The Man Who Didn't Fly
Page 1
Introduction © 2021 by Martin Edwards
The Man Who Didn’t Fly © 1955 by Polly Thelwall
“No Bath for the Browns” © 1945 by Polly Thelwall
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Front cover © The British Library Board
Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in association with the British Library
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The Man Who Didn’t Fly was originally published in 1955 in London, England by Eyre & Spottiswoode.
“No Bath for the Browns” was originally published in Lilliput magazine, November 1945.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bennett, Margot, author.
Title: The man who didn’t fly / Margot Bennett.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, [2021] | Series:
British library crime classics | “Originally published: 1955. ‘No Bath
for the Browns’ originally published: 1945.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2020031820 | (trade paperback)
Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | LCGFT: Novels. | Short stories.
Classification: LCC PR6003.E646 M36 2021 | DDC 823/.912--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031820
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
The Man Who Didn’t Fly
No Bath for the Browns
Back Cover
Introduction
The Man Who Didn’t Fly, first published in 1955, is a highly successful novel by an author of distinction whose crime writing career came to a sudden and rather mysterious end when she was at the peak of her powers.
The central puzzle in the story is unorthodox. A plane is engulfed in fire and crashes in the Irish Sea. The wreckage can’t be found. A pilot and three men were on board and their bodies are missing. But four passengers had arranged to go on the flight and none of them can be found. So who was the man who didn’t fly, and what has happened to him?
This is such an original mystery that I don’t want to say much more about the plot, for fear of spoiling readers’ enjoyment. The novel was a strong contender for the very first Gold Dagger Award for best novel of the year given by the Crime Writers’ Association (in those early days of the CWA, the award was known as the Crossed Red Herring Award). In the event, it was pipped by The Little Walls, written by Winston (Poldark) Graham, while Ngaio Marsh’s Scales of Justice and Lee Howard’s Blind Date were also shortlisted. A couple of years later, the novel was again a runner-up, this time to Charlotte Armstrong’s A Dram of Poison, for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for best novel.
In other words, this was the first book to be shortlisted for the premier crime novel awards in both Britain and the U.S. Julian Symons included the novel in his The Hundred Best Crime Stories, a list compiled in 1958 for the Sunday Times and also published separately, in which he described Bennett as “the wittiest of recent crime novelists, but in other respects the most unpredictable.” As if that were not enough of an achievement, the story was adapted for television in America in 1958, with a cast including the young William Shatner, later to find fame as Captain Kirk in Star Trek, trying out his version of a British accent. Given the success of the book on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s sobering to consider that it has been out of print for a quarter of a century.
Margot Miller was born in Lenzie, Scotland, in 1912, and at the age of fifteen, she emigrated with her family to Australia. In the early 1930s, she spent some time in New Zealand, working on a sheep farm. Much later, she used her first-hand experience of the massive 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake for her mainstream novel That Summer’s Earthquake, set on a sheep farm and published in 1964. She took a job as a copywriter in Sydney, Australia, and moved back to London at the age of twenty-three, where she continued to work in advertising. During the Spanish Civil War, she went to Spain as part of the first British Medical Unit. There she met Richard Bennett, her future husband, who shared her left-wing political sympathies. The Bennetts had four children together.
Margot’s first novel, Time to Change Hats, was published in June 1945 but very clearly set in wartime, with references to the Home Guard and a rural English village invaded by evacuees. She and her two older children had themselves been evacuated, to a village in Cornwall. Her publishers described the book as “a story of drink, a cow, and the fine art of murder.” After the long years of war, they promised readers: “If you are tired of murder in the raw, here is murder in a comedy.” Bennett set the tone in her dedication (“To My Creditors”) as well as in the first line: “It is difficult to become a private detective; the only recognised way is to be a friend of the corpse.”
The narrator is John Davies, who finds his friends disobliging until Della Mortimer responds with a note saying: “I have not been murdered, but may be. A woman called Death has been leaving visiting cards.” This makes for a pleasing start to a story, and the book was well received in Britain and the U.S., although Bennett later commented, with some justice, that her attempt to “try the novelty of combining comedy with the obligatory murder” resulted in the book being too long.
Davies returned in Away Went the Little Fish, published the following year. This mystery displayed Bennett’s developing talent, but she promptly abandoned Davies, and she did not produce another crime novel for another six years. The Widow of Bath was undoubtedly worth the wait. Her skills as a crime writer had matured in the interim and the story blended first-rate characterisation with a strong mystery puzzle. Bennett was, like all good writers, self-critical, and she observed that it “had an entirely plausible and novel plot, but it was low on comedy and had too many twists.” This success was followed by Farewell Crown and Good-Bye King, a book written with the accomplishment that marks all her fiction, albeit pivoting on a plot twist that is pleasing but perhaps too easily guessed.
