Edgar Wallace's 'On the Spot' 1931

The Crime-Book Society No. 2

I must admit I thought Edgar Wallace was an American. In fact, Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) was as English as they come, being born in Greenwich into poverty. Leaving school aged 12, he joined the Army at 21 and served as a war correspondent for Reuters and the Daily Mail during the Boer War in South Africa. Returning to London, heavily in debt, he began writing thrillers to raise income, publishing books such as The Four Just Men (1905). He serialised short stories in magazines and, in 1921, he signed with Hodder & Stoughton and soon became an internationally recognised author. Failing to get elected as one of Lloyd George's Independent Liberals in 1931, he sailed for America, still heavily indebted - usually to racing  and Hollywood. He worked as a scriptwriter for RKO. He died suddenly from undiagnosed diabetes, during the initial drafting of King Kong in 1932. Wallace wrote 18 stage plays, 957 short stories and over 170 novels, 12 in 1929 alone. More than 160 films have been made of his work. He was, apparently, the first British crime novelist to use policemen as his protagonists, rather than amateur sleuths as most other writers of the time did.

On the Spot was one of Wallace's last novels and originated from a play written in 1930 (dictated in just four days!). It was his greatest theatrical success and was inspired by a visit to the USA and, in particular, by the Saint Valentine's Massacre of 1929 in Chicago. The play launched the career of Charles Laughton, who played the lead Al Capone character, Tony Perelli. It lasted for 342 performances on its original West End run. It transferred to America in October 1930 and ran for 167 performances in New York. 

If I am honest, it is not really my kind of novel, which came out in 1931. I am not keen on gangster stories or on those set in America, especially places like 1930s Chicago. The first paragraph typifies the tone of the book: Tony Perelli was not yellow, either by his own code or judges by standards more exacting. It was yellow to squeal to futile police, but not yellow to squeal to one's own crowd, and squeal loudly, about injustices suffered. It was yellow to betray a pal, but not yellow if the pal had not acted square or if he himself was yellow; even then it was yellow to tip off the police about his delinquencies. The honourable thing was to take him to some lone place and "give him the works". And this is what happens to "Red" Gallway, a safe-breaker, con man, hold-up man and keeper of questionable establishments. He makes suggestive remarks to Min Lee, Perelli's Chinese 'squeeze'; he argues with Perelli; he talks to the police Chief Kelly; three big mistakes. He gets shot on Perelli's orders. Vinsetti is another, more important gangster, who crosses Perelli, but he is sharper than Gallway he saw the red light and became cold and cautious and watchful.

Perelli had an espionage system which was well-nigh perfect. He had clerks in the banks who furnished him with particulars about his own people. He knew to a cent their balances, would be instantly informed about the transfer of money or stock to another country...Thus, he knew if any member of his coterie was intending to cut and run. Another rum cove to be put 'on the spot' is Con O'Hara, a noisy man, something of a brute, a boaster with a striking wife, who Perelli wants to usurp Min Lee. It's no surprise when Perelli himself kills O'Hara in his drawing room. As the latter drops to the floor, all Perelli can say is, "Don't soil my carpet, you bastard". It's surely poetic justice that Perelli dies, shot by his own factotum, Angelo. As Chief Kelly says, in the last three lines in the book: "The law got you, Perelli. Not my law, but your own law. And that's the way of it."

The real Capone died in his bed in Florida, surrounded by his family, of heart failure due to apoplexy.

Seldon Truss' 'They Came by Night' 1933

 

The Crime-Book Society No. 2

This, the second of my Crime-Society novels, starts well: Body found on Terrace of House of Commons. I immediately made a mental list of who I hoped it might be; but Seldon Truss is writing about the 1930s not 2025. If you look for Seldon Truss (1892-1990)  on the Internet, there are reams of headings about Anthony Seldon's demolition account of Liz Truss' time as Prime Minister. Not helpful. In 2010, another reviewer simply said of the author, he's almost assuredly unknown to any but the most serious collector today. This is probably equally true fifteen years later. Truss was born in Wallington, South London, and was a film director as well as a prolific author. He was the creator of Chief Inspector Gidleigh, a CID detective (24 novels); Detective Inspector Shane, a Scotland Yard detective (6 novels); and Detective Inspector Bass (3 novels). He also used the pseudonym George Selmark. They Came by Night (1933) is among the other nine books he wrote.

