Murder in the Maze

by J.J. Connington

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'A really first-rate detective story' T. S. Eliot When twin brothers Roger and Neville Shandon are murdered by poisoned darts in Whistlefield's famous hedge maze, Sir Clinton Driffield arrives to restore order. He finds two terrified witnesses - visitors to the estate - and clues aplenty in this brilliantly conceived and meticulously realized country-house mystery.

Release date: November 30, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 252

Sample

by

Curtis Evans

 

 

 

During the Golden
Age of the detective novel, in the 1920s and 1930s, J. J. Connington
stood with fellow crime writers R. Austin Freeman, Cecil John Charles
Street and Freeman Wills Crofts as the foremost practitioner in
British mystery fiction of the science of pure detection. I use the
word ‘science’ advisedly, for the man behind J. J.
Connington, Alfred Walter Stewart, was an esteemed Scottish-born
scientist. A ‘small, unassuming, moustached polymath’, Stewart
was ‘a strikingly effective lecturer with an excellent sense of
humour, fertile imagination and fantastically retentive memory’,
qualities that also served him well in his fiction. He held the Chair of Chemistry at Queens University,
Belfast for twenty-five years, from 1919 until his retirement in
1944.

During roughly
this period, the busy Professor Stewart found time to author a
remarkable apocalyptic science fiction tale, Nordenholt’s
Million (1923), a mainstream novel, Almighty Gold (1924),
a collection of essays, Alias J. J. Connington (1947), and,
between 1926 and 1947, twenty-four mysteries (all but one tales of
detection), many of them sterling examples of the Golden Age
puzzle-oriented detective novel at its considerable best. ‘For
those who ask first of all in a detective story for exact and
mathematical accuracy in the construction of the plot’, avowed
a contemporary London Daily Mail reviewer, ‘there is no
author to equal the distinguished scientist who writes under the name
of J. J. Connington.’1

Alfred Stewart’s
background as a man of science is reflected in his fiction, not only
in the impressive puzzle plot mechanics he devised for his mysteries
but in his choices of themes and depictions of characters. Along with
Stanley Nordenholt of Nordenholt’s Million, a novel
about a plutocrat’s pitiless efforts to preserve a ruthlessly
remolded remnant of human life after a global environmental calamity,
Stewart’s most notable character is Chief Constable Sir Clinton
Driffield, the detective in seventeen of the twenty-four Connington
crime novels. Driffield is one of crime fiction’s most
highhanded investigators, occasionally taking on the functions of
judge and jury as well as chief of police.


Absent from
Stewart’s fiction is the hail-fellow-well-met quality found in
John Street’s works or the religious ethos suffusing those of
Freeman Wills Crofts, not to mention the effervescent
novel-of-manners style of the British Golden Age Crime Queens Dorothy
L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. Instead we see an often
disdainful cynicism about the human animal and a marked admiration
for detached supermen with superior intellects. For this reason,
reading a Connington novel can be a challenging experience for modern
readers inculcated in gentler social beliefs. Yet Alfred Stewart
produced a classic apocalyptic science fiction tale in Nordenholt’s
Million (justly dubbed ‘exciting and terrifying reading’
by the Spectator) as well as superb detective novels boasting
well-wrought puzzles, bracing characterization and an occasional
leavening of dry humour. Not long after Stewart’s death in 1947,
the Connington novels fell entirely out of print. The recent embrace
of Stewart’s fiction by Orion’s Murder Room imprint is a
welcome event indeed, correcting as it does over sixty years of
underserved neglect of an accomplished genre writer.

Born in Glasgow
on 5 September 1880, Alfred Stewart had significant exposure to
religion in his earlier life. His father was William Stewart,
longtime Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at Glasgow
University, and he married Lily Coats, a daughter of the Reverend
Jervis Coats and member of one of Scotland’s preeminent Baptist
families. Religious sensibility is entirely absent from the
Connington corpus, however. A confirmed secularist, Stewart once
referred to one of his wife’s brothers, the Reverend William
Holms Coats (1881–1954), principal of the Scottish Baptist
College, as his ‘mental and spiritual antithesis’,
bemusedly adding: ‘It’s quite an education to see what
one would look like if one were turned into one’s
mirror-image.’

