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.
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