now and then a sentence or a passage of dialogue will appear that makes one sit up and take notice, as if by design on the author's part, to ensure that his readers stay awake.

  "Just a moment," said he and frowned like a man trying to find the lady's nose in a jig-saw puzzle. (The Corpse With the Floating Foot)

  Tolefree heard the car door bang, a deep voice exploring the soles of its owner's boots, and footsteps in the hail. (The Late Unlamented)

  A hint of excitement hovered about Miss Kane, looking well in an afternoon frock and explaining that she had obtained a weekend leave and was looking forward to the party. (The Corpse Without a Clue)

  "In plain English, Patterson," said Pye, "nix on the gats!" (The Corpse With the Floating Foot)

  "Lowell had nothing to do with the shooting of Beresford or the placing of his corpse on the Goonbarrow. You think Lowell had a strong motive for killing Beresford because the scoundrel was blackmailing his wife as a bigamist and playing off his daughter against him."

  "Good God!" cried Mapperley. "Have you got as deep as that?" (The Corpse With the Eerie Eye)

  Over the past twenty years, the British mystery has shown signs of evolving into something quite different from what it had been since Sherlock Holmes made his first bow. There are those writers (Gladys Mitchell is one) who continue to cling to the traditional approach: genteel, civilized, appealing more to the intellect than to the emotions. But their numbers seem fewer with each passing year. More and more English crime novelists appear eager to emulate their American counterparts in the selection of sensational plotlines. Politics, terrorism, high finance, drugs, rock music, the sexual revolution—all these and more have replaced the traditional tale of domestic murder and/or commercial skullduggery. Concomitantly, detection has given way to action as the primary ingredient, with a keen emphasis on matters sexual and psychological.

  A new kind of amateur detective has emerged. No longer do we have Dr. Fells and Miss Marples; now we have the likes of Sam North, self-styled author and hero of 209 Thriller Road (1979), who operates The Novel Shop in downtown London:

  Here it is folks, 209 Thriller Road, step right in, transform your life into an adventure, thrill your friends with a trip to Africa or Luna 5. - . . Buy your way into the elite, the Starfleet? And I don't care if you want to be Bogie in Casablanca, in love with a girl on the lam and no place to hide or a reluctant hero from Apocalypse Now. Camelot or weeping romance, all yours for you and your friends to enjoy, written by the king of ghost writers. No more will he hide his bushel under the likes of a happy hooker or (I survived) the comeback story of a Hollywood alcoholic mother of three, no more will he suffer, now it is ghosting for the people, by the people; the ghost has gone public!

  Sam's first novel-shop writing assignment is to ghost a book for Danny Plant, scrap king and mobster—a thriller in which Danny himself will be the villain and get away with his (unspecified to Sam) crime. But before Sam can get started, Danny turns up dead; and North finds himself mixed up in a wild and woolly adventure blending gangsters, a corporation worth seventeen million pounds sterling, a precocious five-year-old kid, assorted chases, some kinky sex, and a plethora of what the jacket blurb calls "fiendish" humor—all of it told in North's divergent style, replete with eccentric grammar and punctuation, plus asides to the reader.

  I had never heard of such a lot of impossible coincidences. I bet even you find it hard to swallow. But there was bound to be some logic somewhere. Lord Kirk Fawcett. An English absentee landlord. Therefore an income to sustain the fabulous house near Regent's Park. . . . So would it be reasonable to assume that the absentee landlord assisted Danny in his conquest of the City underworld and money fiddles? Or - . . my brain was doing incredible twists and turns, Lord Kirk lost out on the Irish land to Danny and b
ecause of his own problems was in hock to Danny, now that he was dead, Lord Kirk was after getting everything back.