Stewart’s
J. J. Connington pseudonym was derived from a nineteenth-century
Oxford Professor of Latin and translator of Horace, indicating that
Stewart’s literary interests lay not in pietistic writing but
rather in the pre-Christian classics (‘I prefer the Odyssey
to Paradise Lost,’ the author once avowed). Possessing
an inquisitive and expansive mind, Stewart was in fact an uncommonly
well-read individual, freely ranging over a variety of literary
genres. His deep immersion in French literature and supernatural
horror fiction, for example, is documented in his lively
correspondence with the noted horologist Rupert Thomas Gould.2


It thus is not
surprising that in the 1920s the intellectually restless Stewart,
having achieved a distinguished middle age as a highly regarded man
of science, decided to apply his creative energy to a new endeavour,
the writing of fiction. After several years he settled, like other
gifted men and women of his generation, on the wildly popular mystery
genre. Stewart was modest about his accomplishments in this
particular field of light fiction, telling Rupert Gould later in life
that ‘I write these things [what Stewart called tec yarns]
because they amuse me in parts when I am putting them together and
because they are the only writings of mine that the public will look
at. Also, in a minor degree, because I like to think some people get
pleasure out of them.’ No doubt Stewart’s single most
impressive literary accomplishment is Nordenholt’s Million,
yet in their time the two dozen J. J. Connington mysteries did indeed
give readers in Great Britain, the United States and other countries
much diversionary reading pleasure. Today these works constitute an
estimable addition to British crime fiction.


After his
’prentice pastiche mystery, Death at Swaythling Court
(1926), a rural English country-house tale set in the highly
traditional village of Fernhurst Parva, Stewart published another,
superior country-house affair, The Dangerfield Talisman
(1926), a novel about the baffling theft of a precious family
heirloom, an ancient, jewel-encrusted armlet. This clever, murderless
tale, which likely is the one that the author told Rupert Gould he
wrote in under six weeks, was praised in The Bookman as
‘continuously exciting and interesting’ and in the New
York Times Book Review as ‘ingeniously fitted together and,
what is more, written with a deal of real literary charm’.
Despite its virtues, however, The Dangerfield Talisman is not
fully characteristic of mature Connington detective fiction. The
author needed a memorable series sleuth, more representative of his
own forceful personality.

It
was the next year, 1927, that saw J. J. Connington make his break to
the front of the murdermongerer’s pack with a third country-house mystery, Murder in the Maze,
wherein debuted as the author’s great series detective the
assertive and acerbic Sir Clinton Driffield, along with Sir Clinton’s
neighbour and ‘Watson’, the more genial (if much less
astute) Squire Wendover. In this much-praised novel, Stewart’s
detective duo confronts some truly diabolical doings, including
slayings by means of curare-tipped darts in the double-centered hedge
maze at a country estate, Whistlefield. No less a fan of the genre
than T. S. Eliot praised Murder in the Maze for its construction (‘we are provided early in the story with
all the clues which guide the detective’) and its liveliness
(‘The very idea of murder in a box-hedge labyrinth does the
author great credit, and he makes full use of its possibilities’).
The delighted Eliot concluded that Murder
in the Maze
was ‘a really first-rate detective story’. For his part,
the critic H. C. Harwood declared in The
Outlook
that with the publication of Murder
in the Maze
Connington demanded and deserved ‘comparison with the masters’.
‘Buy, borrow, or – anyhow – get hold of it’,
he amusingly advised. Two decades later, in his 1946 critical essay
‘The Grandest Game in the World’, the great locked-room
detective novelist John Dickson Carr echoed Eliot’s assessment
of the novel’s virtuoso setting, writing: ‘These 1920s [.
. .] thronged with sheer brains. What would be one of the best
possible settings for violent death? J. J. Connington found the
answer, with Murder
in the Maze.’
Certainly in retrospect Murder
in the Maze
stands as one of the finest English country-house mysteries of the
1920s, cleverly yet fairly clued, imaginatively detailed and often
grimly suspenseful. As the great American true-crime writer Edmund
Lester Pearson noted in his review of Murder
in the Maze
in The
Outlook,
this Connington novel had everything that one could desire in a
detective story: ‘A shrubbery maze, a hot day, and somebody
potting at you with an air gun loaded with darts covered with a
deadly South-American arrow-poison – there
is a situation to wheedle two dollars out of anybody’s
pocket.’3