The first chapter then goes on to introduce three characters who are integral to the storyline and who all read The Evening Mail's headline and short accompanying note: firstly, a  a shabby and ill-favoured loafer; secondly a man in the comfortable lounge of a Piccadilly Hotel - a big man, massive both in height and girth, and his full-moon, hairless countenance was puckered genially as he read; and, finally, in Whitehall, a spare-built [man] with greying hair and keen, tired eyes. The second chapter swiftly takes us into the very centre of England, where we meet the undoubted hero of the story: John Worth, an infantry captain with a War record in the Intelligence Department,  who is presently in a car belonging to Lord Marchington, the Foreign Secretary, and driven by the latter's chauffeur. They reach the little village of Hayling-Bois, where they gaze on an amazing sight: in the centre of a field adjoining the graveyard an immense pile of faggots had been erected, and surmounting these, lashed to a decrepit rocking-chair, a stuffed effigy garbed in rusty black clothes with an ancient top-hat above its grinning cardboard mask, perched drunkenly. Recent rain meant that, so far, there was much smoke and little fire. Guy Fawkes' Day? No - it is to burn an effigy of a local unpopular landowner, who locals think had murdered his wife. The fires now begins to burn; then, Worth notices one of the effigy's hay-stuffed gloves was beginning to singe. Suddenly, the hand twitched. What a brilliant start to the novel - shades of the Wicker Man! Worth and the chauffeur leap into action and rescue the 'effigy'; the hat and the absurd, leering mask came away together in a fluster of hay, disclosing the deathly white features of a girl.

It is hard for the subsequent story to live up to that opening; but, by and large, it does. The girl is taken to the early Georgian manor house of Montague Clayden and she proves to be Daphne Manners, the step-child of Clayden, my late wife's daughter. Clearly, there are rum doings afoot. Clayden, who had abnormally large eyes in a wasted face and who appeared to Worth to be a sour-faced eccentric (surely, that's a clue to his being a wrong-un), is further apparently shocked to hear that Daphne had been drugged. A garage bung full of petrol further adds to feeling something is not right. Can all this be relevant to Worth's original mission, to uncover a vast and diabolical conspiracy against the country? He is told by his superiors, which include Marchington, that Major Seton Richardson, the greatest daredevil of the War, now in retirement, due to his war wounds which included being nearly blinded, had unearthed details of the conspiracy. However, Richardson had disappeared! Hence Worth's journey to Hayling-Bois, where worrying cases of blindness have occurred. These cases will multiply alarmingly during the story and, obviously, are bound up with the conspiracy; Clayden has several unsavoury henchman, one of whom is an absurd little figure in a neckcloth, whose glass eye (I should have seen the clue there and then) glinted with an extraordinary effect of savagery. He goes by the name of Comrade William Smithers, of the Young Red Workers. He needs watching!

The scene switches to Whitehall, where Marchington is in discussion with the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Home Office pathologist  - they fear that the few cases of blindness will develop into a thousand a day. It is a declaration of war. The enemy? The Lilliputian and semi-barbarous State of Mongoria - on the shores of the Caspian Sea! Mongoria want to establish a powerful state and they need capital for road, rail and dock development. In return for supplying serum to cure the cases of blindness, they require complete immunity from any reprisals and an indemnity of £25 million pounds! Not a bad idea for a thriller. The Prime Minister is relaxed: a big task for one man, but Worth is a big man. And so John Worth proves to be. Working with the gorgeous Daphne Manners (Worth later sees her in a slender chiffon frock as a breath-taking little vision of sheer beauty that caused his heart to leap), he manages to outwit the Mongorian thugs. Perhaps rather far-fetched, but good fun. What one might call a rollicking-yarn. We could do with these particularly when one is confronted with such dire national and international news daily in the media. In fact, we could do with a few more John Worth and Daphne Manners characters in charge today.

Hugh Clevely's 'The Gang-Smasher 1928

 

The Crime-Book Society No. 1 

Having nearly finished collecting the Jarrolds 'Jackdaw' Crime Series, I have - like a moth to a candle flame - now embarked on another paperback flight; this time The Crime-Book Society Pocket Library. I have purchased the first eleven in the series, and have read eight of them whilst on holiday in Greece. 

