The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories

by J. I. M. Stewart

  “I see.” Clazy’s heart had been taken in some powerful clutch and was beating only with difficulty. In his loins he felt an uglier sensation still. He didn’t even try to tell himself that this was a joke. Peverett was insane.

  Clazy didn’t know what to do. Idiotically, he embarked on argument. “I don’t see how you can know—”

  “How I can know?” Peverett’s face was livid, and his voice came no longer in a whisper but in a thin unnatural scream. “Wretched boy, do you not acknowledge the presence … the presence of …?” For a moment he seemed actually to grow in stature, as if here were to be a genuine theophany. Then he swayed, pivoted on a heel, and sank into a chair.

  Clazy stared at him appalled. He supposed that the man must be in some enduring coma. But Peverett was stirring. He was doing various things – entirely commonplace things – in a terrifying slow motion. He buttoned his jacket. He took out a handkerchief and dabbed his nose. He looked at his wrist-watch. It was as if he were submerged in glue – in some invisible recalcitrant medium that interminably lengthened out every effort the organism could make. Clazy was himself incapable of reckoning time. He might have been standing frozen in Peverett’s teaching room for hours. Or it might have been no more than a few minutes.

  And now Peverett was accelerating. He straightened his tie with a gesture that was almost normal, and stood up. He seemed just slightly dazed. “Have they given you a decent set of rooms?” he asked casually and in his natural voice. He walked over to the door and opened it. “Mind the bottom flight of steps,” he said. “They’re wretchedly lit.” He laughed that low confident laugh – the laugh of a man whose personal problems have ceased to hold any power to disturb him. “We’d hate to lose you in an untimely way. Good night.”

  Clazy went downstairs without at all thinking about the bottom flight. He was wondering whether he had been right in supposing he had an affinity with Charles Peverett.

  POOR CHOWDER

  Chapter One

  Damn and blast!”

  The angry young voice came from the other side of the fence. It was followed by the sound of a motor engine firing, racing, spluttering, fading out. Then there was more bad language. The starter gave a final ineffective kick and died away in a whine.

  Sir Leonard was amused. He went up to the fence – it was a rough affair which had been substituted in short stretches for the tumble-down stone wall of the park – and peered over. “Can I be of any help?” he asked cheerfully. He liked young men.

  “You don’t much look as if you could.” The young man, who was alone, made this reply with startling rudeness, so that Sir Leonard at once gave him a whimsical smile. He didn’t stop liking them if they were farouche and shy. Some of his best stories were about his own gaucherie when young. Had any other Eton boy of his time been so clumsy and awkward? Sir Leonard urbanely doubted it.

  “I don’t know,” he said chattily over the fence, “that I can claim appearances to be deceptive this time. Not, that’s to say, so far as any mechanical flair goes. Is it the magneto?”

  “The magneto!” The young man snorted in contempt. “Even in your day cars had stopped using magnetos, I’d have supposed.”

  “But isn’t that a very old car?” Sir Leonard was curious. “What they call a veteran?”

  “It’s only vintage, not veteran. Can’t you see the badge?”

  From where he stood Sir Leonard couldn’t see the badge – nor would he have been wiser if he could have. But he did have a view of the young man, and he studied him with interest. Prowling his aged hostess’s park, and despite its bird-life of which he was so knowledgeably observant, Sir Leonard was a shade bored. Almost, and despite the great interest of his commission, he regretted having come to Great Musters. Although his command of the past was so noticeably adequate, he had what he liked to call the instinct for contemporaneity. And there was nothing contemporary about poor old Agatha Callaway. There wouldn’t be, of course, about Lord Callaway himself, were he still living. But whereas the charm of Lord Callaway’s prose made him alive in a fashion long after he was dead, what had once been – presumably – the charm of his wife’s complexion, eyes, hair, well-filled corsage and all the rest of the Edwardian paraphernalia didn’t prevent Lady Callaway’s being pretty dead even while still, in the common acceptance of the word, alive. Frankly, Great Musters looked like being dull. So Sir Leonard found himself quite eager for a little conversation with the surly young man with the broken-down car. “Well, then,” he asked, “if magnetos have ceased from troubling – for I suppose they don’t, like one’s own appendix, continue to have a nuisance-value in some vestigial state – what is troubling? Or is it precisely the trouble that you don’t know?”