Bennett felt that her last two mystery novels, this one and Someone from the Past were her best. After her near-miss with The Man Who Didn’t Fly, in 1958 she succeeded in winning the Crossed Red Herring Award (it was renamed the Gold Dagger in 1960) with Someone from the Past. The next year, 1959, she was also elected to membership of the Detection Club. She had reached the pinnacle of her profession. But that, as far as crime writing was concerned, was it. Astonishingly, she never published another mystery novel, an extreme example of a crime writer going out at the top.
Instead, she concentrated mainly on writing for film and television. Women Screenwriters: an International Guide describes her as a writer of B-movies, only two of which were actually produced, the comedies The Crowning Touch and The Man Who Liked Funerals. She adapted The Widow of Bath for television and wrote scripts for popular series such as the medical soap opera Emergency Ward 10 and Maigret. Her last known writing credits were in 1968. She wrot
e scripts for Honey Lane, a cockney forerunner of EastEnders, and a science fiction novel, The Furious Masters, which made less impact than her previous venture into sci-fi, The Long Way Back, published fourteen years earlier.
Why did this gifted and versatile author, who lived until 1980, first give up crime writing, and then apparently stop writing for publication altogether in her mid-fifties? It’s a puzzle to rival anything in her books, and I’m very grateful to Veronica Maughan for casting light on Bennett’s life and career. It seems that Bennett found screenwriting more lucrative than producing novels at a time when she was also raising a family, and that in the 1960s she became increasingly committed to political campaigning. She was closely associated with CND and Amnesty International and in 1964 published The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, a book which (like her forays into science fiction) reflected her anxieties about nuclear proliferation.
This volume includes a bonus for Bennett fans in the form of a little-known short story, “No Bath for the Browns,” which first appeared in Lilliput in November 1945 and then in the U.S. in The Mysterious Traveler seven years later; I’m indebted to Jamie Sturgeon for supplying me with this information and a copy of the story.
It was thanks to Julian Symons’s Bloody Murder that I first became aware of The Man Who Didn’t Fly, and when I finally tracked a copy down in a library, I enjoyed reading it. Some years later, I was invited to write an introduction to a reprint published in 1993 by Chivers Press in conjunction with the CWA, and again the story entertained me. So this is, strangely, the second time I’ve written an introduction for a reprint of this novel—although I’ve tried to avoid repeating myself! My hope is that other readers will share my enthusiasm for an author who, despite a regrettably slender output, ranks high among British crime novelists of the post-war era.
—Martin Edwards
martinedwardsbooks.com
The Man Who Didn’t Fly
At eleven in the morning the aeroplane began its westward flight across England; shining like snow under the blue sky; losing its glitter in the thick, white clouds; passing, heard but unseen, over the Welsh hills. On the shore at Aberavon, children struggling wet into jerseys; parents snatching at animated papers, cramming sandwiches back into boxes; flinched as the plane flew too low over their heads; then watched with angry, admiring eyes as it lunged into the black clouds that pressed down on the black sea. No one saw the plane again, although there were reports of a fireball that had rolled, slower than lightning, down the sky to the sea. Rescue planes searched the Irish Channel, but they might as well have looked for Lycidas.
After the accident comes the casualty list; deaths must be documented, and no man is allowed a death certificate without first dying for it.
The death of the pilot was as indisputable as the loss of the plane. The status of the passengers was more difficult to define. Neither friend, relative, enemy, insurance company, nor coroner was willing to admit that any one of the passengers was conclusively and legally dead. Four men had arranged to travel by the aeroplane; four had disappeared; only three men had arrived at the airport, only three passengers had entered the plane.
The man who didn’t fly had been spared by chance or providence. He should have appeared, smiling uneasily, to describe how he had stopped to tie his shoelace and missed his bus. He was silent as though he had taken a bus to eternity. He was not only silent, he was invisible, and, worst of all for the authorities, he was any one of four people. He could be classified only as the man who didn’t fly, and he created the impossible situation of leaving three deaths to be shared out among four men.
Investigation (1)
The patient enquiries began; crackling and exploding around the Wades; splashing through Moira Ferguson’s stupor; rubbing like sandpaper over the indifference of bus conductors and railway porters all the way from Furlong Deep to Brickford Airport; and tenderly nursing the facts that drooped like limp seedlings in the Fairway Arms.
