Crime-Book Society paperback edition - 1936?
This the second Sydney Horler thriller I have read (see my Blog of 20th July 2025 on his Tiger Standish) and, taking into account the fact that critics have called his plots unbelievable and among the worst of British thriller writer, I must admit I quite enjoyed this yarn. In fact, the paperback comprises three stories, of very different lengths. S.O.S. is the main tale (pages 9-160); this is followed by the shorter The Dealer in Death (163-237); and the brief Jungle Law (241-256).
Sydney Horler (1888-1954)
S.O.S. is a typical Horler tale. A young man, James Thorp, is sent to a Harley Street specialist, 'burnt out' due to his work with the Secret Service (the particular sub-department is known as "X.2.") Advised to take three months' off work - reiterated by his boss Sir Rimington Blade - he takes up the offer of a friend's cottage in Kent for six weeks. So off he goes. On his first evening, an S.O.S. comes over the radio - Missing from home...Venetia Delvey, age twenty-three, 5 feet 7 inches in height, slim build, clear complexion, good teeth, brown eyes. Well, what red-blooded male (even an exhausted one) wouldn't be interested. Twenty minutes later, the very same Venetia appears on the doorstep, in desperate need of a decent red-blooded male. She explains a twisted ankle as the result of leaping out of a car to escape from two 'baddies'. Scarcely had she explained this, when the door knocker sounds again. Can it be the baddies? Of course. It is the 'Bishop of Wadborough' apparently. Thorp observed that, in his prime, the Bishop must have been something of an athlete, for the gaiters could not hide the muscular development of the calves. Add to this a veritable barrel of a chest, and he decided that here was a member of the Church who, if occasion demanded, might be very militant indeed.
Well, both Thorp and the reader twig almost immediately. The Bishop is joined by his daughter, Stella, who rather gives the game way by a "God knows" response to a question about the chauffeur who has seemingly gone looking for a garage to deal with a problem with their car. Thorp tries to stop Stella going to the bathroom (next to the bedroom where his 'wife' is lying ill - i.e. Venetia). The 'Bishop' produces a gun!... However, anyone in "X.2." can match Bond any day. The Bishop is summarily disarmed and sent packing with his 'daughter'. Soon after he shoots her dead! The above is the long Introduction to the main Act. viz. is there a Mr. (or Mrs.) Big behind the Bishop and if so, who are they and what's their game?
It's a Mrs Big and she is "Ma" Lake, once world-famous as a show girl in Zeidler's Burlesques of twenty years ago, she had moved lock, stock and barrel, from Broadway to Windmill Street, Piccadilly Circus. Not only is she now running a sleazy joint but is trafficking well-born young girls. A 'bent' copper, Detective-Sergeant Durrant from Scotland Yard, keeps her informed of any trouble ahead. It transpires that Venetia (under the false name of Millie Clark) had joined Ma. Lake's outfit simply to track down a 'disappeared' friend, Lady Denise Hart. The story is essentially how Thorp inveigles his way into Ma. Lake's shenanigans, is then caught and imprisoned in a dungeon in her house on Hampstead Heath. Thanks to Venetia, who has managed to get to the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Sir Ronald Brent, and explain the entire foul proceedings (including the shooting of Stella, which she had seen through a window of the Bishop's house), the Yard spring into action. Detective Durant is forced to confess; Thorp is rescued; he reunites with Venetia, kisses her and marries her. Job done.
The author's racism occasionally surfaces: the caller was a negro of some indeterminate breed, for his skin was of the palest chocolate, and, although his hair was of the usual woolly type, his nose was almost Roman, and his lips were not abnormal.
The Dealer in Death is not a bad short story. A seedy, down-and-out young man, calling himself Harry Mason, is accosted in Pascal's Bar, Soho by a 'butler person' who offers him a job on behalf of his employer. A specially designed Rolls-Royce whisks them off to the South Bank, near Waterloo Station. Here he meets Mr. Big, who he nick-names 'The Grand Duke'. He is given the role of an agent of the Grand Duke - to travel to the famous Glenrobin in Scotland to "watch a man named Reuben Glass. He is a wealthy American, and he is plotting mischief - such mischief as may plunge the world into wholesale chaos. Unless he is prevented. It is my intention to prevent him - through you."
Off Mason goes to Glenrobin, the name of this famous Scottish resort is daily broadcast to the far corners of the earth. Not only does he meet Glass and two supporters - a German Herr Schroder and a Frenchman M. Clement Viviani (one of them is a typical Horler 'baddie') - but also Mason's niece, Helen Simpson. Mason dances with her and, of course in true Horler style, they fall for each other. Mason finds out that Glass (masquerading as Mr Robert Martin) is in fact a genuine philanthropist, determined to banish war from the world! To cut a mildly convoluted story short. Mason is ordered to capture Glass and deliver him to be killed. He doesn't do this. Moreover, it is revealed that his name isn't Mason after all, but Harry Stevenson in the British Secret Service Q.I; the Grand Duke is a crook named Charles Volpin; all the baddies are rounded up; and Mason/Stevenson is able to return hot haste to Scotland to see "Glass, and - er - someone else!"
Jungle Law, is quite an endearing short tale of two erstwhile blackmailers - Francis Leadley, a week out of Dartmoor after a two-year stretch and Jane Lessing, now lying dangerously ill in a house in one of those arid streets which make up the dreary desert of North Kensington. Francis believes it was Jane who had shopped him. Between them they had blackmailed many a rich man by the simple expedient of Francis pretending to be the outraged husband catching his wife in flagrante. He has now come to kill her. There is a neat twist at the end, another man known to both, Anthony Dakers, turns up. The hypodermic needle Francis had brought with him, filled with a palish liquid which, when delivered, would mean the cleverest pathologist could not give any other opinion that one had died from genuine heart disease. Francis uses it. Two beings only leave the house - Jungle Law.
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