The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Rather to my surprise, Cuff made no bones about this; he had conceivably a notion that the session I proposed would be useful in ordering his ideas. “I call that a very good suggestion,” he said. “Time is a factor, I need hardly say. But I’ve no wish to force the pace.”

  “Very well.” And I turned to my friend. “Take a turn down the Riva, Freddie. Go as far as the Gardens. It’s very pleasant at this hour. You’ll be back in time to give the Inspector his innings. But don’t forget I’m dining with you here at half-past eight.”

  “So you are, Jonathan.” Freddie was at least not too bewildered to take a simple lead like that.

  And from the tall window I watched him set out on his giro. His hands were in his jacket pockets, his head was a little on one side; slim and buoyant, he walked with a spring in his step. It was all unspeakably dreadful to him. At the moment, I was certain, he had no power in the world to view this embarrassing episode in any approach to proportion. But he did have some notion of keeping his chin up. My heart warmed again to Freddie, and I found myself hoping rather fervently that the worst in the affair was over.

  I turned to Cuff. “Well?” I said grimly. “Who killed whom?”

  Chapter Four

  But this is not itself a detective story, and I see no occasion for dealing exhaustively with the plumbing. What mainly struck me- – and indeed puzzled me – about Cuff’s narrative was what I can only call its rather dismally dated quality. Hugo St Swithin belonged, it had to be supposed, to the period of Heath Robinson, before the contrivances of applied science had become so ominous as to be not very happily exploitable in the interest whether of diversion or of mystification. There is, I believe, a species of demented person who devotes much thought to the construction of malignly ingenious fly-traps. Just such a person, one would have conjectured, had been at work in the Golder’s Green household which Cuff was now with some particularity describing to me.

  And in Golder’s Green the lunatic fly-trap, whether démodé in its suggestion or not, had operated with tolerable efficiency. At least it had been efficient in that it had designedly brought a human life horribly to an end. It had perhaps a little lacked efficiency in that it had left largely patent to police inquiry the identity of the ingenious artificer. An arrest had in fact been made. It was with a mingling of respect and irritation that I realised the extent to which, in his present pursuit of Freddie, the pertinacious Inspector Cuff was merely crossing the t’s and dotting the t’s of his case. From the public point of view – and there was presently bound to be, I saw, a very public point of view – he was of course pursuing its grand sensation. But if he was aware of this he gave very little sign of it.

  There was at least no doubt over the substantial correspondence between the golden bathroom of Freddie’s imagination and its brazen copy as achieved in the wholly sublunary world of Golder’s Green. Cuff produced for me his advance copy of Death by Water (which was the title of Freddie’s latest and luckless book) and I was able to see for myself. Freddie’s homicide, it was true, happened in a somewhat higher stratum of society. And it took place amid quite a different nexus of family relationships. But about the technique of the murders there could be no arguing. Precisely the same crackpot idea had been carried out in Golder’s Green and in the book.

  Again I see no need for a plunge into detail. The Golder’s Green affair was never other than rather shadowy for me, and it can remain so without much impairing the story of Freddie Seston’s distressing experience. That experience was eventually to take an unexpected turn – one in relation to which, I must confess, I hadn’t a gleam of prescience as I considered the situation now. Cuff, it seemed to me, had conceivably made a mistake in bringing Freddie’s queer part in the business into the forefront at all. If he had luck it might indeed clinch his case for him. But it meant a tremendous field-day for the popular press, big guns being briefed for the defence, and a vast deal of factitious drama of a sort not at all welcome to a prosecution.

  But there was nothing to be gained by making representations of this sort to Cuff now. The die was cast – or, more precisely, what would certainly come to be known as “the crime-novel murder” had been created. I had to content myself with telling Cuff forbiddingly that there were aspects of the affair that puzzled me more than they appeared to puzzle him. This was quite true, although I suspect he discounted it as a mere instance of my professional manner. I left him to go and telephone my wife.