  The young man glowered at him – not uncomprhendingly, as he well might have done, but rather in the way a person of education, soured by dyspepsia, might glower at some remote yet intelligible object in a museum. “A bloody hot-spot,” he said. “And I can’t trace it. Of course the top of the block is uneven, so there has to be an extra-thick gasket. And if that’s a bit displaced, there may be trouble with an exhaust-valve. Would you say?”

  “No, I don’t think I would say. But perhaps my chauffeur might?” Sir Leonard remembered that he hadn’t brought his chauffeur to Great Musters; the establishment was now so sketchy that a man might have been burdensome. “Only he isn’t, when I come to think of it, available. In fact, I’m the only male about the place. Except”—he added in jovial mystification—’’ Chowder.’’

  “Chowder?”

  “The only surviving member here of what was at one time a large resident canine population.”

  “Oh, I see – a dog. Humphry Clinker. How silly.” The young man turned back to peer again beneath the bonnet of his car. He wasn’t interested.

  But Sir Leonard was. The number of young men driving about the countryside in dangerous old cars like this was large. But few of them, surely, could recognise the name of Miss Tabitha Bramble’s dog in Smollett’s novel. Sir Leonard made a further study of the young man. He was dressed in dirty and shapeless corduroy trousers, sandals of a type to which Sir Leonard could recall graduating at the age of five or six, and a woollen garment of the kind which had been known, in Sir Leonard’s undergraduate days, as an up-to-the-necker. His hair, although it wasn’t like his clothes dirty, was untidy and much too long. Or it was much too long – Sir Leonard corrected himself – to please a drill sergeant or a house master. Considered without social prejudice, it was an attractive tumble of chestnut. Which made only the more unfortunate, no doubt, the spotty and ill-shaven skin, the rebarbative expression, that went with it. But Sir Leonard, for whom the young man would presumably continue to exist only for a few minutes longer, refused to be alienated. Here was an interesting contemporary type, and it seemed he wasn’t without a gleam of letters. This aspect of his personality might surely be further appealed to. “How pleasant,” Sir Leonard went on, addressing the young man’s bottom, since the rest of him had disappeared under the bonnet, “to stumble on someone who knows Miss Tabby’s dog. The best dog since Speed’s, I’d say. A great shame that he should be removed from the action so soon.”

  The young man glanced over his shoulder. “Booksy ballocks,” he said briefly, and returned to his engine. His tone had been quite staggeringly contemptuous – so that Sir Leonard, although smiling indulgently, prepared to resume his stroll in Lady Callaway’s park. But the young man forestalled him. He had emerged from the mechanism he was struggling with and turned round. “Just for the record,” he said. “The dog in The Two Gentlemen of Verona isn’t Speed’s. It’s Launce’s. Get?”

  “What a monstrous young bear you are!” Sir Leonard noticed with interest that this frank exclamation, although offered with good humour, made the young man scowl ferociously. “But of course you’re quite right. The dog is Launce’s. Mine is a shocking memory, I’m afraid.”

  “Would it stretch to knowing where you are?” The young man’s scowl transfo
rmed itself into a grin, as if he judged this sarcasm to be rather choice of its kind. And his accent – for he owned a provincial accent of one of the more unpleasing Midland sorts – had broadened. “Because I want to know where I am in this blasted wilderness.”

  “Certainly,” Sir Leonard said. He considered adding, “I rather thought you didn’t know your place.” But he refrained, partly because the thing wasn’t neat enough, and partly because one doesn’t snub inferiors. Instead he asked, “Is there anywhere in particular you want to go?”

  “I’m looking for a house called Great Musters.” The young man displayed, for the first time, a moment’s hesitation. “It’s very big.”

