Fire, Burn!
Page 27
Vulcan, oddly enough, was a real-life character. The Gambler’s Scourge, already mentioned, quotes a few anecdotes about him, including the reason for his nickname which Sergeant Bulmer gives. But so little is actually known of him that I have fashioned him to suit my purpose, and the reader is free to regard the character as imaginary.
Nevertheless, his gambling-house stood where it stands in the story. The premises of Messrs. Hooper, now displaying Rolls-Royces and Bentleys, are still there, though nearly the whole south side of Bennet Street was wrecked in the war. The description of the interior comes from a journalist’s in The Gambler’s Scourge, and from a copper-plate engraving which depicts a typical gaming-house of the time. Here too we learn how to play rouge-et-noir; we are told of the mechanism of the crooked roulette-wheel Cheviot is made to expose; we are taught the behaviour and idiom in the world of flash-and-fraud.
Lady Cork’s house is gone too. But Wheatley and Dearden give the number, the position, the description. It was the sixth house from the western end of New Burlington Street, on the right-hand side as you enter from Upper Regent Street. And its modern premises are now overlooked by the white stare of the new West End Central Police Station. In New Burlington Street (see Wheatley, vol. 2, p. 308) originated the custom of affixing brass name-plates to the front door.
Of Joe Manton’s shooting-gallery many stories are told in Captain Gronow’s Recollections and Reminiscences, 1814–1860 (London: John C. Nimmo, 1900). There are so many descriptions of Vauxhall Gardens, and so many illustrations, that documentation is unnecessary; the imitation Greek temple, put up about 1788, was demolished in the eighteen-fifties. A hand-coloured illustration in Pennant’s London, a rare work in three volumes, published in 1814 with only the publisher’s address, number eleven Pall Mall, to show who did issue it, shows us Westminster—the old Houses of Parliament, Westminster Hall, the Abbey—from the river side.
Only Flora Drayton’s house in Cavendish Square is imaginary.
4. The Real People
How great a statesman was Sir Robert Peel is not always recognized, either now or in his own time. He had not the winning ways of Lord Melbourne or Sidney Herbert; he had no magnetism to charm a mob. Only among his close friends, those whom he knew and trusted, could he unbend and roar with laughter or tell jokes. Even Sir Robert Peel, From His Private Papers (3 vols., edited by Charles Stuart Parker, London: John Murray, 1899) gives us few glimpses into his real nature. He was innately shy, as young Queen Victoria shrewdly saw (see the excellent biography of him by Miss A. A. W. Ramsay, already mentioned) and his manner remained cold and formal.
But his greatest achievement was not the invention of the police; it was his reform of the English penal system. No reader need be told how savage was this system, or the number of offences for which men and women could be hanged even into the second decade of the nineteenth century. But let Miss Ramsay speak of its grotesque irrationality.
“Men could be hanged for cutting down a tree, sending threatening letters, impersonating a Greenwich pensioner, cutting down the banks of rivers, stealing in a shop or on a navigable river, stealing forty shillings from a dwelling-house,” and so on.
Juries refused to convict; they simply brought in a verdict of not guilty. This infuriated the judges, who said the country was doomed. And yet, before Sir Robert left the Home Office, he had driven his Act through Parliament and abolished the death-penalty for more than a hundred offences.
The histories and careers of Colonel Charles Rowan and Mr. Richard Mayne may be found in some detail in the 1875 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography. What is told of their backgrounds here is true; their characters can only be deduced from their known actions.
References to Lady Cork are scattered through many journals, letters, and biographies, from Boswell to Tom Moore. She did keep a cigar-smoking macaw, which nipped both the King and Lady Darlington; she did threaten (in a letter) to hang Reform banners from her window; and her character has been drawn as accurately as possible. There is an admirable account of her in Mr. Michael Sadleir’s Blessington-d’Orsay: A Masquerade (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1933).
In conclusion, a few questions may be asked. I have just spoken of a book about Lady Blessington and Count d’Orsay, very famous figures; why is there no reference to them in this novel? Because they were still abroad; they did not return to England until 1830. Again, since railways were being used, why is there only one mention of them?
Literary critics have asked the same question concerning Pickwick. But the answer is not difficult. Such railways as existed were all in the North; they did not touch the Midlands, let alone London (cf. the Creevy Papers, Nov. 18, 1829, when Creevy bitterly objected to a proposed Liverpool-Manchester railway). Though Pickwick was written in 1836–1837, its main action is made to take place between 1827–1828.
In Mr. Hamilton Ellis’s Four Main Lines (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950) we see that the famous London-to-Birmingham Line was not opened at Euston Station until September, 1838, though there was a small junction-line in 1836. Dickens never bundled the Pickwickians into a train because he himself had never travelled in one.
Were there temperance societies in 1829? Yes; again see Pickwick. Did dance programmes exist? Of course; they are mentioned as early as in the novels of Jane Austen, who died in 1817. How extensively was gas used in lighting houses? Only in the homes of the well-to-do, and even there by those who were not afraid the house would blow up. Street lighting was widespread, since Pall Mall had first been lighted in 1807.
Finally, all descriptions of the military have been taken from Major R. Money Barnes’s A History of the Regiments and Uniforms of the British Army (London: Seeley Service & Co., 1951). Major Barnes’s fascinating text and colour-plates require close study; for example, had this novel been set a year later, the military would not have worn white cross-belts, which were abolished in 1830.
Aside from contemporary descriptions of men’s and women’s clothes, the furniture, decoration, and customs (the ladies journals are rich in these), I am indebted to English Costume in the Nineteenth Century, by Iris Brooke and James Laver (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1947); to The Perfect Lady, by Dr. C. Willett Cunnington (Max & Co. Ltd., 1948), which in the age under discussion calls her “The Imperfect Lady”; and to the fine colour-plates of Costume Cavalcade, by Henny Harald Hansen (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1956).
About the Author
John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) was one of the most popular authors of Golden Age British-style detective novels. Born in Pennsylvania and the son of a US congressman, Carr graduated from Haverford College in 1929. Soon thereafter, he moved to England where he married an Englishwoman and began his mystery-writing career. In 1948, he returned to the US as an internationally known author. Carr received the Mystery Writers of America’s highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and was one of the few Americans ever admitted into the prestigious, but almost exclusively British, Detection Club.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1957 by John Dickson Carr
Copyright © renewed 1985 by Clarice M. Carr, Julia McNiven, Mary B. Howes and Bonita Marie Cron
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
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