  It turned out that a good many of my explanations had been forestalled. A couple of English papers had arrived at our pensione, and Freddie Seston was all over them. There was a picture of him talking into his tape recorder and another in which he was apparently giving a lantern lecture, since it showed him holding a long pointer with which he seemed about to indicate the chief features of interest in a large shadowy nude projected on a screen behind him. My wife gave me these particulars plainly at the insistence of Margaret, who was standing beside her at the instrument. There was also, it seemed, a reproduction of Death by Water, open at pages 86 and 87, with rings and crosses added to emphasise the crucial bits.

  I scarcely think I’d expected anything less, but it struck me with a chill of dismay, all the same. I could imagine only too well the high-pressure conferences with their legal advisers held by editors who had resolved thus largely to go to town. It must have been tricky work – particularly for the libel boys, who would have to assess Freddie’s chances of enormous damages if things weren’t quite as they seemed. But if the hazards were stiff, the bait was correspondingly attractive. There was a wonderful story in Freddie’s blueprint for crime. I realised this clearly enough. I was to blame myself later for not proceeding to an obvious corollary. There was a wonderful story in Freddie too.

  Rather to my surprise, Freddie insisted on holding his second session with Cuff unaccompanied. Our relationship was essentially not a professional one, and I imagine that, when it came to the point, he couldn’t bear to have a friend listening in on Hugo St Swithin’s intimate affairs. I didn’t protest. The arrangement fitted in with what I now judged to be my best means of playing down my friend’s sense of disaster. It was my line, that is to say, to maintain that his connection with Cuff’s case was, at the most, remote and tenuous; and I’d convey this best by intimating that I saw no occasion to have a protecting legal mind further brooding over it at the moment. So I left them to it, and later joined Freddie for dinner at a restaurant in the piazza.

  It was a very good dinner, but a little too splendid for our occasion. On his Blue Train side, I reflected, Freddie wasn’t quite to the manner born, and would always be liable to small fatal hesitation in asserting the genuine simplicity of his own tastes. But I was far from quarrelling with what was set before me – or with the mood that Freddie showed some sign of being about to achieve. He had been put through a stiff questioning, for Cuff was determined to know just who might have had access to Death by Water before it went off to the publisher, and just who might have heard Freddie talking about it while it was being written. Nevertheless Freddie seemed to have taken a fancy to Cuff. I had the wild thought that this might represent an attenuated form of that sort of pathological relationship which is said sometimes to establish itself between political prisoners and their tormentors. But such a fancy wasn’t suitable for airing even as a joke, and instead I asked Freddie lightly whether he had concluded that the Inspector was a fan of his.

  “Oh, no – I don’t think so!” Freddie said this as if I had asked whether Cuff wasn’t a dipsomaniac, or one who had been several times through the divorce courts. “One wouldn’t—would one?—expect people in the police ever to read that sort of thing. They must get quite a stiff enough ration, I’d say, of low life and criminal practice.”

  “But isn’t it high life and criminal practice that’s rather your line? Lord Ormont’s butler’s wine-cooler, and so forth?” I felt that I could begin cautiously to rally Freddie.

  “Well, yes – that’s true, Jonathan
. I’m a sort of inverted Robin Hood, I suppose. So far as crime goes, I take from the poor and give to the rich.” This was evidently a well-worn joke with Freddie. “But Cuff certainly doesn’t read detective stories.”

  “One might think they would help to sharpen the wits of real detectives.”

  “I don’t think this chap Cuff is in any need of that. He’s sharp enough, if you ask me. And he says that he’s never found crime stories to have the remotest bearing on real crime. That’s why he’s so struck by this wretched business.”

  “The fact is, Freddie, that he’s formed a high regard for you simply because you’ve contributed – although in so utterly remote a way – to actual criminal history.”

  “We oughtn’t to be talking frivolously about it.” Freddie made a genuine return to gloom. “It’s a frightful thing to have happened.” He paused and sipped our rather expensive wine. “And an utterly amazing thing, too.”