  “Well, say moderately big.” Sir Leonard was amused. “And this is it. Have you—er—brought a message?”

  As soon as Sir Leonard had said this he was ashamed of himself. His jibe was the product, actually, of a second’s alarm – of alarm, before amusement and indeed pleasure reasserted themselves. For now he knew about the young man, or thought he did. And his knowledge opened up a prospect which must at least be thought odd. “Am I right,” he pursued, “in supposing you to be Mr Shopland?”

  “Yes – I’m James Shopland. You’re not Sir Leonard Vause?”

  “Certainly I am.” Sir Leonard was genial. “And if I could get across this fence, my dear young man, I’d shake hands at once.”

  Shopland scowled. An informally cordial manner of address seemed not to please him. “I don’t think,” he said darkly, “you’re likely to get across the fence.”

  Since retiring, rather early, from the Treasury, Sir Leonard had devoted himself wholly to literary pursuits. His weekly essay on one of our older writers instructed and delighted a large circle of readers on Sunday mornings. It was a joke among some of Sir Leonard’s friends that this regular opportunity of armchair edification often detained them from their religious duties, and more than one rector of a polite parish had remarked an increase in his congregation in those occasional fortnights during which it had been given out that Sir Leonard would be on holiday. In addition to this constant task – exacting though modestly remunerative – Sir Leonard gave lectures and attended conferences. He was also the moving spirit in a small dining club, consisting of men of his own generation and interests, to which young writers were invited as guests. They were thus amiably given an opportunity to impress upon their elders both the extent of their talents and the justness of their perceptions alike in letters and in life. Sir Leonard himself did a great deal for young men who had recommended themselves on these occasions. He gave luncheons to publishers, he importuned industrialists to subsidise cultural journals, he quite often put his hand into his own pocket in cases of evident need.

  Talent delighted him, but he was even more delighted by taste. When talent went along with taste – with what he would call, with a dip into old-fashioned terminology, a correct taste – he was always generously willing to announce that genius was hovering in the wings, if it had not indeed actually taken the boards. And all these functions Sir Leonard performed lightly and with gaiety and charm. There wasn’t a less pompous man in England.

  It was in his single devotion to literature that Sir Leonard differed from the late Lord Callaway – into whose shoes, nevertheless, he had distinguishably stepped. Lord Callaway had been the most eminent littérateur of his day, and in this department had owned a brilliance which Sir Leonard was the first to acknowledge as vastly superior to his own. Moreover, Lord Callaway had never declined hereditary responsibilities. He had crowned his public career – which had included a long spell as a Pro-Consul of Empire – by some notable services to the cause of popular education. It had been indeed his first love – and when Lord Sherbrooke on a celebrated occasion informed the House of Commons that “we must educate our masters” he was only quoting from a remarkable letter received that day from little Bobby Callaway while yet at his private school. And Bobby Callaway, returned from India, promoted increasingly massive slabs of popular education to the last. He ended his days as Chancellor of two Universities: his own, and a new one which he had caused to be endowed and erected farther north.

  Lord Callaway had died fifteen years ago. Many things – Sir Leonard reflected as he made his way back to the house – had happened since then. For instance, they had built, at his old friend’s fledgling university, the large and hideous object known as the Callaway Hall. They had built it with Callaway’s own money – with far more of his own money than it had been judicious to give up. Money was something which Callaway never understood – a Viceroy didn’t need to in those days – and it was his notion, no doubt, as it had been Lord Durham’s, that a man might jog along very nicely on forty thousand a year. But what did dear old Agatha have now? Certainly not a quarter of that, and she had the whole place to keep up, all the same. She couldn’t be blamed if Great Musters rather failed to be a bed of roses at the moment.

