by Roy Vickers
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Contents
Roy Vickers
Dedication
Introduction
The Rubber Trumpet
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
The Lady who Laughed
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
The Man who Murdered in Public
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
The Snob’s Murder
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
The Cowboy of Oxford Street
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
The Clue of the Red Carnations
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
The Yellow Jumper
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
The Case of the Social Climber
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
The Henpecked Murderer
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Blind Man’s Bluff
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Roy Vickers
The Department of Dead Ends
Roy Vickers
Roy Vickers was the author of over 60 crime novels and 80 short stories, many written under the pseudonyms Sefton Kyle and David Durham. He was born in 1889 and educated at Charterhouse School, Brasenose College, Oxford, and enrolled as a student of the Middle Temple. He left the University before graduating in order to join the staff of a popular weekly. After two years of journalistic choring, which included a period of crime reporting, he became editor of the Novel Magazine, but eventually resigned this post so that he could develop his ideas as a freelance. His experience in the criminal courts gave him a view of the anatomy of crime which was the mainspring of his novels and short stories. Not primarily interested in the professional crook, he wrote of the normal citizen taken unawares by the latent forces of his own temperament. His attitude to the criminal is sympathetic but unsentimental.
Vickers is best known for his ‘Department of Dead Ends’ stories which were originally published in Pearson’s Magazine from 1934. Partial collections were made in 1947, 1949, and 1978, earning him a reputation in both the UK and the US as an accomplished writer of ‘inverted mysteries’. He also edited several anthologies for the Crime Writers’ Association.
Dedication
TO D.L.C.
An artist in living, whose mental and emotional courage have brought him wide knowledge and sympathetic understanding of others, including those tragic persons who drive themselves to murder.
Introduction
One of the most important books of detective short stories ever written is The Singing Bone (1912) in which the author, R. Austin Freeman, invented what is now called the ‘inverted’ detective story. Dr Freeman, a man of true scientific curiosity, posed to himself the interesting question: Would it be possible to write a detective story in which, from the outset, the reader was taken entirely into the author’s confidence, was made an actual witness of the crime and furnished with every fact that could possibly be used in its detection? In other words, reverse the usual procedure: let the reader know everything, the detective nothing. Would the reader, in possession of all the facts, be able to foresee how the detective would solve the mystery? Or would the reader be so occupied with the crime and its concomitant drama that he would overlook the evidence and still be dependent on the detective to find how the case could be cracked?
The Freeman ‘inverted’ detective stories were a monumental contribution to the development of the genre, and from them have stemmed some of the modern masterpieces of crime writing – especially those purely psychological studies in which the reader follows step by step the terrifying events leading up to the tragedy.
In the field of the contemporary detective short story the most brilliant manipulator of the ‘inverted’ method is, in my opinion, Roy Vickers. In the purest tradition of the difficult form originated by Dr Freeman, Vickers relates the full case history of his unusual murders – or as Dr Freeman explained his own innovation: Isn’t the first part of each Department of Dead Ends story ‘a minute and detailed description of the crime, setting forth the antecedents, motives and all attendant circumstances’? Doesn’t the reader of a Vickers D.D.E. story ‘see the crime committed, know all about the criminal’? Isn’t the one small item of evidence (a child’s toy, a bracelet, a faded flower) by which the Department of Dead Ends ultimately solves the case always clearly exposed, for the reader to lay hold of and pursue to its inevitable catalytic meaning?
True, the Department of Dead Ends tales are not as deductively conceived as Dr Freeman’s ‘inverted’ stories: the nature of the evidence is not as scientific or irrefutable. But compared with Dr Freeman’s earlier classics, they are even more gripping in their psychological interest and they generate a suspense that Dr Freeman never achieved.
