The Hammersmith Maggot - William Mole

William Mole was the pseudonym of Bill Younger, Dennis Wheatley's stepson and wartime MI5 agent, working for Max Knight and involved with the internment of members of the Right Club.  Stricken with polio as a child, Younger's growth was stunted but he apparently made up in aggression what he lacked in physical force. A well-reviewed poet before the war, he took to writing novels in the forties and fifties, and seems to have completed five before dying young, in 1962, aged only 45.

The Hammersmith Maggot is from 1955, so more or less the middle of his fiction-writing career.  The hero, Casson, is a Mayfair wine merchant with the time and the money to pursue his interest in unconventional criminality, wherein he is aided by Strutt of the Yard.  The criminal in this case, the titular maggot, is far from ordinary.  He blackmails well-off citizens over something they haven't done but the public would believe them guilty of if the allegation ever became public.  Lockyer, the elderly banker who draws Casson into the case, is a confirmed bachelor who admits he has no interest in women, but he's not gay, although the blackmailer suggests he could be.  He pays up because, obviously, he can't prove otherwise.  Besides, the amount demanded is substantial but nothing he cannot easily afford.  It's as if the extortion has been tailor-made for Lockyer and the other victims who come to light.  The Maggot has another trick up his sleeve.  He promises his victims that the payment will be a one-off - he will not be back for more.  Thus far he has kept his promise.  The threat of a return or, if captured, the allegation getting into the public domain, keeps the victims quiet.

This fabulous Penguin greenback, with a tremendous cover illustration by Romek Marber, is clever, well-written, very old-fashioned and highly amusing.  It could so easily have been formulaic but is kept on a higher level by Younger's gift for characterisation. I'm on the lookout for more.

Dead Man Running - John Blackburn

Blackburn was incredibly popular when I was a child.  I remember exactly the shelf where his books were ranged in my local library.  I remember aspiring to be as successful when I grew up,  Yet he was largely forgotten even before his death in 1993, and since then he has vanished entirely.  I cannot for the life of me think why that is.

In the main, and certainly to start with, Blackburn wrote in two genres, John Wyndham style sci-fi horror and Eric Ambler style thrillers.  It seems unfair to suggest that he copied two better known writers; it is better to say he worked in similar fields.  Like Wyndham, his sci-fi tends to be set in the immediate tomorrow, so similar to now that it might as well be today.  Like Ambler, his world of subterfuge is European, his protagonists ordinary men cast adrift from normality.  In both forms Blackburn anchors his narrative with a whodunnit structure.  He is very good indeed at the mystery element,

Dead Man Running is the first of his thrillers, written in 1960, before the Berlin Wall but at a time when Russia was the deadly enemy of the West.  On the face of it, it is a murder mystery: Who killed Peter Carlin's wife and where is Peter Carlin?  Carlin, it turns out, is being interrogated by KGB thugs in Moscow.  The British authorities know exactly where he is.  To the great British public Carlin is both a killer and a traitor.

The rest of the story is Carlin's attempt to prove he is neither.  The conspiracy is incredibly murky.  The cast of characters is varied and colourful - the snobbish ex-maid, the last of his line aristocrat and philanthropist, and best of all the mad man-of-action adventurer J Moldon Mott.

OK, it's old-fashioned, but it is written with great skill, admirable economy (a modern equivalent would be a padded 350 pages whereas Dead Man Running is a well-honed 158) and a healthy humanity.  Nobody here is a total villain, no hero without fault.  Blackburn is every bit as good as I assumed he was back when I was a lad.

