The Boathouse Riddle

by J. J. Connington

  In newspaper reviews both Dorothy L. Sayers and ‘Francis Iles’ (crime novelist Anthony Berkeley Cox) highly praised this latest mystery by ‘The Clever Mr Connington’, as he was now dubbed on book jackets by his new English publisher, Hodder & Stoughton. Sayers particularly noted the effective characterisation in The Ha-Ha Case: ‘There is no need to say that Mr Connington has given us a sound and interesting plot, very carefully and ingeniously worked out. In addition, there are the three portraits of the three brothers, cleverly and rather subtly characterised, of the [governess], and of Inspector Hinton, whose admirable qualities are counteracted by that besetting sin of the man who has made his own way: a jealousy of delegating responsibility.’ The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement detected signs that the sardonic Sir Clinton Driffield had begun mellowing with age: ‘Those who have never really liked Sir Clinton’s perhaps excessively soldierly manner will be surprised to find that he makes his discovery not only by the pure light of intelligence, but partly as a reward for amiability and tact, qualities in which the Inspector [Hinton] was strikingly deficient.’ This is true enough, although the classic Sir Clinton emerges a number of times in the novel, as in his subtly sarcastic recurrent backhanded praise of Inspector Hinton: ‘He writes a first class report.’

  Clinton Driffield returned the next year in the detective novel In Whose Dim Shadow (1935), a tale set in a recently erected English suburb, the denizens of which seem to have committed an impressive number of indiscretions, including sexual ones. The intriguing title of the British edition of the novel is drawn from a poem by the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay: ‘Those trees in whose dim shadow/The ghastly priest doth reign/The priest who slew the slayer/And shall himself be slain.’ Stewart’s puzzle plot in In Whose Dim Shadow is well clued and compelling, the kicker of a closing paragraph is a classic of its kind and, additionally, the author paints some excellent character portraits. I fully concur with the Sunday Times’ assessment of the tale: ‘Quiet domestic murder, full of the neatest detective points [. . .] These are not the detective’s stock figures, but fully realised human beings.’7

  Uncharacteristically for Stewart, nearly twenty months elapsed between the publication of In Whose Dim Shadow and his next book, A Minor Operation (1937). The reason for the author’s delay in production was the onset in 1935–36 of the afflictions of cataracts and heart disease (Stewart ultimately succumbed to heart disease in 1947). Despite these grave health complications, Stewart in late 1936 was able to complete A Minor Operation, a first-rate Clinton Driffield story of murder and a most baffling disappearance. A Times Literary Supplement reviewer found that A Minor Operation treated the reader ‘to exactly the right mixture of mystification and clue’ and that, in addition to its impressive construction, the novel boasted ‘character-drawing above the average’ for a detective novel.

  Alfred Stewart’s final eight mysteries, which appeared between 1938 and 1947, the year of the author’s death, are, on the whole, a somewhat weaker group of tales than the sixteen that appeared between 1926 and 1937, yet they are not without interest. In 1938 Stewart for the last time managed to publish two detective novels, Truth Comes Limping and For Murder Will Speak (also published as Murder Will Speak). The latter tale is much the superior of the two, having an interesting suburban setting and a bevy of female characters found to have motives when a contemptible philandering businessman meets with foul play. Sexual neurosis plays a major role in For Murder Will Speak, the ever-thorough Stewart obviously having made a study of the subject when writing the novel. The somewhat squeamish reviewer for Scribner’s Magazine considered the subject matter of For Murder Will Speak ‘rather unsavoury at times’, yet this individual conceded that the novel nevertheless made ‘first-class reading for those who enjoy a good puzzle intricately worked out’. ‘Judge Lynch’ in the Saturday Review apparently had no such moral reservations about the latest Clinton Driffield murder case, avowing simply of the novel: ‘They don’t come any better’.

