Other Dover Books by R. T. Campbell
Bodies in a Bookshop
Death for Madame
Swing Low, Swing Death
Foreword by
Peter Main
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Mineola, New York
Copyright
Copyright © 1945 by R. T. Campbell
Reprinted with permission from the Estate of Ruthven Todd.
Foreword copyright © 2019 by Peter Main
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2019, is an unabridged republication of the work originally printed by John Westhouse (Publishers) Ltd., London, England, November 1945. R. T. Campbell is the pseudonym of Ruthven Todd.
International Standard Book Number
ISBN-13: 978-0-486-82254-9
ISBN-10: 0-486-82254-0
Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications
82254001 2018
www.doverpublications.com
Contents
Foreword by Peter Main
PART ONE
Chapter 1. Congress Meets
Chapter 2. Congress Dances
Chapter 3. ’Twas Brillig
Chapter 4. Slithy Tove
Chapter 5. Gimbling in the Wabe
Chapter 6. He Burbled
Chapter 7. Natural Magic
Chapter 8. Pawn in Check
PART TWO
Chapter 9. You Pays Your Penny
Chapter 10. You Takes Your Choice
Chapter 11. Calico Pie
Chapter 12. The Little Birds Fly
PART THREE
Chapter 13. Here Comes the Bogy
Chapter 14. Pop Goes the Weasel
Chapter 15. Easy Come Easy Go
About the Author
Foreword
R. T. CAMPBELL was the pen name of Ruthven Campbell Todd, a man better known under his real name as a poet and leading authority on the printing techniques of William Blake. The true identity of R. T. Campbell was not revealed to the world until the publication of Julian Symons’s 1972 history of crime fiction, Bloody Murder (published in the United States as Mortal Consequences). Symons was a close friend of Todd, who had agreed readily enough to be unmasked. Symons recorded that Todd had written ten detective stories under the name R. T. Campbell, published by John Westhouse, and that the novels were “now distinctly rare.” In a revised edition after Todd’s death, Symons had to change his tune somewhat: “ten” novels became “twelve.”
“A pleasant uncertainty prevails about the publication of four among the twelve books. Did The Hungry Worms Are Waiting ever see print, or did Westhouse go broke first? No copy of it is known to have appeared in any specialized bookseller’s list.”
This uncertainty has since been resolved, and it is now known that only eight novels were published, although Todd probably wrote four more. The missing novels were repeatedly advertised by Westhouse as “forthcoming,” but they never forthcame because in 1948 Westhouse went into liquidation.
Todd wrote the novels toward the end of World War II, when he was living in rural Essex, England, having been bombed out of his apartment in central London. He wrote them at speed and claimed he finished one of them in three days. Throughout his life, he remained dismissive of their quality, saying they were “hack work,” which he wrote to make money he badly needed to support himself while engaged in what he regarded as his more serious work: poetry and art history. Although the novels are uneven in quality, it is difficult to read them without feeling that he rather enjoyed writing them. Westhouse paid him two hundred pounds for each manuscript—quite a considerable amount at the time!
He was advised by fellow poet Cecil Day Lewis, who wrote detective novels as Nicholas Blake, to try his hand at detective fiction as a means of making money, but to use a pen name in order to avoid “ruining his name.” Thus, Todd gave birth to R. T. Campbell by reworking his own full name. These books were his only foray into crime fiction, with the exception of Mister Death’s Blue-Eyed Boy (set in New York City’s Greenwich Village), which was never published and which Todd later said the manuscript was “probably happily, now lost.” He also wrote two short stories in crime magazines under his real name, which later found their way into anthologies published by Mystery Writers of America.
Todd’s novels are comedic, and all but one of the published works (Apollo Wore a Wig, a spy caper in the style of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps) feature a botanist-cum-amateur detective, Professor John Stubbs. The blurb on the dust jacket of his debut appearance in Unholy Dying tells us Stubbs is “an explosive and fallible character in the long English tradition of engaging, comic figures. Professor Stubbs sets out to unravel the crime with considerable energy and the tact of a herd of elephants.”