  A faint note of complacency had stolen into Freddie’s voice. A great deal of distress, I was sure, still lay ahead of him. But beyond that – very far beyond, when Freddie was old and grey and through with whatever unconfessed literary ambitions prompted some of his present discontents – I could glimpse a Freddie Seston who might become rather a bore on the long-forgotten crime-novel murder. But my friend would certainly have been outraged if he could have read this thought in my mind now. “You know,” he said, “it’s awfully funny that this should have happened just after your telling me that story.”

  “Ah, yes.” It would have been insincere and silly of me to pretend to be puzzled by this. “And I must say I told it, Freddie, before recollecting that you wrote mystery novels. And you were fishing, my boy. There’s no other word for it. You asked me, most casually, whether I ever read such things – and without having first given the faintest jog to any memory of Hugo St Swithin’s existence that I might have possessed. So you deserved what you got. But I’m sorry, all the same.”

  “No, no!” Freddie was genuinely distressed that I should reproach myself. “But I was tremendously struck by your story – quite tremendously.”

  I was about to tell Freddie that he had been nothing of the kind – for I remembered very well that he had received my gruesome reminiscence with no more than his own engaging convention of lively interest in anything one said. But then I recalled Phèdre. I recalled, that is to say, Freddie’s account of how Phèdre had been a frost with him at the Comedie Frangaise, and how it had come over him overwhelmingly an hour or so later. It had been established that he went in for that sort of delayed reaction. “You oughtn’t,” I said, “to be so suggestible at your mature years.”

  Freddie ignored this. “And I can remember,” he said, “getting a similar dose of home truth years ago. It was when I was out in Australia, and actually writing my first thriller. I’d gone for a walk with a chap from the university there. He was a fine chap, with a simple straightforward mind and a lot to his credit as an explorer in the Antarctic. I had a great admiration for him. Well, our talk turned to crime stories. As I think I’ve said, I used to read hundreds of them as a young chap, although I couldn’t remember a thing about them now. And I was writing one – although there wasn’t a soul in the world knew that. Well, this chap didn’t much like the topic. But he seemed to find it difficult to say just why. Eventually he managed it. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘murder’s a pretty rotten thing.’ Just that.”

  Freddie told this story so solemnly that I had to be impressed by it. “If your exploring friend had been more articulate,” I said, “he’d have gone on to maintain that pretty rotten things ought to be treated of only in pretty serious fiction. Murder’s all right in Macbeth, he would have said, but not in Death by Water.

  The feeling’s comprehensible to me, I admit – and it must have been at the bottom of my spinning my assize story to you. Still, it hasn’t much of a basis either in logic or morals. I’m reminded of what Lord Melbourne said about Oliver Twist. ‘I don’t like such things in real life, and therefore I don’t like to read about them.’ Melbourne was in a muddle – or more probably he was affecting to be. And I’d say, Freddie, that you’re in a muddle too.”

  “A muddle?” Freddie repeated this on a hopeful note which I found rather touching; he was like a sufferer who has been offered some new and encouraging diagnosis.

  “You understand artistic accomplishment. Your writing on the Venetian painters proves that. And probably it goes into your Hugo St Swithin stories too. Probably they have some merits over and above what’s required of their kind. Indeed, I’ve heard people say that they have. And you feel, you know, that you’ve been spreading over them – thinly enough, it may be – some small authentic talent which it might have been more satisfying to concentrate elsewhere. That’s honestly it, Freddie. In your heart of hearts you believe you’ve sold cheap what is most dear. Yours is an aesthetic discontent. And when I say you’re in a muddle I mean you persuade yourself that it’s not an aesthetic discontent – in fact that it’s a moral dubiety. It’s not for me to say, but I think there may be some substance in the underlying trouble. There’s none in the case you cook up for yourself at the moral level. Your stories must have given an enormous amount of harmless pleasure. Any really absorbing light fiction, whether it’s stuffing with corpses or not, is quite as much a boon to man as chloroform is. Of course you may resent being called a drug manufacturer – but it’s not as a moral being that you can resent it. As to the relationship of your sort of stuff to actual crime, there simply isn’t one – unless indeed it be of a mildly cathartic sort, purging us of any tendency to law-breaking. This freakish Golder’s Green business is the perfect exception proving the rule.”

