by Peter Main
Foreword by
Peter Main
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Mineola, New York
Copyright
Copyright © 1946 by R. T. Campbell
Reprinted with permission from the Estate of Ruthven Todd.
Foreword copyright © 2018 by Peter Main
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2018, is an unabridged republication of the work originally printed by John Westhouse (Publishers) Ltd., London, June 1946. R. T. Campbell is the pseudonym of Ruthven Todd. A new Foreword by Peter Main has been specially prepared for this volume.
International Standard Book Number
ISBN-13: 978-0-486-82277-8
ISBN-13: 0-486-82277-X
Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications
82277X01 2018
www.doverpublications.com
Contents
Foreword by Peter Main
Chapter 1. Visit to An Aunt
Chapter 2. Fitful Fever
Chapter 3. A Kill in the Morning
Chapter 4. Lawyer’s Outing
Chapter 5. Interlude with Coffee
Chapter 6. Digging Up the Past
Chapter 7. Under New Management
Chapter 8. Paper Chase
Chapter 9. Arrests and Emotions
Chapter 10. Nothing Doing
Chapter 11. Troubles of a Toper
Chapter 12. After-Dinner Amusements
Chapter 13. The Mischief of Money
Chapter 14. A Damp Squib
Chapter 15. Trouble Tumbling
Chapter 16. Blank Face Bet
Chapter 17. Running Wild
Chapter 18. Time Presses
Chapter 19. Clouds Lifting
Chapter 20. Reason and Explanation
About the Author
Foreword
R. T. CAMPBELL was the pen name of Ruthven Campbell Todd, a man better known under his real name as a poet and leading authority on the printing techniques of William Blake. The true identity of R. T. Campbell was not revealed to the world until the publication of Julian Symons’s 1972 history of crime fiction, Bloody Murder (published in the United States as Mortal Consequences). Symons was a close friend of Todd, who had agreed readily enough to be unmasked. Symons recorded that Todd had written ten detective stories under the name R. T. Campbell, published by John Westhouse, and that the novels were “now distinctly rare.” In a revised edition after Todd’s death, Symons had to change his tune somewhat: “ten” novels became “twelve.”
“A pleasant uncertainty prevails about the publication of four among the twelve books. Did The Hungry Worms Are Waiting ever see print, or did Westhouse go broke first? No copy of it is known to have appeared in any specialized bookseller’s list.”
This uncertainty has since been resolved, and it is now known that only eight novels were published, although Todd probably wrote four more. The missing novels were repeatedly advertised by Westhouse as “forthcoming,” but they never forthcame because in 1948 Westhouse went into liquidation.
Todd wrote the novels toward the end of World War II, when he was living in rural Essex, England, having been bombed out of his apartment in central London. He wrote them at speed and claimed he finished one of them in three days. Throughout his life, he remained dismissive of their quality, saying they were “hack work,” which he wrote to make money he badly needed to support himself while engaged in what he regarded as his more serious work: poetry and art history. Although the novels are uneven in quality, it is difficult to read them without feeling that he rather enjoyed writing them. Westhouse paid him two hundred pounds for each manuscript—quite a considerable amount at the time!
He was advised by fellow poet Cecil Day Lewis, who wrote detective novels as Nicholas Blake, to try his hand at detective fiction as a means of making money, but to use a pen name in order to avoid “ruining his name.” Thus, Todd gave birth to R. T. Campbell by reworking his own full name. These books were his only foray into crime fiction, with the exception of Mister Death’s Blue-Eyed Boy (set in New York City’s Greenwich Village), which was never published and which Todd later said the manuscript was “probably happily, now lost.” He also wrote two short stories in crime magazines under his real name, which later found their way into anthologies published by Mystery Writers of America.
