Basil Thomson
The Case of Naomi Clynes
“The late Miss Clynes, sir? How dreadful. It must have been very sudden.”
“It was.”
Naomi Clynes was found dead, her head in the gas-oven. She left a suicide note, but Richardson, newly promoted to the rank of Inspector in the C.I.D., soon has cause to think this is a case of murder. With scarcely a clue beyond a postmark and a postage stamp, treasured by the deceased, he succeeds in bringing home the crime to a person whom no one would have suspected.
The Case of Naomi Clynes was originally published in 1934. This new edition, the first in many decades, features an introduction by crime novelist Martin Edwards, author of acclaimed genre history The Golden Age of Murder.
“Sir Basil Thomson is a past-master in the mysteries of Scotland Yard, and this novel is a highly capable piece of work…A brisk story, skilfully told.” Times Literary Supplement
“A first-class thriller. Written with lively vigour and a realism that can only come from an author who knows his subject, it can be wholeheartedly recommended as the best detective story of the week.” Sunday Referee
Contents
Cover
Title Page/About the Book
Contents
Introduction by Martin Edwards
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
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
About the Author
Also by Basil Thomson
The Case of the Dead Diplomat – Title Page
The Case of the Dead Diplomat – Chapter One
Copyright
Introduction
SIR BASIL THOMSON’S stranger-than-fiction life was packed so full of incident that one can understand why his work as a crime novelist has been rather overlooked. This was a man whose CV included spells as a colonial administrator, prison governor, intelligence officer, and Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard. Among much else, he worked alongside the Prime Minister of Tonga (according to some accounts, he was the Prime Minister of Tonga), interrogated Mata Hari and Roger Casement (although not at the same time), and was sensationally convicted of an offence of indecency committed in Hyde Park. More than three-quarters of a century after his death, he deserves to be recognised for the contribution he made to developing the police procedural, a form of detective fiction that has enjoyed lasting popularity.
Basil Home Thomson was born in 1861 – the following year his father became Archbishop of York – and was educated at Eton before going up to New College. He left Oxford after a couple of terms, apparently as a result of suffering depression, and joined the Colonial Service. Assigned to Fiji, he became a stipendiary magistrate before moving to Tonga. Returning to England in 1893, he published South Sea Yarns, which is among the 22 books written by him which are listed in Allen J. Hubin’s comprehensive bibliography of crime fiction (although in some cases, the criminous content was limited).
Thomson was called to the Bar, but opted to become deputy governor of Liverpool Prison; he later served as governor of such prisons as Dartmoor and Wormwood Scrubs, and acted as secretary to the Prison Commission. In 1913, he became head of C.I.D., which acted as the enforcement arm of British military intelligence after war broke out. When the Dutch exotic dancer and alleged spy Mata Hari arrived in England in 1916, she was arrested and interviewed at length by Thomson at Scotland Yard; she was released, only to be shot the following year by a French firing squad. He gave an account of the interrogation in Queer People (1922).
Thomson was knighted, and given the additional responsibility of acting as Director of Intelligence at the Home Office, but in 1921, he was controversially ousted, prompting a heated debate in Parliament: according to The Times, “for a few minutes there was pandemonium”. The government argued that Thomson was at odds with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir William Horwood (whose own career ended with an ignominious departure from office seven years later), but it seems likely be that covert political machinations lay behind his removal. With many aspects of Thomson’s complex life, it is hard to disentangle fiction from fact.
Undaunted, Thomson resumed his writing career, and in 1925, he published Mr Pepper Investigates, a collection of humorous short mysteries, the most renowned of which is “The Vanishing of Mrs Fraser”. In the same year, he was arrested in Hyde Park for “committing an act in violation of public decency” with a young woman who gave her name as Thelma de Lava. Thomson protested his innocence, but in vain: his trial took place amid a blaze of publicity, and he was fined five pounds. Despite the fact that Thelma de Lava had pleaded guilty (her fine was reportedly paid by a photographer), Thomson launched an appeal, claiming that he was the victim of a conspiracy, but the court would have none of it. Was he framed, or the victim of entrapment? If so, was the reason connected with his past work in intelligence or crime solving? The answers remain uncertain, but Thomson’s equivocal responses to the police after being apprehended damaged his credibility.
Public humiliation of this kind would have broken a less formidable man, but Thomson, by now in his mid-sixties, proved astonishingly resilient. A couple of years after his trial, he was appointed to reorganise the Siamese police force, and he continued to produce novels. These included The Kidnapper (1933), which Dorothy L. Sayers described in a review for the Sunday Times as “not so much a detective story as a sprightly fantasia upon a detective theme.” She approved the fact that Thomson wrote “good English very amusingly”, and noted that “some of his characters have real charm.” Mr Pepper returned in The Kidnapper, but in the same year, Thomson introduced his most important character, a Scottish policeman called Richardson.