The Arena - William Haggard

 

William Haggard (Richard Clayton, 1907-1993) was a professional civil servant.  Technically spy fiction, I suppose, The Arena (1961) is really a story of realpolitik.  The arena in question is merchant banking, supposedly the province of upper middle class English gents but - even in 1961 - the playground of foreign chancers trading in dodgy money.  Like the majority of Haggard's fiction, one of the principal characters is Colonel Charles Russell of the Security Executive, the sort of spymaster who calls in favours and drops hints over a brandy at his club.  But Russell is not the protagonist here.  The protagonist who drives the plot and arranges its denouement is Walter Hillyard, director of one merchant bank which is the subject of a hostile takeover bid from another.  Hillyard, too, is old school, so much of a gent that he and his wife don't have sex.  Hillyard's main objection to the takeover is that it is fronted by Sabin Scott, one of those pushy stateless upstarts.  As the story progresses, Walter's preconceptions of his world fall apart at the same alarming rate as his health (he is diagnosed with sudden onset diabetes).  He has always known, of course, that his father-in-law and senior partner Lord Laver passes for an English milord but is actually third generation Mafioso.  The bank Walter is so proud of was set up to launder the proceeds of Neapolitan crime.  He knows, also, that the director of the respectable bank he turns to for help has anglicised his name to hide his racial origins.  Walter knows these things but now he has to face them - and thus we are drawn into his personal tragedy.

 

The personal narrative, for me, sets Haggard above some other spy writers of the period.  The world he depicts is corrupt but his protagonist is not.  We don't care about the financiers and their shadowy clients.  We do care about poor old Walter Hillyard.

Scotland Yard - Sir Harold Scott

 

 True crime classic Penguin greenback.  Scott (1887-1969) was a career civil servant appointed Commissioner of Scotland Yard in 1945.  He continued in office through the coronation of Elizabeth II and then retired in 1953.  A year later the hardback version of this memoir appeared, followed by this Penguin in 1957.

There are accounts of classic murders here - Christie, Heath and Haigh were all brought to justice on Scott's watch, but perhaps more important is the reminder of just how damaged British society was in the immediate aftermath of the war.  Crime boomed as never before and there was a desperate shortage of police officers to try and contain it.  It was not until Scott that such radical innovations as women police constables and police dogs became standard.  Even so, Scott makes it clear that policing in those days was about crime reduction rather than counting arrests.  It was also on his watch that traffic cops came into their own but, amazing as it seems to us now, advice and warnings were prioritised over collecting convictions.  There was more crime and more civil liberty - if only such a concept troubled our modern legislators.

I personally enjoyed the chapters about the river police and horse patrols, both of which predate the Met and were subsequently absorbed into it.  But as a pure period piece, how about this sentence from the Flying Squad chapter?  "The next piece of information the police received was that a certain bookmaker, known as Poofy Len, might be worth their attention."  Poofy Len - ah, those were the days...

The Three Taps - Ronald Knox

Ronald Knox (1888-1957) was an Anglican priest who became a Catholic, justly esteemed for his translation of the Vulgate and briefly notorious for his 1926 radio spoof Broadcasting from the Barricades, which claimed to be describing insurrection in central London and which a lot more listeners believed then ever really believed Orson Welles' remarkable similar War of the Worlds.  He has been remarkably well-served biographically, first by his friend and executor Evelyn Waugh, and later by his neice, the novelist Penelope FitzGerald, whose Human Voices I have written about over on my media and culture blog.

Knox is completely forgotten as a practitioner of English Golden Age detective fiction.  Actually, he formulated the classic rules of the form and was part of "the Detection Club".  He wrote six detective stories of his own, five of which feature the Insurance Company Investigator Miles Bredon, of which this is the first, from 1927.  A Midlands industrialist is found dead in a village pub where he's been on a fishing holiday.  The cause of death is asphyxiation from gas.  Is it murder or suicide?  A walloping great insurance payout hangs on the outcome.

Bredon and his wife Angela are something of an English Nick and Nora Charles (Dashiell Hammett's Thin Man novel and several movie sequels): they wisecrack, they mock one another, they do not seem to have a sex life.  Otherwise the dramatis personae are largely eccentric bachelors of middle age.  The plot is clever (extremely), the writing sparkling throughout.  In short, great fun.  A recommended read.

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Incidentally, Knox's Ten Commandments or Decalogue, compiled in 1929, are as follows:

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
9. The "sidekick" of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

Wonder why no chinaman?