  Over the next couple of years Stewart again sent Sir Clinton Driffield temporarily packing, replacing him with a new series detective, a brash radio personality named Mark Brand, in The Counsellor (1939) and The Four Defences (1940). The better of these two novels is The Four Defences, which Stewart based on another notorious British true-crime case, the Alfred Rouse blazing-car murder. (Rouse is believed to have fabricated his death by murdering an unknown man, placing the dead man’s body in his car and setting the car on fire, in the hope that the murdered man’s body would be taken for his.) Though admittedly a thinly characterised academic exercise in ratiocination, Stewart’s Four Defences surely is also one of the most complexly plotted Golden Age detective novels and should delight devotees of classical detection. Taking the Rouse blazing-car affair as his theme, Stewart composes from it a stunning set of diabolically ingenious criminal variations. ‘This is in the cold-blooded category which [. . .] excites a crossword puzzle kind of interest,’ the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement acutely noted of the novel. ‘Nothing in the Rouse case would prepare you for these complications upon complications [. . .] What they prove is that Mr Connington has the power of penetrating into the puzzle-corner of the brain. He leaves it dazedly wondering whether in the records of actual crime there can be any dark deed to equal this in its planned convolutions.’

  Sir Clinton Driffield returned to action in the remaining four detective novels in the Connington oeuvre, The Twenty-One Clues (1941), No Past is Dead (1942), Jack-in-the-Box (1944) and Commonsense is All You Need (1947), all of which were written as Stewart’s heart disease steadily worsened and reflect to some extent his diminishing physical and mental energy. Although The Twenty-One Clues was inspired by the notorious Hall-Mills double murder case – probably the most publicised murder case in the United States in the 1920s – and the American critic and novelist Anthony Boucher commended Jack-in-the-Box, I believe the best of these later mysteries is No Past Is Dead, which Stewart partly based on a bizarre French true-crime affair, the 1891 Achet-Lepine murder case.8 Besides providing an interesting background for the tale, the ailing author managed some virtuoso plot twists, of the sort most associated today with that ingenious Golden Age Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie.

  What Stewart with characteristic bluntness referred to as ‘my complete crack-up’ forced his retirement from Queen’s University in 1944. ‘I am afraid,’ Stewart wrote a friend, the chemist and forensic scientist F. Gerald Tryhorn, in August 1946, eleven months before his death, ‘that I shall never be much use again. Very stupidly, I tried for a session to combine a full course of lecturing with angina pectoris; and ended up by establishing that the two are immiscible.’ He added that since retiring in 1944, he had been physically ‘limited to my house, since even a fifty-yard crawl brings on the usual cramps’. Stewart completed his essay collection and a final novel before he died at his study desk in his Belfast home on 1 July 1947, at the age of sixty-six. When death came to the author he was busy at work, writing.

  More than six decades after Alfred Walter Stewart’s death, his J. J. Connington fiction is again available to a wider audience of classic-mystery fans, rather than strictly limited to a select company of rare-book collectors with deep pockets. This is fitting for an individual who was one of the finest writers of British genre fiction between the two world wars. ‘Heaven forfend that you should imagine I take myself for anything out of the common in the tec yarn stuff,’ Stewart once self-deprecatingly declared in a letter to Rupert Gould. Yet, as contemporary critics recognised, as a writer of detective and science fiction Stewart indeed was something out of the common. Now more modern readers can find this out for themselves. They have much good sleuthing in store.

  1. For more on Street, Crofts and particularly Stewart, see Curtis Evans, Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920–1961 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012). On the academic career of A
lfred Walter Stewart, see his entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 52, 627–628.

  2. The Gould–Stewart correspondence is discussed in considerable detail in Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery. For more on the life of the fascinating Rupert Thomas Gould, see Jonathan Betts, Time Restored: The Harrison Timekeepers and R. T. Gould, the Man Who Knew (Almost) Everything (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Longitude, the 2000 British film adaptation of Dava Sobel’s book Longitude:The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (London: Harper Collins, 1995), which details Gould’s restoration of the marine chronometers built by in the eighteenth century by the clockmaker John Harrison.