Thomson took advantage of his inside knowledge to portray a young detective climbing through the ranks at Scotland Yard. And Richardson’s rise is amazingly rapid: thanks to the fastest fast-tracking imaginable, he starts out as a police constable, and has become Chief Constable by the time of his seventh appearance – in a book published only four years after the first. We learn little about Richardson’s background beyond the fact that he comes of Scottish farming stock, but he is likeable as well as highly efficient, and his sixth case introduces him to his future wife. His inquiries take him – and other colleagues – not only to different parts of England but also across the Channel on more than one occasion: in The Case of the Dead Diplomat, all the action takes place in France. There is a zest about the stories, especially when compared with some of the crime novels being produced at around the same time, which is striking, especially given that all of them were written by a man in his seventies.
From the start of the series, Thomson takes care to show the team work necessitated by a criminal investigation. Richardson is a key connecting figure, but the importance of his colleagues’ efforts is never minimised in order to highlight his brilliance. In The Case of the Dead Diplomat, for instance, it is the trusty Sergeant Cooper who makes good use of his linguistic skills and flair for impersonation to trap the villains of the piece. Inspector Vincent takes centre stage in The Milliner’s Hat Mystery, with Richardson confined to the background. He is more prominent in A Murder is Arranged, but it is Inspector Dallas who does most of the leg-work.
Such a focus on police team-working is very familiar to present day crime fiction
fans, but it was something fresh in the Thirties. Yet Thomson was not the first man with personal experience of police life to write crime fiction: Frank Froest, a legendary detective, made a considerable splash with his first novel, The Grell Mystery, published in 1913. Froest, though, was a career cop, schooled in “the university of life” without the benefit of higher education, who sought literary input from a journalist, George Dilnot, whereas Basil Thomson was a fluent and experienced writer whose light, brisk style is ideally suited to detective fiction, with its emphasis on entertainment. Like so many other detective novelists, his interest in “true crime” is occasionally apparent in his fiction, but although Who Killed Stella Pomeroy? opens with a murder scenario faintly reminiscent of the legendary Wallace case of 1930, the storyline soon veers off in a quite different direction.
Even before Richardson arrived on the scene, two accomplished detective novelists had created successful police series. Freeman Wills Crofts devised elaborate crimes (often involving ingenious alibis) for Inspector French to solve, and his books highlight the patience and meticulous work of the skilled police investigator. Henry Wade wrote increasingly ambitious novels, often featuring the Oxford-educated Inspector Poole, and exploring the tensions between police colleagues as well as their shared values. Thomson’s mysteries are less convoluted than Crofts’, and less sophisticated than Wade’s, but they make pleasant reading. This is, at least in part, thanks to little touches of detail that are unquestionably authentic – such as senior officers’ dread of newspaper criticism, as in The Dartmoor Enigma. No other crime writer, after all, has ever had such wide-ranging personal experience of prison management, intelligence work, the hierarchies of Scotland Yard, let alone a desperate personal fight, under the unforgiving glare of the media spotlight, to prove his innocence of a criminal charge sure to stain, if not destroy, his reputation.
Ingenuity was the hallmark of many of the finest detective novels written during “the Golden Age of murder” between the wars, and intricacy of plotting – at least judged by the standards of Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, and John Dickson Carr – was not Thomson’s true speciality. That said, The Milliner’s Hat Mystery is remarkable for having inspired Ian Fleming, while he was working in intelligence during the Second World War, after Thomson’s death. In a memo to Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming said: “The following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thomson: a corpse dressed as an airman, with despatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that has failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.” This clever idea became the basis for “Operation Mincemeat”, a plan to conceal the invasion of Italy from North Africa.
A further intriguing connection between Thomson and Fleming is that Thomson inscribed copies of at least two of the Richardson books to Kathleen Pettigrew, who was personal assistant to the Director of MI6, Stewart Menzies. She is widely regarded as the woman on whom Fleming based Miss Moneypenny, secretary to James Bond’s boss M – the Moneypenny character was originally called “Petty” Petteval. Possibly it was through her that Fleming came across Thomson’s book.
Thomson’s writing was of sufficiently high calibre to prompt Dorothy L. Sayers to heap praise on Richardson’s performance in his third case: “he puts in some of that excellent, sober, straightforward detective work which he so well knows how to do and follows the clue of a post-mark to the heart of a very plausible and proper mystery. I find him a most agreeable companion.” The acerbic American critics Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor also had a soft spot for Richardson, saying in A Catalogue of Crime that his investigations amount to “early police routine minus the contrived bickering, stomach ulcers, and pub-crawling with which later writers have masked poverty of invention and the dullness of repetitive questioning”.
Books in the Richardson series have been out of print and hard to find for decades, and their reappearance at affordable prices is as welcome as it is overdue. Now that Dean Street Press have republished all eight recorded entries in the Richardson case-book, twenty-first century readers are likely to find his company just as agreeable as Sayers did.
Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com
Chapter One
THE CHARWOMAN of the flat on the first floor came tearing down the back stairs into the milk-shop panting and breathless.