  “There must be a great deal in what you say. And you’ll forgive me”—Freddie was truly apologetic—”if I add that it’s ground I’ve been over more than once in my own mind. And I don’t feel that your case is altogether sound. About my real trouble being an aesthetic discontent, for instance. Of course it’s true that I could have written something different. I could have invented, so to speak, somebody other than Hugo St Swithin, and he’d have been modestly successful at some species of writing conventionally regarded as less lowly than thrillers. But it wouldn’t have mattered a damn, after all. I mean, you know, that it’s the same with writers as with painters. Either one’s a great artist or it doesn’t matter even one very small damn. And I could never have been a great writer, you can see. My frivolity, Jonathan, is an absolute bar there. If one is more anxious to please and amuse people than to keep an implacably appraising eye on them, one will never take the first step towards considerable writing. No, I honestly think that, if I’m a trifle out of love with St Swithin at times – even at ordinary times, unaffected by a horrid affair like this – it’s simply from the feeling that he’s chosen rather a shabby and unedifying line.”

  “But did he have all that amount of choice? Or rather did you, Freddie, have all that amount of choice when you invented him? I can imagine a man making one or two contributions to some kind of writing more or less arbitrarily chosen. But if he keeps at it – keeps at it for years, even if it’s only as a sort of hobby or sideline – there must be something in him that really answers to the kind.”

  “Yes, indeed – that’s obviously so. And I sometimes dream about that sort of thing.” Freddie was looking perplexed. “Hunted men, for instance. I’ve never been a hunted man. I’ve never even seen one. But sometimes I’ve dreamed of that sort of thing with a vividness that no fiction has ever touched … I suppose we’ve time for coffee and brandy before Cuff gets back to that hotel?”

  I agreed that we might have coffee and brandy. “Cuff’s coming back again?” I asked. “I thought I’d arranged that he wouldn’t bother you after dinner.”

  “Well, yes.” Freddie was apologetic. “But it seemed a bit stiff, telling him he must kick his heels until after breakfast. Besides, I’m curious. He’s told me almost nothing, you know, about the affair in Golder’s Green. He’s
promised to do that now.”

  “I can do that myself.” Dinner had done Freddie good, and it occurred to me that I might usefully give him an outline of the thing while he was in a mood of some confidence. “The set-up, it seems, isn’t at all like the one you’ve invented in Death by Water. It’s more verisimilar, for one thing. For in your novel, I gather, you make this electrified-bath business the means of perpetrating what may be called a crime of calculation. The motive is large financial gain. It doesn’t seem very convincing to me.”

  “Quite so.” Freddie, rather surprisingly, seemed pleased with what I would have supposed to be a derogatory judgment. “I’m not awfully keen on realism, Jonathan. To my mind, a detective story should be very much a matter of conventions – a tall story, you know, with something basically bizarre or fantastic to it. That’s the best way I’ve found to keep clear of the ordinary rather sordid effect.”

  “No doubt.” Freddie’s compunctions, I saw, could become positively tiresome. “But my point is that a crime of calculation isn’t, in actual life, at all likely to be executed in a manner that is fantastic or bizarre. It’s when you have some involved emotional situation, which has been brooded over until fact and fantasy have got themselves badly mixed up, that you get people turning to crazy ingenuities. And that’s what’s been happening in Golder’s Green. The fellow who is suspected of – well, of taking that leaf out of your book, had been facing a pretty maddening situation for some time. Or so he seems to have believed. It’s been a crime of sexual passion, you see. And it can’t be said that the sex has been of a very straightforward sort.”