Hugh Clevely starts the series - he also wrote No. 15 'Gang Law' and No. 41 'The Wrong Murderer'. Clevely was born in Bristol in 1898 and was a bank clerk at the start of the Great War. He enlisted in the Grenadier Guards in April 1915 and was posted to France in March 1917. Wounded in August, he returned to England but transferred to the RFC in March 1918. After the War, in March 1922, he joined the British Gendarmeries section of the Palestine Police as a Sergeant but left in the Spring of 1925. On his return, he found himself without either a job or money, his most prized possession being an old type writer. He lived for three months on 7/6 a week, in a disused furniture van in the middle of a Sussex wood! He set to work on the type writer and became a prolific writer of novels, publishing 23 books under his own name between 1928 and 1955. He wrote a further nine under the pseudonym Tod Claymore. He was also one of the dozens of authors who wrote for the story paper The Thriller in the 1930s - other writers included Leslie Charteris, John Creasey, Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham. After the 2WW, Clevely contributed a dozen or so titles to the hugely popular Sexton Blake series. He died in 1964.

This tale is a fairly breath-taking account about the man nick-named 'The Gang-Smasher', a gigantic red-haired figure of a man yet human and attractive withal. It is the story of a born fighter, who sets out to smash the all-powerful Tortoni gang... John Martinson had worked his passage home from China only a week before the story begins. He was an educated man, who could shoot, fence, box, wrestle, command a battalion, and speak five languages. Walking aimlessly in a London fog, he deals with a pickpocket and an enquiring policemen in the same way - one to the head the other to the solar plexus! A quarter of an hour later the booking-clerk at the Paddington Station hotel was astonished by a large, deeply tanned, and very shabby man, with an ugly face, a bent nose, and the most aggressively red hair that he had ever seen, who smiled contentedly in a queer, lop-sided manner as he asked for food and drink immediately and a room for the night.

In his room, he searches what he had purloined from the pickpocket. An address (Sylvester Brown...) on a piece of paper, five cigarettes  and a cigarette tin with at least £400 in £1 notes! The following day, be spent £30 odd buying a refit of clothes, then travelled to the address on the piece of paper. He encounters Susan Brown - a very pretty girl, her dark, shingled hair, parted in the middle, fell in attractive waves on either side of her forehead, and formed a pleasing contrast with the clear, warm tints of her complexion. Her eyes were dark, tender with the dreaminess of youth, but shining with a light of humour and intelligence that gave a delightful air of animation to her face. Her mouth was small and red, a mouth that would very easily tempt men to forget themselves...What's not to like? Martinson, being a toughie but uncomfortable with girls, takes the whole book to succumb - in the last couple of pages she hears him say, luckily for my piece of mind there's nothing I can imagine myself hating more than being married. Equally luckily for him, he is no seer.

It is Sylvia who tells Martinson about the feared and ruthless Tortoni gang. Apparently, they want to kill her brother Sylvester. The latter turns up and says the gang recently knifed his friend Ted Williamson to death and he himself had received a threatening telephone call - don't talk or you die!  Well, Martinson 's reaction is obvious: I'm going after them. And so he does, over the next 260 pages. First, he relieves one of the gang of the stolen Duchess of Midhurst's diamonds, worth £60,000+. Before going to see the Duchess, he makes it clear his whole enterprise has no place for a woman. Sylvia responds: You seem to have a very poor opinion of girls, Mr. Martinson. I suppose that very brave and tremendously clever men always have. Or perhaps it's because you're what is called 'a man's man.' Are you? Do you smell of tweeds, and tobacco, and have you got an Irish terrier named Pete who's your best friend? What a girl! Martinson's meeting with the Duke and Duchess also includes a Comtesse de Varenne, who summons her friend Captain Vandaleur to verify the jewels. Are both of the latter what they seem? Of course not, or there would be no plot. And clever Martinson knows they are crooks from the start.

Scotland Yard get involved; Martinson inches every closer to finding out who the leader of the Tortoni gang is; the deaf and dumb Professor André, a neighbour of the wealthy Mrs. Somerville, whose jewels are also stolen, is clearly a Person of Interest; and the novel builds to a thrilling climax in the English Channel. It's a fairly convoluted, but well-controlled plot, and I enjoyed the flashes of humour interspersed amongst the skulduggery.  I look forward to purchasing Gang Law before too long.

Marthe McKenna's 'Hunt the Spy' 1939/40?

 

Jarrolds publishers - 1939/40?