“Come quick, Mrs. Corder, there’s a terrible escape of gas upstairs. I just opened the door of my lady’s flat and the gas drove me back. I didn’t dare go in.”
“Oh, my God! And not a man about the place! I’ll come up with you. The first thing to do is to open the window and get the gas turned off. Come on; the shop’ll have to mind itself.”
Mrs. Corder caught up a towel as she went and the two women raced up the stairs. When they reached the top the smell of gas was overpowering, but Mrs. Corder held the towel over her mouth and ran to the door of the first floor flat. She was a woman of decision. She threw the door wide open and with her free hand flung back the shutters and threw up the window sash. Then she ran back into the passage to breathe.
“It’s coming from the kitchen from the gas-oven,” she gasped. “You stay here while I run in again and turn it off.”
With the towel pressed against her face she made a second plunge into the poisoned air and emerged white and shaking.
“I’ve got it turned off, but oh! My God! Miss Clynes is lying in there with her head in the gas- oven.”
“You don’t mean it? Whatever made her do that? I suppose I’d better go out and find a policeman.”
“No, you needn’t do that. I’ll ring up the police- station from the ’phone upstairs. You go and keep your eye on the shop a minute. Call me if I’m wanted.”
Three minutes later Mrs. Corder returned to her shop. “The gas isn’t so bad now. If we keep the shop door open the draught will blow it all out.”
“I can’t go up there by myself, Mrs. Corder; I wouldn’t have the nerve.”
“No one must go up there or touch anything until the police come. They’re sending round a plain clothes officer, and they say that they’ve ’phoned the police surgeon, so we can’t do any more till they come.”
“Are you sure she’s dead, Mrs. Corder?”
“She must be. No one could have lived through all that gas. Ah! Here’s John at last! He’ll go up.”
A rosy, broad-shouldered man rolled into the shop and stopped short. “Why, what’s up, Jenny? You look all scared.”
“Miss Clynes has been and gassed herself, Mr. Corder,” said the charwoman, who was beginning to enjoy herself, “and Mrs. Corder has been risking her life turning off the gas.”
“Go up, John, and make sure she’s quite dead. I’m sure I don’t know what you do to bring people round when they’ve been gassed.”
The husband turned to obey the order: she called after him, “Mind and not touch the body or anything else, more than you can help. The police are on their way down with the doctor. And you, Mrs. James; you mustn’t go away. The police will want to question us all.”
Annie James was thrilled to the marrow. “Will they? It’s the very first time I’ve been mixed up in a suicide.”
A heavy step was heard descending the stairs. John Corder, the roses faded from his cheeks, returned to the shop, shaking his head. “She’s dead all right, poor lady—stone cold.”
Two men darkened the shop door: the one a tall, broad-shouldered man approaching forty; the other a younger man with a professional air about him. He carried an attaché-case.
“Are you Mrs. Corder?” asked the first, addressing the mistress of the shop.
“Yes, sir.”
“You telephoned to the station that a woman had been gassed in this house.”
“That’s right, sir. It’s the lady that has the flat overhead. I suppose that you’re the police inspector?”
“No, I’m Detective Sergeant Hammet
t. The detective inspector is on leave. This gentleman is Dr. Wardell, the police surgeon. Will you kindly show us the way upstairs?”
“This way, gentlemen. Shall I go first to show you?” said John Corder, leading the way.
Mrs. James, the charwoman, in a spasm of curiosity, would have followed if Mrs. Corder had not held her back.
The three men seemed to fill the little kitchen.
“Can we have a little more light?” asked the doctor.
“Certainly, sir.” The dairyman switched on the electric light.
The doctor knelt down beside the body.
“We’ll leave you, doctor,” said the sergeant. “You’ll find us in the next room when you want us. Now, Mr. Corder, I want a few particulars from you.” They had moved into the bed-sitting-room. The sergeant looked round it and clicked his tongue. “Nicely furnished,” he said. “The poor lady knew how to make herself comfortable.”
“Oh, the furniture doesn’t belong to her. She was only a sub-tenant.”
The sergeant had taken out his notebook. “What was her name?”
“Miss Clynes; first name Naomi.”
“Her age?”
“I couldn’t tell you that. I should think by the look of her that she was between thirty and forty.
“How long had she been with you?”
“Let me see. It must be three months now.”
“Do you know the address of any of her friends?”
“No, Sergeant, I don’t. She was very reserved and we scarce ever saw her. You see, the flat has its own front door—37A Seymour Street—just round the corner, and she had no occasion to come into the shop.”
“But she must have had friends who called on her?”
“Funny you should say that. My wife was talking of that very thing less than a week ago—wondering whether she ever had any visitors.”
“Was she regular with her rent?”
“I can’t tell you that either. She took a sublease of the flat from Harding & Anstruther—the house-agents in Lower Sloane Street. It’s them that receive the rent and pay it over to the real tenant.”
The Case of Naomi Clynes Page 1