  Sir Leonard paused on the brow of a small hillock. From here there was a view over the downs. The Atomic Research Establishment, he noticed, seemed almost within gunshot. A portent of changed times indeed, its uncouth forms crawled over or soared above the immemorial green-clad chalk. He could even see, clearly with the naked eye, the high barbed-wire fence surrounding the place. It was sinister – perhaps because the high barbed-wire fence constituted the ominous master-symbol of our age. Of what went on behind this particular barrier he was disposed to take a hopeful view – including a view hopeful even in relation to his own particular field of interest. What went on there- – Sir Leonard told himself, strolling back to drink Lady Callaway’s tea – was a challenge to the most transcendent literary imagination. Hadn’t Wordsworth said something very good about poetry being the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science? A quite exalted poetry might come out of the Atomic Research Establishment one day. And he would be the first to welcome it. Almost, he might be the first to spot it. For didn’t he, beyond everything else, notably keep up?

  (At this point in his reflections Sir Leonard noticed Chowder. Chowder, an elderly but still active Labrador, was padding towards the fringe of the park. He had the air of a dog that is about to pay a visit away from home. Sir Leonard, whose general approachability extended far out over the brute creation, passed the time of day with him. Chowder gave him a searching look and padded on.)

  Sir Leonard turned his mind to the labour confronting him during the next week or so. Lord Callaway’s purely literary works, including the edition of Fielding and the monumental four-volume Spirit of English Comedy, had become part of the public heritage long ago. Even his polemical and somewhat astringent Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Crisis of the Age had proved perfectly proper to publish in the year following Lord Callaway’s death. But both the Forum Papers and the Closet Papers (as they were provisionally called by those in the know) were another matter. Distinct but concurrent diaries, loosely organised, they contained Lord Callaway’s commentaries upon the political and the literary life of his time respectively. He had left instructions about each series. The Closet Papers were to be examined by appointed persons fifteen years after his death, and a first selection might be published at the discretion of his literary executors five years later.

  In making these dispositions Lord Callaway had placed the chief burden of responsibility on Sir Leonard Vause, a close friend and literary associate some twenty years younger than himself. But he had also been mindful of the new university and its diffusion of a higher education through fresh reaches of society. With a thought to the prestige that would thereby accrue to the stripling seat of learning, he had directed that it should nominate from among its own recent graduates in literature a suitable person to assist Sir Leonard in his editorial labours. Which was the explanation of the arrival at Great Musters of the young man called James Shopland. And now it was with curiosity that Sir Leonard, making his way through the neglected gardens, climbed to the terrace and entered the house. He had been delighted with his glimpse of Shopland;
his ready contacting of the young man had been an instance of his flair for breaking new ground. Presently – he smiled good-humouredly – he would have an opportunity of further observation, this time among old Agatha’s tea-cups.

  (Curiosity might have been detected, at this moment, as dominating too the less distinguished mind of Chowder. He had no difficulty in making his way out of his mistress’s policies. And he pursued an unimpeded and determined course thereafter.)

  Shopland was in the same clothes, so presumably he had lacked time to change before being summoned to Lady Callaway’s drawing-room. He made disconcerting noises when he drank, and he ate everything he could lay his hands on – so that if Jones, Lady Callaway’s crazed but still vestigially efficient parlourmaid, hadn’t kept tottering in and out of the room in a rapid replenishing of plates, the board would have been bare. Sir Leonard, who had a good knowledge of the habits of other social classes, was inclined to wonder whether the young man supposed this to be his “tea” in the more substantial north-country sense. And although Shopland managed to eat so much he was far from being at ease; his large contempt for the common forms didn’t preserve him from some discomfort at not much knowing about them. It even came to Sir Leonard that the young man’s bolting so much food wasn’t a matter of hunger – or even of greed or sheer grossness; its sole prompting was a nervousness which probably didn’t even allow him an awareness of the means he was taking to cope with it. Sir Leonard hoped that the consequence wouldn’t be a frightful indigestion; that certainly was how so much plum-cake, swilled down with so much tea, would have affected him. But then Shop- land was young, and – despite his unpleasing complexion – obviously healthy; he would probably, without damage to his inside, behave in just the same way at dinner.