Tragedy at Ravensthorpe

by J.J. Connington

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'Mr J. J. Connington is a name revered by all specialists on detective fiction' Spectator In Clinton Driffield's second case he must tangle with a plethora of crimes including robbery, murder and a disappearance - not to mention a Family Curse, and a less than sympathetic victim ...

Release date: November 30, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 236

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 B. . .