The man in the bar was unco-operative. That was another piece of bad luck. It was a man. A girl would have been interested in the customers who came in that morning, or at least she would have been interested in what she thought about them. She might have studied them like tea-leaves, to see if they could affect her future; observed their positions in society or their failure to resemble film stars; built up in her head a life-time of five seconds with one of them; or flattered herself that she could recognise a man who was up to no good. Girls are romantic, but sometimes before they sail into the outer space of invention they remember the shape of a nose or the colour of a tie.
The landlord was old. He had a disease of the liver that prevented him from working at anything but the study of racing form. He spent most of his life in a back room making imaginary bets on a three-column system, and keeping accounts with the precision of a nationalised industry. In five years he had made a theoretical profit of £18,640. His wife didn’t allow him any money for betting, so on the few occasions when he had to take her place he became mute of malice. He sat on a low stool, his great, yellow, rectangular face hanging over the bar like a disfigured moon; occasionally pouring a drink; taking the customers’ money with disgust, as though it might be radioactive; and putting the change, one coin at a time, on the counter. He was surly, and made useless by circumstances, but he had never been in trouble with the police, so they accepted him as a good citizen, and asked their questions patiently, almost genially.
He listened to what they had to say, shaking his head slowly from side to side, to indicate complete incapacity to help. When they persisted, he retired into his own world, and answered wearily, like a man who needed sleep.
“I know you feel you can’t describe any of them, Mr Crewe,” the detective-sergeant said. “But there must be something that you noticed. If one of them had a moustache, now. You’d have seen that?”
Crewe shook his head again.
“You mean a man sat a few yards away from you, and you didn’t see his moustache?”
“I didn’t.”
“There you are. They were all clean-shaven. You didn’t remember a moustache, and you were right.”
Crewe looked bewildered.
“Now what about hats? Did any of these men, your first customers of the day, wear a hat?”
“Could of done. Or they couldn’t.”
“Would you be willing to say that one of them wore a hat?”
“No. And I’ll tell you why. Because I didn’t see. And if I did see, I didn’t remember. And if I didn’t remember, it was because I was thinking of something else. And if I was thinking of something else it was the three thirty at Lingfield. And if I was thinking of the three thirty at Lingfield, there’s no law against it.”
“Racing?” the sergeant said stiffly, as though it was an indecent word. “Well, we needn’t discuss racing. What we have to do is get these men identified. They all had names. If you heard any part of their talk, you might have heard one of their names, as I would say to you, Do you sell cigarettes here, Jack?”
“My name’s Raymond,” Crewe said in a confused voice.
“They were called Joseph Ferguson, Maurice Reid, Harry Walters, Morgan Price.”
Crewe yawned, and sat down with his stomach resting on his knees. He looked up, blinking, then shook his head again.
“We have only one photograph. It’s of Joseph Ferguson.” He held out the picture of a dark, square-faced man, with a large, strong nose, and a suggestion of amiable jowls. He looked like a first, or perhaps a second, generation Englishman. “Was this man here?”
“Never seen him.”
“Are you prepared to say he wasn’t here?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that.”
“Is there anything you would say? Look, Mr Crewe, the position is this. Four men arranged to meet here somewhere around ten-fifteen before going on to the airport to get on a plane that was supposed to
leave at ten-forty-five. Now, I’m asking you a straight question, Mr Crewe. Did they come here?”
“There was men here. They had whisky. They drank it and had another. And there wasn’t four. There was three.”
“Three? Are you sure?”
“Three. You got me mixed all the time, talking about four. Three doubles and splash and the same again. One pound four shillings in the till. The wife’ll tell you,” he added venomously, not looking at her.
She sat beside him, indicating by twitches of nostril and eyebrow how complete was her dissociation from her husband and his stupidity.
“One pound six and eight in the till, Raymond,” she said sharply.
“There was two bitters later,” Crewe agreed dully.
“Two men?”
“Suppose so. Couldn’t say.”
“It was only three days ago, Mr Crewe.”
“It was all of three days ago,” Crewe agreed.
“Did these other two speak to you?”
“They ordered bitters. It’s a manner of speaking.”
“I’ll make enquiries among our regulars,” Mrs Crewe promised. She seemed to recognise the urgency of proving she was on the right side.
“As a matter of curiosity, did you hear any of the men’s conversation?”
“Which men? I don’t know which men you’re talking about. First it’s four, then it’s three, now it’s the two bitters.”
“No, Raymond, not the two bitters. It’s the three whiskies,” Mrs Crewe said officiously.
“You give me time, Ethel, give me time. I know better than you what happened. There was a word about horses and Ireland, but next thing it was accidents and Australia, or it might have been South Africa, then I lost interest.”
“What did they say about horses?”
“Something about racing, it might be supposed,” Crewe said triumphantly, and smiled at last. “But we’ve agreed that’s not to be discussed. It was only the Grand National,” he added generously.