I began collecting the Jarrolds 'Jackdaw' Crime Series paperbacks a few years ago and have managed to purchase 12 of the original 16, published between 1939 and 1940. The two Moray Dalton works (Nos. 15 and 16) and Alan Kennington's She Died Young (No. 9) are proving elusive. However, I received from Zardoz Books - that excellent paperback bookseller in Westbury, Wiltshire - only this morning the fourth book I was after: Marthe McKenna's Double Spy (No. 12). Once I have read it, I shall Blog on it. There are two others (at least), in addition to the numbered sixteen, which have been traced and, though unnumbered, I have detailed as No.17# and No.18#. Van Wyck Mason's, The Cairo Garter Murders, the first of these, I failed to win on Ebay - my top bid was beaten by another, more wealthy, collector.  I did track down another of Marthe McKenna's spy novels - again from Zardoz Books. This was the first of nine crime paperbacks I read on our recent holiday in Greece - all of which I will be Blogging on in sequence. Like Van Wyck Mason's book, the cover price has gone up from 6d. to 9d. A casualty of the Second World War.

 

The story of the author is at least as interesting as her spy books. Marthe Mathilde Cnockaert, born in West Flanders, Belgium, in 1892, began studying at Ghent University's medical school, but her studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the Great War. She was conscripted as a nurse at a German military hospital in her home village. She was awarded the Iron Cross by the Germans for her medical service. Transferred to the German Military Hospital in Roulers, a family friend revealed she was a British intelligence agent and that she wished to recruit Marthe to an Anglo-Belgian intelligence network operating in the town. Such was the latter's success in passing on important military intelligence, she was mentioned in dispatches on 8 November 1918 by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig and was made a member of the French and British Legions of Honour. She married John 'Jock' McKenna, a British army officer. Her memoir I Was a Spy - ghostwritten by her husband and published under her married name in 1932 - had a foreword by Winston Churchill. The following year, saw it made into a Spy Thriller movie, with Conrad Veidt as Commandant Oberaertz and Madeleine Carroll as Marthe. The film was voted the best British movie of 1933 and Carroll as the best actress in a British film that year.

Of the 17 books written by Marthe between 1932 and 1951, 13 had 'Spy'/'Spies' in their title. Although published under Marthe's name, it is speculated that her husband was largely responsible for their writing. In the Second World War, Marthe was listed in 'The Black Book' of prominent subjects to be arrested by the Nazis in case of a successful invasion of Britain.  After the war, the McKennas returned to Marthe's family home in Westrozebeke. Their marriage ended around 1951 and Marthe died in 1966.

Hunt the Spy tells the story of the inimitable British secret agent Jim Archer and a beautiful London shop girl, Susan Denton, who innocently becomes entangled in a sinister spy plot. Susan's close friend, and fellow worker at the outfitters Rayon and Crepe, has married Andrew Blair, a staid uncommunicative young man, who is an assistant to a Professor Justin MacArdle, who is working on some secret assignment in the small town of Bayleigh on the Thames Estuary. Strolling along window-shopping in Bond Street, Susan is accosted by a tall, slim young man, tanned of face, short dark crispy hair and glittering laughing eyes. He pretends he has mistaken her for someone else, but the tone of his deep caressing voice and other attributes soon enable him to wangle his way into her affections. The reader soon finds out (before Susan herself) that he is a dastardly spy - leaning towards the Germans but, more importantly, totally out for the highest bidder. What is he after? - Professor MacArdle's 'secret' invention, which could help turn the tide in a future war. Nicholas Talos, for such is he, at their first dining out, gives Susan a sparkling brooch (the reader should keep this in mind for a future episode).

A burly chauffeur is sent to pick Susan up for the next date, but is attacked and Susan is 'rescued' from a difficult situation. Her rescuer? "My name is Archer - Jim Archer" (shades of "Bond. James Bond.") of the British Secret Service. Archer takes her to meet a friend, Philip Glade, who is immediately attracted to Susan.  Archer tells Glade that "Talon is a brilliant misfit. A God in forehead but at heart a fiend...he is a magnificent beast...he is the complete international spy..." He also explains that MacArdle's invention will possibly give Britain a cast-iron defence against air bombers (no wonder Talon wants the blueprint - to sell it to the highest bidder). The story develops with Susan not only visiting Rayleigh to see Muriel but also  going to a fortune-teller, Madam Sigratta, who is obviously up to no good. The latter appears to have links with Talon. In fact, it's all good, if dangerous, fun and the author can spin a promising yarn, with plenty of mishaps and near escapes on the way. Good and Britain will, of course, win out, as does Philip Glade with Susan Denton. Moreover, as the very last paragraph states: But, damn it all, it was well worth it. Professor MacArdle would recover the complete plans of his invention, and the day that saw its completion would be the signal for Britain's roar to be heard rumbling round the world. And this time it would roar with a set purpose, not of frightening persecuted insanity, but of carrying soothing peace to all men's minds. So, bah! to Hitler and his toughs.