Staying
with what had worked so well for him to date, Stewart the same year
produced yet another country-house mystery, Tragedy
at Ravensthorpe,
an ingenious tale of murders and thefts at the ancestral home of the
Chacewaters, old family friends of Sir Clinton Driffield. There is
much clever matter in Ravensthorpe.
Especially fascinating is the author’s inspired integration of
faerie folklore into his plot. Stewart, who had a lifelong –
though skeptical – interest in paranormal phenomena, probably
was inspired in this instance by the recent hubbub over the Cottingly
Faeries photographs that in the early 1920s had famously duped, among
other individuals, Arthur Conan Doyle.4
As with Murder
in the Maze,
critics raved about this new Connington mystery. In the Spectator,
for example, a reviewer hailed Tragedy
at
Ravensthorpe
in the strongest terms, declaring of the novel: ‘This is more
than a good detective tale. Alike in plot, characterization, and
literary style, it is a work of art.’

In
1928 there appeared two additional Sir Clinton Driffield detective
novels, Mystery
at Lynden Sands
and The
Case with Nine Solutions.
Once again there was great praise for the latest Conningtons. H. C.
Harwood, the critic who had so much admired Murder
in the Maze,
opined of Mystery
at Lynden Sands
that it ‘may just fail of being the detective story of the
century’, while in the United States author and book reviewer
Frederic F. Van de Water expressed nearly as high an opinion of The
Case with Nine Solutions.
‘This book is a thoroughbred of a distinguished lineage that
runs back to “The Gold Bug” of [Edgar Allan] Poe,’ he
avowed. ‘It represents the highest type of detective fiction.’
In both of these Connington novels, Stewart moved away from his
customary country-house milieu, setting Lynden
Sands
at a fashionable beach resort and Nine
Solutions
at a scientific research institute. Nine
Solutions
is of particular interest today, I think, for its relatively frank
sexual subject matter and its modern urban setting among science
professionals, which rather resembles the locales found in P. D.
James’ classic detective novels A
Mind to Murder
(1963) and Shroud
for a Nightingale (1971).

By
the end of the 1920s, J. J. Connington’s critical
reputation had achieved enviable heights indeed. At this time Stewart
became one of the charter members of the Detection Club, an
assemblage of the finest writers of British detective fiction that
included, among other distinguished individuals, Agatha Christie,
Dorothy L. Sayers and G. K. Chesterton. Certainly Victor Gollancz,
the British publisher of the J. J. Connington mysteries, did not
stint praise for the author,
informing readers that ‘J. J. Connington is now established as,
in the opinion of many, the greatest living master of the story of
pure detection. He is one of those who, discarding all the
superfluities, has made of deductive fiction a genuine minor art,
with its own laws and its own conventions.’


Such
warm praise for J. J. Connington makes it all the more surprising
that at this juncture the esteemed author tinkered with his
successful formula by dispensing with his original series detective.
In the fifth Clinton Driffield detective novel, Nemesis
at Raynham Parva
(1929), Alfred Walter Stewart, rather like Arthur Conan Doyle before
him, seemed with a dramatic dénouement to have devised his
popular series detective’s permanent exit from the fictional
stage (read it and see for yourself). The next two Connington
detective novels, The
Eye in the Museum
(1929) and The
Two Tickets Puzzle
(1930), have a different series detective, Superintendent Ross, a
rather dull dog of a policeman. While both these mysteries are
competently done – the railway material in The
Two Tickets Puzzle
is particularly effective and should have appeal today – the
presence of Sir Clinton Driffield (no superfluity he!) is missed.