The first Department of Dead Ends story was ‘The Rubber Trumpet’. The moment I finished that tale of the Merry Widower I realized that I had just completed a rare experience – I had read a contemporary classic in the field of the detective short story. A short time after its publication I received professional confirmation of my critical opinion. One day I travelled to Morningside Heights with Herbert Mayes, the remarkably perceptive editor of Good Housekeeping, to serve as one of his panel of ‘guest experts’ in the post-graduate course in journalism at Columbia University. Sitting next to me on the platform was Carl Van Doren, the famous author, critic, biographer, and Pulitzer Prize winner. Imagine my delight when Mr Van Doren complimented me on having published ‘The Rubber Trumpet�
��! He was so impressed by the story that he considered it one of the finest detective shorts he had ever read. The next day, Mr Mayes read the story and subsequently added his editorial accolade. Indeed, since ‘The Rubber Trumpet’ originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, I have heard nothing but extravagant praise for that first tale of the Department of Dead Ends. Such connoisseurs as Christopher Morley, Vincent Starrett, Anthony Boucher, Howard Haycroft, James Sandoe, Charles Honce, E. A. Osborne and other true aficionados, have written or spoken to me, unanimously selecting that great story for the Honour Roll Award.
Each of the stories in this volume unfolds the complete background – the situation, the characters, the motive, the modus operandi of the crime itself. Only one clue in each story, seemingly irrelevant and immaterial, keeps sticking in the craw of the Department of Dead Ends. And most of the time you will keep wondering how that apparently uninterested, apparently inefficient bureau of Scotland Yard, that slow, sluggish but elephant-memoried Department of Dead Ends will manage to see through the protective coloration surrounding a truly perfect crime. But it always does, and it is curious to note that its method is miraculously English: it muddles through.
Yet this, too, is protective coloration; for behind the muddling through and the deceptive lack of imagination in the Department of Dead Ends are a group of the world’s most patient, painstaking pursuers who never know when they are beaten, because they never dream of giving up. The English detective is like the English soldier, and both are like the English civilian: they possess bulldog tenacity and indomitable courage. How else explain why the residents of Dover never quitted their bomb-shattered homes, why the people of Britain still walk – and will always walk – the free streets of London.
These symbolically English qualities achieve an almost complete suspension of disbelief for the Department of Dead Ends stories: we forget that we are reading fiction. Enthralled by the richness and authenticity of photographic detail, we accept the D.D.E. tales as real life case histories. Whether they are or not, whether they are based on true crimes or cut out of the whole cloth of Roy Vickers’ imagination, they project a kind of realism unmatched in their field. The realism is neither drab nor prosaic: it is shot through with the credible fantasy which occurs repeatedly in real life – the peculiar touch of the unreal which somehow stamps all works of genuine imagination with the very trademark of reality.
If you have never read any of the Department of Dead Ends stories, I envy your first reading.
ELLERY QUEEN
The Rubber Trumpet
Chapter One
If you were to enquire at Scotland Yard for the Department of Dead Ends you might be told, in all sincerity, that there is no such thing, because it is not called by that name nowadays. All the same, if it has no longer a room to itself, you may rest assured that its spirit hovers over the index files of which we are all so justly proud.
The Department came into existence in the spacious days of King Edward VII and it took everything that the other departments rejected. For instance, it noted and filed all those clues that had the exasperating effect of proving a palpably guilty man innocent. Its shelves were crowded with exhibits that might have been in the Black Museum – but were not. Its photographs were a perpetual irritation to all rising young detectives, who felt that they ought to have found the means of putting them in the Rogues’ Gallery.
To the Department, too, were taken all those members of the public who insist on helping the police with obviously irrelevant information and preposterous theories. The one passport to the Department was a written statement by the senior officer in charge of the case that the information offered was absurd.
Judged by the standards of reason and common sense, its files were mines of misinformation. It proceeded largely by guess-work. On one occasion it hanged a murderer by accidentally punning on his name.
It was the function of the Department to connect persons and things that had no logical connexion. In short, it stood for the antithesis of scientific detection. It played always for a lucky fluke – to offset the lucky fluke by which the criminal so often eludes the police. Often it muddled one crime with another and arrived at the correct answer by wrong reasoning.
As in the case of George Muncey and the rubber trumpet.
And note, please, that the rubber trumpet had nothing logically to do with George Muncey, or the woman he murdered, or the circumstances in which he murdered her.
Chapter Two
Until the age of twenty-six George Muncey lived with his widowed mother in Chichester, the family income being derived from a chemist’s shop, efficiently controlled by Mrs Muncey with the aid of a manager and two assistants, of whom latterly George was one. Of his early youth we know only that he won a scholarship at a day-school, tenable for three years, which was cancelled at the end of a year, though not, apparently, for misconduct. He failed several times to obtain his pharmaceutical certificate, with the result that he was eventually put in charge of the fancy soaps, the hot-water bottles and the photographic accessories.