Todd’s novels are comedic, and all but one of the published works (Apollo Wore a Wig, a spy caper in the style of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps) feature a botanist-cum-amateur detective, Professor John Stubbs. The blurb on the dust jacket of his debut appearance in Unholy Dying tells us Stubbs is “an explosive and fallible character in the long English tradition of engaging, comic figures. Professor Stubbs sets out to unravel the crime with considerable energy and the tact of a herd of elephants.”
Stubbs is corpulent, mustachioed, opinionated, smokes a pipe filled with evil-smelling tobacco, and constantly swills beer from a quart mug in order to overcome his susceptibility to “dehydration.” He cheerfully accuses innocent people of murder and lumbers on, unabashed, to find the true culprit. His “Watson” for most of the books is Max Boyle, with whom he has an engagingly prickly relationship, as he does with his sparring partner Inspector Reginald Bishop of Scotland Yard.
Here are the seven published Stubbs novels and their publication dates in the order they were presumably written, based on references that appear within them to previously occurring events:
Unholy Dying (November 1945)
Take Thee a Sharp Knife (February 1946)
Adventure with a Goat (April 1946, published as a double volume with Apollo Wore a Wig)
Bodies in a Bookshop (April 1946)
The Death Cap (June 1946)
Death for Madame (June 1946)
Swing Low, Swing Death (July 1946, published as a double volume with The Death Cap)
One of the most attractive features of the novels is they are alive with atmosphere—primarily of London in the 1940s. Todd did not dream up his backgrounds; he drew on his own experiences. Thus, Unholy Dying is set in the midst of a congress of geneticists, an environment he had recently experienced firsthand when helping his father-in-law, Francis Crew, himself a distinguished geneticist, to organize the Seventh International Congress of Genetics at Edinburgh University. His first draft of the story (then called Drugs Fit and Time Agreeing) was written in 1940, although it did not see publication until 1945. Also in 1940, Todd began writing When the Bad Bleed, which he never completed. However, the manuscript survives and leaves no doubt that this was an early version of Take Thee a Sharp Knife. This is a sleazy tale of murder in London’s Soho and was based on his own all too frequent trips in the company of Dylan Thomas and other hard-drinking cronies around the bars and clubs of Soho and Fitzrovia. Adventure with a Goat is the shortest and slightest of the Stubbs novels, whose theme was suggested to him by an incident during childhood when a goat devoured the notes for a local minister’s Sunday sermon before it could be delivered. Bodies in a Bookshop is a biblio-mystery, and Todd himself was a bibliomaniac who continually trawled the secondhand bookshops of Charing Cross Road to supplement his already groaning bookshelves. From childhood, Todd had been fascinated by the natural world and developed a specialized appreciation of fungi. Drawing on this knowledge, the plot of The Death Cap deals with the dastardly poisoning of a young woman using amanita phalloides, the deadly “death cap” mushroom. The plot of Death for Madame centers around the murder of the owner of a seedy residential hotel, inspired by Todd’s dealings with the memorable Rosa Lewis, chef and owner of Cavendish Hotel in St James’s district of London. At the time he wrote the Stubbs novels, Todd was deeply occupied with art his
torical research, and his understanding of the world of art and artists provided him with the backdrop for Swing Low, Swing Death, a book in which a poet called Ruthven Todd makes a cameo appearance! We are lucky that Todd even left a clue in his memoirs about the plot of one of the four missing novels. Its events took place in a “progressive” school, a setting suggested no doubt by his interest in the work of A. S. Neill, founder of Summerhill School, which Todd had visited.
What do we know of Ruthven Campbell Todd himself? He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1914, the eldest of ten children of Walker Todd, an architect, and his wife, Christian. Ruthven received an elite private school education at Fettes College, which he hated and reacted against, leading to him being “asked to leave.” During a short spell at Edinburgh College of Art, he recalled that he spent more time drinking beer and Crabbie’s whiskey than attending to his studies. After less than a year, his father became fed up with his son’s antics and Ruthven was dispatched to the Isle of Mull in the Scottish Highlands to work as a farm laborer for two years. After a further year as assistant editor to an obscure literary magazine, he left finally for London. Apart from occasional family visits, he never returned to Scotland.