  3. Potential purchasers of Murder in the Maze should keep in mind that $2 in 1927 is worth over $26 today.

  4. In a 1920 article in The Strand Magazine, Arthur Conan Doyle endorsed as real prank photographs of purported fairies taken by two English girls in the garden of a house in the village of Cottingley. In the aftermath of the Great War Doyle had become a fervent believer in Spiritualism and other paranormal phenomena. Especially embarrassing to Doyle’s admirers today, he also published The Coming of the Faeries (1922), wherein he argued that these mystical creatures genuinely existed. ‘When the spirits came in, the common sense oozed out,’ Stewart once wrote bluntly to his friend Rupert Gould of the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Like Gould, however, Stewart had an intense interest in the subject of the Loch Ness Monster, believing that he, his wife and daughter had sighted a large marine creature of some sort in Loch Ness in 1935. A year earlier Gould had authored The Loch Ness Monster and Others, and it was this book that led Stewart, after he made his ‘Nessie’ sighting, to initiate correspondence with Gould.

  5. A tontine is a financial arrangement wherein shareowners in a common fund receive annuities that increase in value with the death of each participant, with the entire amount of the fund going to the last survivor. The impetus that the tontine provided to the deadly creative imaginations of Golden Age mystery writers should be sufficiently obvious.

  6. At Ardlamont, a large country estate in Argyll, Cecil Hambrough died from a gunshot wound while hunting. Cecil’s tutor, Alfred John Monson, and another man, both of whom were out hunting with Cecil, claimed that Cecil had accidentally shot himself, but Monson was arrested and tried for Cecil’s murder. The verdict delivered was ‘not proven’, but Monson was then – and is today – considered almost certain to have been guilty of the murder. On the Ardlamont case, see William Roughead, Classic Crimes (1951; repr., New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2000), 378–464.

  7. For the genesis of the title, see Macaulay’s ‘The Battle of the Lake Regillus,’ from his narrative poem collection Lays of Ancient Rome. In this poem Macaulay alludes to the ancient cult of Diana Nemorensis, which elevated its priests through trial by combat. Study of the practices of the Diana Nemorensis cult influenced Sir James George Frazer’s cultural interpretation of religion in his most renowned work, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. As with Tom Tiddler’s Island and The Ha-Ha Case the title In Whose Dim Shadow proved too esoteric for Connington’s American publishers, Little, Brown and Co., who altered it to the more prosaic The Tau Cross Mystery.

  8. Stewart analysed the Achet-Lepine case in detail in ‘The Mystery of Chantelle’, one of the best essays in his 1947 collection Alias J. J. Connington.

  Chapter One

  The Owner of Silver Grove

  PUNCTUALITY was a virtue on which Wendover piqued himself; and it was with satisfaction that he noticed the signal drop just as he drew up his car in the little station yard. He got out of the driving seat, nodded in response to a porter’s salute, and passed through the booking office on to the platform.

  Wendover’s world was a pleasant one. Things go smoothly for a man with kindly blue eyes, a humourous mouth under a grey moustache, and a friendly manner which can set even the shy at their ease in a moment. His small estate, the County Council, and his work as Justice of the Peace kept him sufficiently occupied without robbing him of leisure; and though quite devoid of vanity, he was pleasantly conscious of being a well-known and well-liked figure throughout the countryside.

  He sauntered along the platform, examining the neat flower beds and inspecting with approval the ornamental lettering “AMBLEDOWN” which stretched across a slope of turf at the side. That was just how a country station ought to look. Nice to see the station staff taking a pride in the place, he reflected. Something at his feet attracted his attention; and, looking down, he discovered the station cat, with tail erect, rubbing itself enthusiastically against his legs. He stooped, scratched it politely under the ear, and then, as a whistle warned him of the train’s approach, he shooed the cat gently away from the line and moved up the platform to where he expected the first-class carriages to stop.

  When the train came to a standstill, the door in front of Wendover opened, and a young man stepped out. At the sight of a girl’s figure in the background, Wendover’s hand went to his cap.

  “I thought you would be coming down by car,” he said, as she reached the platform, “so I hardly expected to be the first person to see you when you arrived. We’re old-fashioned people hereabouts, so may I bid you ‘Welcome home’, Mrs. Keith-Westerton?”