For this work he received two pounds per week. Every, Saturday he handed the whole of it to his mother, who returned him fifteen shillings for pocket money. She had no need of the balance and only took it in order to nourish his self-respect. He did not notice that she bought his clothes and met all his other expenses.
George had no friends and very little of what an ordinary young man would regard as pleasure. He spent nearly all his spare time with his mother, to whom he was devoted. She was an amiable but very domineering woman and she does not seem to have noticed that her son’s affection had in it a quality of childishness – that he liked her to form his opinions for him and curtail his liberties.
After his mother’s death he did not resume his duties at the shop. For some eight months he mooned about Chichester. Then, the business having been sold and probate granted, he found himself in possession of some eight hundred pounds, with another two thousand pounds due to him in three months. He did not, apparently, understand this part of the transaction – for he made no application for the two thousand, and as the solicitors could not find him until his name came into the papers, the two thousand remained intact for his defence.
That he was a normal but rather backward young man is proved by the fact that the walls of his bedroom were liberally decorated with photographs of the actresses of the moment and pictures of anonymous beauties cut from the more sporting weeklies. Somewhat naively he bestowed this picture gallery as a parting gift on the elderly cook.
He drew the whole of the eight hundred pounds in notes and gold, said good-bye to his home and went up to London. He stumbled on cheap and respectable lodgings in Pimlico. Then, in a gauche, small-town way, he set out to see life.
It was the year when The Merry Widow was setting all London a-whistling. Probably on some chance recommendation, he drifted to Daly’s Theatre, where he bought himself a seat in the dress-circle.
It was the beginning of the London season and we may assume that he would have felt extremely self-conscious sitting in the circle in his ready-made lounge suit, had there not happened to be a woman also in morning dress next to him.
The woman was a Miss Hilda Callermere. She was forty-three, and if she escaped positive ugliness she was certainly without any kind of physical attractiveness, though she was neat in her person and reasonably well-dressed, in an old-fashioned way.
Eventually to the Department of Dead Ends came the whole story of his strange courtship.
There is a curious quality in the manner in which these two slightly unusual human beings approached one another. They did not speak until after the show, when they were wedged together in the corridor. Their voices seem to come to us out of a fog of social shyness and vulgar gentility. And it was she who took the initiative.
‘If you’ll excuse me speaking to you without an introduction, we seem to be rather out of it, you and I, what with one thing and another.’
His reply strikes us now as somewhat unusual.
‘Yes, rather!’ he said. ‘Are you coming here again?’
‘Yes, rather! I sometimes come twice a week.’
During the next fortnight they both went three times to The Merry Widow, but on the first two of these occasions they missed each other. On the third occasion, which was a Saturday night, Miss Callermere invited George Muncey to walk with her on the following morning in Battersea Park.
Here shyness dropped from them. They slipped quite suddenly on to an easy footing of friendship. George Muncey accepted her invitation to lunch. She took him to a comfortably furnished eight-roomed house – her own – in which she lived with an aunt whom she supported. For, in addition to the house, Miss Callermere owned an income of six hundred pounds derived from gilt-edged investments.
But these considerations weighed hardly at all with George Muncey – for he had not yet spent fifty pounds of his eight hundred, and at this stage he had certainly no thought of marriage with Miss Callermere.
Chapter Three
Neither of them had any occupation, so they could meet whenever they chose. Miss Callermere undertook to show George London. Her father had been a cheery, beery jerry-builder with sporting interests and she had reacted from him into a parched severity of mind. She marched George round the Tower of London, the British Museum and the like, reading aloud extracts from a guide-book. They went neither to the theatres nor to the music-halls, for Miss Callermere thought these frivolous and empty-headed – with the exception of The Merry Widow, which she believed to be opera, and therefore cultural. And the extraordinary thing was that George Muncey liked it all.
There can be no doubt that this smug little spinster, some sixteen years older than himself, touched a chord of sympathy in his nature. But she was wholly unable to cater for that part of him that had plastered photographs of public beauties on the walls of his bedroom.