Stubbs is corpulent, mustachioed, opinionated, smokes a pipe filled with evil-smelling tobacco, and constantly swills beer from a quart mug in order to overcome his susceptibility to “dehydration.” He cheerfully accuses innocent people of murder and lumbers on, unabashed, to find the true culprit. His “Watson” for most of the books is Max Boyle, with whom he has an engagingly prickly relationship, as he does with his sparring partner Inspector Reginald Bishop of Scotland Yard.
Here are the seven published Stubbs novels and their publication dates in the order they were presumably written, based on references that appear within them to previously occurring events:
Unholy Dying (November 1945)
Take Thee a Sharp Knife (February 1946)
Adventure with a Goat (April 1946, published as a double volume with Apollo Wore a Wig)
Bodies in a Bookshop (April 1946)
The Death Cap ( June 1946)
Death for Madame ( June 1946)
Swing Low, Swing Death ( July 1946, published as a double volume with The Death Cap)
One of the most attractive features of the novels is they are alive with atmosphere—primarily of London in the 1940s. Todd did not dream up his backgrounds; he drew on his own experiences. Thus, Unholy Dying is set in the midst of a congress of geneticists, an environment he had recently experienced firsthand when helping his father-in-law, Francis Crew, himself a distinguished geneticist, to organize the Seventh International Congress of Genetics at Edinburgh University. His first draft of the story (then called Drugs Fit and Time Agreeing) was written in 1940, although it did not see publication until 1945. Also in 1940, Todd began writing When the Bad Bleed, which he never completed. However, the manuscript survives and leaves no doubt that this was an early version of Take Thee a Sharp Knife. This is a sleazy tale of murder in London’s Soho and was based on his own all too frequent trips in the company of Dylan Thomas and other hard-drinking cronies around the bars and clubs of Soho and Fitzrovia. Adventure with a Goat is the shortest and slightest of the Stubbs novels, whose theme was suggested to him by an incident during childhood when a goat devoured the notes for a local minister’s Sunday sermon before it could be delivered. Bodies in a Bookshop is a biblio-mystery, and Todd himself was a bibliomaniac who continually trawled the secondhand bookshops of Charing Cross Road to supplement his already groaning bookshelves. From childhood, Todd had been fascinated by the natural world and developed a specialized appreciation of fungi. Drawing on this knowledge, the plot of The Death Cap deals with the dastardly poisoning of a young woman using amanita phalloides, the deadly “death cap” mushroom. The plot of Death for Madame centers around the murder of the owner of a seedy residential hotel, inspired by Todd’s dealings with the memorable Rosa Lewis, chef and owner of Cavendish Hotel in St. James’s district of London. At the time he wrote the Stubbs novels, Todd was deeply occupied with art historical research, and his understanding of the world of art and artis
ts provided him with the backdrop for Swing Low, Swing Death, a book in which a poet called Ruthven Todd makes a cameo appearance! We are lucky that Todd even left a clue in his memoirs about the plot of one of the four missing novels. Its events took place in a “progressive” school, a setting suggested no doubt by his interest in the work of A. S. Neill, founder of Summerhill School, which Todd had visited.
What do we know of Ruthven Campbell Todd himself? He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1914, the eldest of ten children of Walker Todd, an architect, and his wife, Christian. Ruthven received an elite private school education at Fettes College, which he hated and reacted against, leading to him being “asked to leave.” During a short spell at Edinburgh College of Art, he recalled that he spent more time drinking beer and Crabbie’s whiskey than attending to his studies. After less than a year, his father became fed up with his son’s antics and Ruthven was dispatched to the Isle of Mull in the Scottish Highlands to work as a farm laborer for two years. After a further year as assistant editor to an obscure literary magazine, he left finally for London. Apart from occasional family visits, he never returned to Scotland.
