Crime-Book Society paperback - 1936?
One of the pleasures of reading these crime books, is that I look up information about authors I have never heard of. Collin Brooks is a typical example.
Collin Brooks as a young man
Brooks (1893-1959), often known as "CB", was a broadcaster and journalist as well as a writer, with over fifty books to his name. In 1915 he joined the Army, served in the Machine Gun Corps and was awarded the Military Cross as a 2nd Lieutenant. From 1921 to 1953, he worked for many newspapers, such as The Yorkshire Post, eventually becoming editor of the Sunday Dispatch. He then moved into broadcasting and took part in Any Questions and The Brains Trust on the BBC Radio. He was a member of the Savage Club, The Carlton, the Royal Thames Yacht Club, the Reform and the Press. His detective stories - he called them his "shockers" (very Buchan-like!) - introduced readers to such memorable characters such as the eccentric amateur sleuth Lord Tweed, who plays an important role in Account Paid. He died on 6th April 1959 and his friend, T.S. Eliot, gave an address at his memorial service at St. Bride's Church, Fleet Street.
Account Paid is quite a clever novel, perhaps a little too convoluted. The last two chapters, totalling fifteen pages, are essentially a long explanation of the hows and whys of the preceding murder-detection story. A suicide, or murder?, takes place by the second page. This story begins, where so many of the best stories have begun, at an English fireside. Friends Drayton and Peter Galliard had just popped out for a brief stroll, before returning to Drayton's wife Helen. She was seemingly sound asleep in one of the two great arm-chairs in front of a coal fire. The three had dined well at the nearby Capuchin Restaurant, returned for a chat in front of the fire and left Helen with a volume of verses to amuse her. Now she was dead, aged only twenty-three, a woman who had combined all the rare freshness of girlishness with the wise sophistication and appealing comradeship of maturity. (Sounds like my wife at that age.) Drayton goes speedily for a local doctor. He returns with Dr. Stephen Blackstone, a man somewhere in the late thirties of life...tall, and spare of frame, with an indescribable air of assurance and command in his carriage...[with] a head that seemed small and a little serpentine...an aquiline nose jutted from beneath two hard eyes of the blueness and strength of cold steel. The mouth was thin and wide, a grim line...Hmm. Needs watching, surely?
Blackstone confirms Helen's death - by poison, from a little glass phial which he had prised from her clenched hand. The doctor returns to his home and tells his nurse-attendant (whose face in repose was a little hard. Again, hmm.) to go with a Mrs. Noblet, a laying-out woman, to deal with the corpse. The doctor also pops upstairs to see another man - whose face was impish in an empty way; the sharp-pointed nose, the prominent rabbit-teeth and the light-coloured eyes, under very fair brows and lashes, combining with the flaxen hair, scrupulously parted down the exact mathematical centre of his egg-shaped head, to give him an aspect of idiotic and supercilious vacuity. A potentially fascinating character, but I never saw the point of him throughout the story. Did the author tire of him half-way through? Blackstone, the nurse and Mrs. Noblet arrive at Drayton's house to lay-out the body. During a discussion, the finger is pointed at a possible murderer (Drayton is convinced his wife has been murdered), one Black Ben Weir - one of the most loathly men in the whole history of modern crime. Wow!
On to the scene comes Detective-Inspector Debenham and his high-ranking chum Hon. Arthur Arkwright, third Earl of Tweed, and the latter's factotum, Stimpson. The ensuing tale is how these three very different men - the heavy-featured, clumsy-bodied Debenham, nicknamed 'Doleful' by one and all, the parchment-faced Stimpson and the willowy graceful Tweed - track down the real villains of the piece. It's not until the end - played out in a dank, narrow underground passage linking The Three Jolly Stevedores public house with a Thames-side wharf - that the reader realises he has been pointed in the wrong direction. It's almost a Gothic ending, which is just within the bounds of the possible. Whatever. The true baddies - Ben Weir is unmasked - are not only caught but killed, buried under the debris after an explosion leads to a ramshackle building collapsing on them. Unfortunately, the two innocent men are also killed along with five of Debenham's police colleagues. The final chat between Debenham and Tweed may have unravelled the truth but they seemed very cavalier about the loss of life of seven individuals who were not scoundrels! It makes you wonder who are the 'shockers'.
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