  The bride acknowledged the greeting, shyly but with evident pleasure. Her husband hastened to explain their presence.

  “We’d meant to come down by road, of course. Got stuck at the last moment, though. A mudguard got a bit twisted in a slight collision, so we had to leave the car behind and take the train instead. Chauffeur’s to bring it on to-morrow.”

  “I can drive you over to Silver Grove, if you haven’t arranged for anything to meet you,” Wendover suggested.

  “That’s all right, thanks. Very good of you, but we shall be all right. I wired from town. And, by the way, we’re not going to Silver Grove. We’re camping at the Dower House until we can get Silver Grove fitted up—electric light, central heating, modernising the old place a bit before we go into it.”

  Then, seeing Wendover’s eye wandering along the train, he added:

  “Meeting some one? Mustn’t let us detain you, then.”

  Wendover, glad of his dismissal, moved off hastily in search of his guest; but a couple of steps along the platform his eye caught a figure which stood out incongruously from the rest of the passengers: an obvious French priest in cassock and buckled shoes. For an instant, Wendover’s face showed surprise at this unaccustomed apparition; then, apparently, he recollected something which accounted for it.

  His expression changed as he caught sight of a man in a suit of inconspicuous tweed, with a rod case in his hand; and he hurried past the priest to greet the Chief Constable of the county. Sir Clinton Driffield, seeing his host momentarily engaged on the arrival of the train, had secured a porter and collected his luggage.

  “Glad to see you again, Clinton,” Wendover exclaimed, as he shook hands. “Is this all your stuff?”

  He turned to the porter.

  “Put it in the back seat of my car, Jarvis, please.”

  “I’ll keep the rod,” Sir Clinton said, as the porter put out his hand for it. “You can put the golf clubs with the rest of the things.”

  They followed the porter out of the station and watched him stack the suit cases and golf clubs in the back of the car. Wendover, glancing around, noticed that luggage was being strapped to the grids of two other motors. The French priest had joined the bride and her husband; and it was evident from the way in which they were talking together that he was more than a casual acquaintance. A little apart from the group, beside the second car, were two people whom Wendover took for a French maid and Keith-Westerton’s man. Sir Clinton’s glance ranged with apparent incuriosity over the little party, dwelt for a moment on the priest’s face, and then seemed idly to examine the remaining passengers who were leaving the station in twos an
d threes.

  “That’s all?” Wendover demanded.

  “Everything’s in, sir.”

  The porter, generously tipped, closed the door. Wendover, with a friendly gesture to the Keith-Westertons, started his car and drove off through the little town.

  “Nothing seriously wrong with this health of yours, Clinton?” he asked abruptly, as they left the streets behind them and came out into the open country.

  The Chief Constable shook his head reassuringly.

  “I haven’t taken a holiday for the last two years,” he explained. “Something’s always seemed to come in the way at the wrong time; and, after all, I’d sooner be at work than idle—if it’s the kind of work I like. But this summer I felt I was getting a bit stale; too much office work, with no amusing breaks in it, was making me a dull boy. So I called in a friendly medical and explained that I was suffering from mental indigestion due to a monotonous diet of official papers and administrative details—no food for a strong man. He saw the point at once and prescribed a couple of months’ leave, to be spent in the open air by preference. Fishing, he thought, might be good for the soul. So I thought of the comforts of Talgarth Grange and the fish in your lake, naturally; and here I am. You can take off that expression of concern; it isn’t needed, really. There’s nothing the matter with me, except that I feel bored stiff.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Wendover answered, in a tone which showed he was glad to be reassured. “Your note was a bit laconic and when you mentioned two months’ leave, I was afraid there was something seriously wrong with you.”

  “No. A grateful county owes me a couple of summer holidays, so I’m taking payment in a lump, that’s all. Lucky I’ve got a good man to take over the running while I’m off. By the way, what about the fishing? You’ve stocked the lake with Loch Leven trout, you said?”

  Wendover nodded in confirmation.