In London, Todd embraced the bohemian world of poets, writers, and artists with rather too much enthusiasm, developing the alcoholism and addiction to strong tobacco that was to undermine his health and, to an extent, his productivity as a writer. Nevertheless, at this time he did publish several volumes of poetry as well as two fantasy novels, Over the Mountain and The Lost Traveller. (The latter became something of a cult classic.) His most notable achievement, however, was Tracks in the Snow, a book on Blake and his circle, which is still remembered today as a highly original and groundbreaking work.
In 1947, Todd left for the United States to pursue research for a complete catalog of the artworks of Blake. He lived there for the next thirteen years, first in New York City and later in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Here he became famous among younger readers for his four books about a feline astronaut, Space Cat, and he became a US citizen. In the late 1950s, he was commissioned to write the official life of Dylan Thomas, a project he failed to deliver. In 1960, while visiting Robert Graves in Mallorca, Spain, he became seriously ill with pleurisy and pneumonia and was hospitalized. He recovered, but the treatment costs he incurred meant he was unable to return to the United States. He lived in Mallorca for the rest of his life, first in Palma and then in the mountain village of Galilea, where he died of emphysema in 1978.
Original editions of Todd’s detective novels remain elusive and expensive. However, Dover Publications is publishing four of the Stubbs books: Bodies in a Bookshop; Unholy Dying; Swing Low, Swing Death; and Death for Madame.
Peter Main, author
A Fervent Mind: The Life of Ruthven Todd
London, England, 2018
Apologia
AN APOLOGY is due to all geneticists, none of whom, I am sure, would behave in the least like the characters in this book. It should not be necessary to state that all the characters are completely imaginary, and that any coincidence of name is pure coincidence.
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Congress Meets
THERE WAS SILENCE in the hall as the President rose to address the Congress. “Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully, “I can hardly find words to express my feelings. I am overwhelmed when I think of the honour you have done me and how unworthy I am to occupy a position that has previously been occupied by so many much greater men. All that I can say is that it is my wish, and I will make every effort to turn that wish into an accomplished fact, to serve you, the Congress, in every way I can. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am your humble servant.”
As he retired from the front of the stage and the clapping echoed round the vast dome, I looked around me, wondering how many different nationalities were gathered together to discuss their work, and I thought that, in addition to their many languages, they all were experts in one, that of science, of which I knew next to nothing. The things I knew about took place at least a hundred years before the study of genetics had become an organised science. The less reputable side of the late eighteenth century was my pigeon, the literary underworld of prophets who met the devil clad in a scarlet cloak strolling in the Tottenham Court Road and who claimed the Almighty as an uncle, of fantastic housemaids whose visions foretold the beginning of a new era of peace for mankind, and of mad artists who believed in the damnation of the body on earth.
My uncle John was the reason why I was attending the eighteenth Congress of Geneticists. He is a botanist, or at least that is what I would call him, though I believe the correct term is a plant-physiologist, and once, when broke, I had managed to write an article on some stuff called colchicine with his assistance. This stuff, it seems, the juice of the autumn crocus, has the effect of making other plants produce new varieties of themselves when it is applied to them. I had sold this article to the Daily Courier and they must have liked it, for they had offered me the job of reporting the Congress. I rang up my uncle John when I got the letter and asked him if he minded if I made a nuisance of myself by asking him damfool questions. His answering bellow had nearly split my ears, “Not the least, my boy, not the least. I’m only too glad to hear you’re taking an interest in things that matter.” His hoot of laughter echoed round the room for a long time after I had rung off.
So here I was seated among the scientists with whom I had nothing in common but a very healthy curiosity about everything. Owing to the fact that my uncle John had paid out two guineas in hard cash I was not a journalist but a full-blown member of the Congress, due, some day, to receive a heavy volume of the proceedings, and, so long as I was not spoken to, I could pass as a scientist.
