The Counsellor

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.

  Introduction Notes

  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: McFarla
nd, 2012). On the academic career of Alfred 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

  Adviser in General

  MARK BRAND turned into the door of an Oxford Street office building, past the indicator-board which bore: “THE COUNSELLOR, Second Floor,” among the names of other concerns. He was a shade below middle height, wiry, quick-stepping, with a sparrow-like alertness; and his taste in fabrics favoured the louder varieties for his clothes. There was a hint of raffishness about him, a faint indefinable air of horsiness, though he seldom attended a race-meeting.

  In his young days, his grandfather—a plain-spoken old gentleman who kept his carriage—had once glanced at him, grunted disapprovingly, and then declared: “That child looks like a stable-boy who’ll never grow up into a coachman.” And the family, accustomed to the awful dignity of the coachman caste, had agreed that Mark could never hope to reach that standard. This, however, proved of small importance; for Mark Brand, widely known as he was, had never appeared in the public eye. He was, to his host of admirers, only a disembodied voice.

  Disdaining the lift, he ran upstairs with the swiftness of a terrier and reached the second floor opposite a door ornamented with a brass plate bearing the inscription: “THE COUNSELLOR. No appointments.” Along the corridor to the left was a plain door. Mark Brand opened this with a Yale key and let himself into his private office.

  Though it was the smallest of the seven rooms in the suite, it was bright and airy; and the sparseness of the furnishing made it seem almost spacious. Three comfortable chairs, a Persian rug, a fire-proof safe, toilet fittings behind a curtain, a cupboard, a set of expanding bookshelves crammed with works of reference and other books, and a big roll-top desk: these were the main items. The desk had a telephone with a switchboard panel; and on the desk itself lay a small pile of neatly-docketed papers, and two wire trays.

  Whistling softly to himself, Mark Brand hung up his oyster-grey felt hat and took the chair at the desk. He picked up the first set of documents from the pile and glanced at the typewritten slip which was clipped to them.

  “My employer is too familiar, but I can’t afford to lose my job.—PERPLEXED IVY.”

  This, supplied by the office staff, gave the gist of the letter to which it was fastened. Mark Brand flipped over the sheets of the epistle with a faint frown on his face.

  “Better see what Sandra’s got to say,” he concluded, putting the documents into the right-hand wire tray and turning to the next set.

  “What about Urisk next week?—PRESS-A-BET PETER. (N.B. Mr. Shalstone’s opinion attached.)”

  Mark Brand did not trouble to read the expert opinion on Urisk’s form. All racing problems were in the hands of Mr. Shalstone, a University don known among his colleagues as the Student of Form, from his all-embracing knowledge of the proper handicaps for even the most obscure outsiders. It was his hobby. He boasted, perhaps truly, that he had never made a bet in his life; but he was not averse to drawing a liberal salary from The Counsellor, so long as his name was not disclosed. Press-a-bet Peter’s inquiry joined that of Perplexed Ivy. Both had a wide human appeal, in the Counsellor’s judgment. He picked up the next document.

  “When I sunbathe, I get a rash. But if I don’t sunbathe, I am out of it.—TROUBLED.”

  An almost superfluous note explained that the writer was “(female)” and added: “Doctor’s opinion attached.” This physician had once practised in the Harley Street neighbourhood, but had been struck off the Medical Register for reasons quite apart from his professional competence. He was now glad to put his experience at the disposal of The Counsellor for something much lower than his quondam fees.

  Mark Brand pencilled: “Send her the doctor’s note” on a blank space on the typewritten slip and tossed the documents into the left-hand tray. His public would not be thrilled by that subject.

  “Someone has palmed a bad pound note on me. What can I do with it?—CHEATED.”

  The Counsellor jotted down a memorandum: “Ask him to send it to us for our museum,” and dropped the papers into the left-hand tray.

  “My fiancé objects to my going alone on a cruise.—ZENA.”

  This went into the right-hand tray on the strength of the epitome alone. That type of problem interested people, whether they went themselves on cruises or stayed at home. Also it was the kind of thing which lent itself to expansion into fields of wider application.

  “I have an inferiority complex which goes against me at the office.—HARASSED CLERK.”

  “Poor devil!” sympathised The Counsellor, as he read
the letter. He put it into the right-hand tray, after scribbling a note: “Write him a kind letter and enclose Leaflet D. 7.”

  “My wife re-reads her late husband’s love-letters.—K.T.”

  “A polygon of a problem,” mused The Counsellor, “so many sides to it.”

  He put the papers back for further consideration and continued to work his way down through the pile, sorting out the sheep from the goats, and occasionally making jottings on the typed slips. When his task was completed, he ran through the contents of the right-hand tray again, paying special attention to some of the letters. Then, for a time, he leaned back in his chair, pondering over the problems raised by his correspondents.

  At twenty-two, Mark Brand had been left an orphan with no occupation except to look after a large fortune which he inherited from his father. He had tried spending his income in one way and another, but the process soon bored him.

  “It’s no good” he confided ruefully to a friend. “I can’t spend even a mere £5,000 a year on myself and get direct personal enjoyment out of it. I’ll have to look for a job. And I don’t want to pile up more money. Stiff proposition.”

  A chance visit to America solved his problem. Listening to the WOR station on the wireless, he heard the talks of that peculiar genius who calls himself “The Voice of Experience.” Mark Brand made inquiries, learned something about the thousands of letters which flow in to V.O.E. daily, about the office staff which copes with them, about the books, the pamphlets, the questionnaires, and about the Charity Fund.

  “This fellow’s doing fine work,” was Brand’s conclusion. “We could do with something like it in Europe. Cost big money to start it. But I’ve got the money. And it must be great fun. I’ll take it on. But he’s got the best pseudonym possible. I’ll have to think of something else.”