In London, Todd embraced the bohemian world of poets, writers, and artists with rather too much enthusiasm, developing the alcoholism and addiction to strong tobacco that was to undermine his health and, to an extent, his productivity as a writer. Nevertheless, at this time he did publish several volumes of poetry as well as two fantasy novels, Over the Mountain and The Lost Traveller. the latter became something of a cult classic). His most notable achievement, however, was Tracks in the Snow, a book on Blake and his circle, which is still remembered today as a highly original and groundbreaking work.
In 1947, Todd left for the United States to pursue research for a complete catalog of the artworks of Blake. He lived there for the next thirteen years, first in New York City and later in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Here he became famous among younger readers for his four books about a feline astronaut, Space Cat, and he became a US citizen. In the late 1950s, he was commissioned to write the official life of Dylan Thomas, a project he failed to deliver. In 1960, while visiting Robert Graves in Mallorca, Spain, he became seriously ill with pleurisy and pneumonia and was hospitalized. He recovered, but the treatment costs he incurred meant he was unable to return to the United States. He lived in Mallorca for the rest of his life, first in Palma and then in the mountain village of Galilea, where he died of emphysema in 1978.
Original editions of Todd’s detective novels remain elusive and expensive. However, Dover Publications is publishing four of the Stubbs books: Bodies in a Bookshop, Unholy Dying, Swing Low, Swing Death, and Death for Madame.
Peter Main, author
A Fervent Mind: The Life of Ruthven Todd
London, England, 2018
Chapter 1
Visit to an Aunt
I ALWAYS knew that no good would come of the old man taking up Mr. Ben Carr as a kind of pet or hobby. It was all very well for me to tell myself that two such disruptive personalities might cancel one another out and result in that peace which passes all understanding. I might as well have hoped that Professor Stubbs would learn to mind his own business.
Mr. Carr seemed to be in and out of the house at all hours of the day and night. He is the genuine inquiring mind, taking nothing for granted until he has tried it out and then usually making some mistake in his experiment which meant that he did not believe even then.
I groaned aloud when I realised that he had discovered Stephen Hales’s Statistical Essays, published early in the eighteenth century, for I was afraid of what was coming. I tried to change the subject, but I might as well have tried to push back the water falling over Niagara.
“Prof, cock,” Mr. Carr said, looking up from the calf-bound volume on his knees, “have you ever tried these things out?”
The old man looked startled. I was sure that experiments on the force of sap in vegetables were among the things which he had never got around to trying out. I might have hoped, but for Mr. Carr, that he never would get around to them, but as Mr. Carr waved the book I realised with great bitterness the vanity of human wishes.
Before I knew where I was, I was out in the garden with Mr. Farley, the gardener and general factotum, and the old man and Mr. Carr. We were all busily engaged in cutting off branches and tying pieces of glass tubing to the ends of the branches, with which we hoped to work out the force of the sap. The only thing that prevented vegetable statistics becoming a major part of my life and hard times was that neither the Professor nor Mr. Carr had realised or remembered, in their enthusiasm, that it was the wrong time of the year, and, glory be to God, a hard frost put the snuffer on their ideas.
I might easily have rejoiced in my escape, but I knew that the failure of one experiment was only an incentive to the minds of the others to think up other things which might worry me and give me extra work. I was damned, literally as well as figuratively, when Mr. Carr turned up one day in a taxi, the greater part of which seemed to be occupied by a strange machine. It was nothing more or less than an air-pump, and judging from its appearance it might very well have been one of those which my illustrious namesake, Robert Boyle, had used for his experiments On the Spring and Weight of the Air in the sixteen-fifties. It certainly dated from the time of Mr. Hauksbee. The only thing that could be said in its favour was that it was in a bad state of repair, but I should have known that a little thing like that would not have deterred Mr. Carr once he was determined on some sort of game. He set to work, with the help of various seventeenth-and eighteenth-century copper-plates, to make the thing work, and I’m damned if he did not succeed.