Poison Ivy - Peter Cheyney

In Cheyney's second novel (1937), G-man Lemmy Caution is embroiled in a Great Train Robbery heist centred upon the eponymous true-noir femme fatale, nightclub torch singer Carlotta.  The first-person, present-tense narration is reasonably convincing and often compelling, with plenty of twists and turns along the way.  The final twist was a stunner I didn't see coming.

I know that some noir fans sneer at Cheyney but they have to remember that it was through Cheyney, who was already an extremely well-known crime writer for the colourful press when he began writing novels, that the English public discovered the likes of Hammett and Chandler.  Cheyney sold millions, the others didn't - but they sold a lot more on this side of the Atlantic because Cheyney popularised the hardboiled style.  And not only in print - the earliest dramas on the British Forces Network were specially commissioned 15-minute playlets featuring the series characters Cheyney had developed by 1940 - Lemmy Caution, of course, and the British sleuths Slim Callaghan and Alonzo Mactavish.  (If you think Alonzo has an unlikely moniker, Slim's oppo is Windemere Nikolls.)

It's interesting how, in the early novels, Cheyney feels he has to Anglicise Caution - the denouement of Poison Ivy takes place in England as, apparently, did its precursor, This Man is Dangerous - and Americanise Callaghan (actually, Nikolls in Canadian).  Was he hoping for big US sales, which didn't come, or a Hollywood movie?  We shall probably never know - Cheyney died young and the only biography is by a country mile the worst book I ever read - and he has yet to be discovered by cultural historians, other than me.

Murder at Crome House - GDH & Margaret Cole

Another classic Penguin greenback from the Golden Age of detective fiction, this one from 1927.  GDH Cole (1889-1959) is the slightly better remembered half of the husband-and-wife literary team.  He was a libertarian socialist, Fabian and co-operator who also wrote political non-fiction.  His wife Margaret (1893-1980) was a pacifist and also a Fabian, who was later knighted for her services to local government.

The Murder at Crome House is only the third of about thirty novels they wrote together.  It does not feature one of their regular sleuths but is a stand-alone mystery featuring James Flint, an academic of enquiring mind who inevitably puts us in mind of GDH himself.

The set-up of the mystery - the murder of Sir Harry Wye - is so convoluted that I initially thought I was reading a spoof.  The murder has been photographed, not once but twice, by the victim and featuring two different killers.  It's not a spoof but what I suspect we have here is two clever people dreaming up the wildest possible premise and unravelling it as they go rather than plotting it out in advance.

That said, the writing is witty and smart throughout.  The Coles avoid the usual pitfall of contemporary writing and soak their scenes with layers of circumstantial detail which brings the world of 85 years ago vividly back to life for the modern reader.

I enjoyed it thoroughly without ever once believing it.  I didn't guess the murderer - I never do - but I for once I don't see that as a shortcoming on my part.

Like Mr and Mrs Cole, I overthought it.

Can Ladies Kill? - Peter Cheyney

A real treat, this - vintage hard-boiled detective fiction from a notorious Whitechapel-born English purveyor of pulp.  This is, according to the official Cheyney site, the fourth of the Lemmy Caution books.  Cheyney only started writing books in 1936 (this is from 1938 ) when he was over 40.  He knocked out fifty full-length stories before he dropped dead in his mid-50s, alongside hundreds of short stories, short plays and a mountain of tabloid journalism.

The striking thing about his Caution novels is that Cheyney instantly adopts the tricky first person present.  As he predates Raymond Chandler, I wonder if his key influence was Damon Runyon?  Cheyney keeps his punctuation extremely simple and seems to have no problem with US gumshoe slang.  The morals of his characters are very loose indeed - startlingly so for the period.  No wonder they were such enormous best sellers - even during the war, when paper was rationed and money was tight, Cheyney was selling two million a year.

I don't know who publishes Cheyney today, if anyone, and I don't care.  A bibliomaniac has to have it in a genuine vintage edition, like my 1949 Penguin greenback (above).