The first Plenary Session was just on the point of breaking up and about six rows behind me I saw my uncle John, looking rather like a shortsighted baby elephant, struggling up from his seat, which he must have found a pretty tight fit, waving a large bundle of manuscript to his acquaintances around him and absent-mindedly ignoring the protests of his neighbours who, in the execution of this friendly gesture, he had swiped on their heads, to the devastation of the flora and fauna upon several professors’ wives’ hats.
I let the crowd pass by me and scribbled a few perfunctory notes on the back of an envelope, remembering that I was being paid to write a report of everything that might be of interest to the great general public. When the hall was nearly empty I got up and shoved my pen into my pocket.
Outside, in the Square, the members of the Congress had gathered into groups. In one of them I saw the huge beam end of Uncle John with the unpressed grey tweed trousers wrinkled round his knees and hanging baggily behind, adding to his resemblance to a young elephant. He turned his steel-rimmed spectacles toward me and blew heavily through his frayed moustache, which was white by nature but yellow by the grace of nicotine. He smacked me, rather too heartily, with the bundle of manuscript and boomed, “There was nothing there you couldn’t understand, was there? It was all pap for the unweaned whelps.”
“No, thank you,” I said, “by concentrating hard I managed to take it all in.”
He turned to his companions, saying, “You know my nephew, Andrew Blake? He thinks his last name gives him a licence to be crazy.”
I looked at the others as my uncle introduced them. Professor Silver was a small eager man with a cockatoo lock of greying hair which gave him the appearance of a shrunken version of Arnold Bennett, his voice was surprisingly harsh and I could not place his affected accent. Then there was a younger man, in grey flannels and a green tweed jacket, bound at the cuffs and elbows with chamois leather; he was addressed as Dr. Peter Hatton and, so far as I could judge at first glance, I liked his looks. The third was a puffy man, whose fat looked flabby opposed to the honest bulk of Uncle John, his eyes were deeply pouched and his mouth petulant and pinched at the corners. He acknowledged my uncle’s introduction of him as Dr. Ian Porter with a Canadian drawl, “Waal, I guess
I’d better be moving. Coming, Silver?” As I took the damp hand he rather grudgingly offered me, I thought of the phrenologists and wondered how the brain found room for itself in Porter’s head, which was shaped like an inverted sea-gull’s egg with all the width about the jowls.
“Uncle John,” I said sternly, “you have not forgotten that you invited me to have lunch with you, have you?” He took a very short black pipe out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. Lighting it, to the immense danger of his moustache, with one of those old-fashioned fusees which explode like a volcano in eruption, he looked at me over the top of his glasses which had slipped halfway down his blunt nose, and scowled in a friendly fashion. “Since when, Andrew,” he enquired, “have I been in the habit of forgetting my appointments?” I was just going to remark that if he did not forget them, he at least had cultivated a convenient habit of ignoring them at will when he continued, “At any rate, my luncheon appointments? You don’t mind, do you, if young Peter here eats with us? You’ll find him useful for he’s a proper geneticist, not a dabbler like myself.”
He laughed gustily and so loud that the attention of the other groups was focused upon us for a moment. “That’s very kind of you, Professor Stubbs,” said Dr. Hatton, with the air of one who was hearing about the invitation for the first time. My uncle stumped across the square, brandishing his bundle of papers at such of his friends as he encountered. I fell into step with Hatton and explained that I was a journalist in scientist’s clothing, a lamb who would only too easily be led astray, and that I hoped that he would not pull my leg too much if I asked questions that were so simple as to be beneath his notice. He said cheerfully that he would promise not to mislead me more than he felt right, if in return I would promise not to ask him whether he could foretell the sex of an unborn infant or whether he could produce human twins at will. These questions were apparently the favourites among journalists and I said that I would refrain from asking them unless I found that he had led me along the garden path to the maze.
Unholy Dying Page 1