This is the sort of thing which persisted in interfering with my serious work. What it did to the old man’s work was nobody’s business. So far as I could see life looked as though it would be one crack-brained scheme after another and that we would never get back to our old-fashioned sort of hard work. I had grumbled like hell at the old man’s working methods, notes all over the floor and books everywhere in the house, even including the bathroom, but I’d gladly have gone back to that to escape from the sheer lunacy which seemed to have descended upon the large house in Hampstead.
There was only one thing left for me to be grateful about. That was that by some miracle there did not seem to be any really interesting murders about. Mr. Carr’s amusements certainly interfered with work, but the interference was not on the same scale as that of a first-class murder.
So far as I was concerned, personally the whole of the population of the United Kingdom could murder one another, just so long as, to use the immortal words of Mr. Sam Goldwyn, they included me out of it. When I took the job as assistant to Professor Stubbs I looked forward to a really quiet life, with nothing moving any faster than a seed germinates, or a plant takes to grow to maturity and blossom and fruit. I’d had enough rough-and-tumble during the war and was fed up with it.
I should have guessed that I was born under a false star, and that no wish of mine would ever come true. My life with Professor Stubbs had been nothing more than one damned murder after another, and even in between murders I’d had no peace. I think that the Professor keeps a tame poltergeist as another man might keep a cat or a dog, and that his poltergeist has a private feud with me. At any rate that is the only way I can account for the manner in which things silt up from the large work-room and come to rest in my rooms at the top of the house. One day I’ll wake up and find that there is no room left for me to move about and then they’ll put me in a padded cell where, at least, there will be some sort of quiet.
It has become quite useless for me to protest to Professor Stubbs, with all the pathos of which I am capable, that we are botanists and not detectives or playboys. He insists that there is enough time in a day to try our hands at everything. That is all right for him, as my private belief is that he has come to a mutual agreement with the devil under which he has given
up the luxury of sleeping. He can go on working for forty-eight hours without a break and come up as fresh as paint. I can’t.
Of course, I really have no one but myself to blame. If when I first joined the Professor I had insisted upon working some sort of regulation hours, then he’d have agreed and I’d have been able to have a little time to myself, but, alas, I made no such suggestion and now I find I’m as likely to finish work at five in the morning as at tea-time, more likely in fact.
We were sitting in the large work-room, a place lined with many thousands of books which have become the terror of my waking hours. I rearrange them at least once a week and still they become a mass of ill-sorted all-sorts, with thrillers in between the volumes of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, and Gunther’s Early British Botanists in the place where the telephone directory should be. When I want the directory as likely as not I find it between the two volumes of Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth or hobnobbing with Parkinson or Gerard. Mr. Carr, waving a very sharp and dangerous-looking Norwegian knife, was busily engaged in whittling a piece of cedar wood. I did not know what he wanted it for, and I still don’t know. It was probably a part of some machine he was trying to invent, which would not have worked once he had put it together. On the other hand he may just have been whittling away for the sheer love of it. He adores making things which can be of no possible use to anyone. I remember him once spending two days on a set of dice, loaded dice, which when they were finished seemed to have been weighted so that no matter what happened he was certain to lose.
“Max, cock,” he had said to me with a far-away sigh, “it’s no good. I thought I’d make a set of dice which would let me take the skin off Maggie, but it seems I’ll need to get a new wife.”
He had scowled at the thought of the trouble getting a new wife would entail. I could never make up my mind about the truth of his stories, for he certainly enjoyed improving the truth, but one of his most continual complaints was that his wife, who wasn’t his wife, used to win all his money off him with loaded dice. He complained that she was worse than the income-tax, for at least they left a man something in his pockets, even if it was only a few coppers.