Probably
Stewart detected that the public minded the absence of the brilliant
and biting Sir Clinton, for the Chief Constable – accompanied,
naturally, by his friend Squire Wendover – triumphantly
returned in 1931 in The
Boathouse Riddle,
another well-constructed criminous country-house affair. Later in the
year came The
Sweepstake Murders,
which boasts the perennially popular tontine multiple-murder plot, in
this case a rapid succession of puzzling suspicious deaths afflicting
the members of a sweepstake syndicate that has just won nearly
£250,000.5
Adding piquancy to
this plot is the fact that Wendover is one of the imperiled syndicate
members. Altogether the novel is, as
the late Jacques Barzun and his colleague Wendell Hertig Taylor put
it in A
Catalogue of Crime
(1971, 1989), their magisterial survey of detective fiction, ‘one
of Connington’s best conceptions’.

Stewart’s
productivity as a fiction writer slowed in the 1930s, so that,
barring the year 1938, at most only one new Connington appeared
annually. However, in 1932 Stewart produced one of the best
Connington mysteries, The
Castleford Conundrum.
A classic country-house detective novel, Castleford introduces to
readers Stewart’s most delightfully unpleasant set of greedy
relations and one of his most deserving murderees, Winifred
Castleford. Stewart also fashions a wonderfully rich puzzle plot,
full of meaty material clues for the reader’s delectation.
Castleford
presented critics with no conundrum over its quality. ‘In The
Castleford Conundrum
Mr Connington goes to work like an accomplished chess player. The
moves in the games his detectives are called on to play are a delight
to watch,’ raved the reviewer for the Sunday
Times,
adding that ‘the clues would have rejoiced Mr. Holmes’
heart.’ For its part, the Spectator
concurred in the Sunday
Times’
assessment of the novel’s masterfully constructed plot: ‘Few
detective stories show such sound reasoning as that by which the
Chief Constable brings the crime home to the culprit.’
Additionally, E. C. Bentley, much admired himself as the author of
the landmark detective novel Trent’s
Last Case,
took time to praise Connington’s purely literary virtues,
noting: ‘Mr Connington has never written better, or drawn
characters more full of life.’

With Tom
Tiddler’s Island in 1933 Stewart produced a different sort
of Connington, a criminal-gang mystery in the rather more breathless
style of such hugely popular English thriller writers as Sapper, Sax
Rohmer, John Buchan and Edgar Wallace (in violation of the strict
detective fiction rules of Ronald Knox, there is even a secret
passage in the novel). Detailing the startling discoveries made by a
newlywed couple honeymooning on a remote Scottish island, Tom
Tiddler’s Island is an atmospheric and entertaining tale,
though it is not as mentally stimulating for armchair sleuths as
Stewart’s true detective novels. The title, incidentally,
refers to an ancient British children’s game, ‘Tom
Tiddler’s Ground’, in which one child tries to hold a
height against other children.

After his
fictional Scottish excursion into thrillerdom, Stewart returned the
next year to his English country-house roots with The Ha-Ha Case
(1934), his last masterwork in this classic mystery setting (for
elucidation of non-British readers, a ha-ha is a sunken wall, placed
so as to delineate property boundaries while not obstructing views).
Although The Ha-Ha Case is not set in Scotland, Stewart drew
inspiration for the novel from a notorious Scottish true crime, the
1893 Ardlamont murder case. From the facts of the Ardlamont affair
Stewart drew several of the key characters in The Ha-Ha Case,
as well as the circumstances of the novel’s murder (a shooting
‘accident’ while hunting), though he added complications
that take the tale in a new direction.6


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
. . .