Hugh Clevely's 'Amateur Crook' 1936 and Sydney Horler's 'The Man who shook the Earth' 1933

 

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.54 - 1938?

I enjoyed this 'rattling good yarn' - mostly sympathetic and believable characters; several twists and car chases; and an excellent, atmospheric ending. Jane Gilman, slim, dark, good-looking is chuntering across the table at Rex Trent: you're reasonably good-looking, you've got heaps of money, and you know all the right people [but] what do you do except ride horses, shoot things, and drive noisy cars at dangerous speeds round Brooklands? It may be quite thrilling, but what good is it? I don't suppose you've ever done a useful day's work in your life. Ouch. However, this is all about to change. Roaring off in his super-charged sports Invicta, Rex is stopped by Chief Inspector Williams, who had once arrested him in mistake for a criminal named John Brownlie. The Inspector orders him to chase a big, grey car with three men on board racing past Hyde Park Corner. A car chase on the third page - Ethan Hunt and Jason Bourne, here we come. The rogues are finally stopped in a side street with a blank wall ahead. One of the three crooks had a gun; the other two were holding ugly looking knives. Rex, of course, is a match for them. He went forward with a rush, all the lean, active thirteen stone of him...with the speed of a leaping tiger...[his] hard fist, with all the weight of his body, and all the force of his rush scientifically behind it, landed squarely on the man's jaw, sending him spinning across the roadway to collapse in a heap in the far gutter. Rex then deals in a similar fashion with a second villain. They didn't stand a chance.  No wonder the Chief Inspector remarks, "You're some scrapper, Mr. Trent." 

The admiring copper asks Trent to call at Scotland Yard the following day; and so begins the Big Adventure, where Trent is able to prove to Miss Gilman that he can be useful. He is asked to impersonate his lookalike Brownlie, easily the cleverest safe-opener in the country, who is presently in prison. The aim? To unmask a Mr. Big, leader of criminal outfits such as the Spadoni gang and the  Hoxton Boys. As Trent later says to Jane: "I'm a changed man now. I've given up frivolous things, like motor-racing, and I'm going in seriously for a life of crime." He is successfully 'sprung' from prison (an aircraft drops smoke bombs on the prison farm where he is working), and escapes in a Hispano car, driven by Valerie Lane, young and very attractive...her light-brown silky hair fell in a low fringe over her forehead. Her nose was slightly tip-tilted, adding to her attractiveness. Her eyes, shaded by long lashes, were blue and clear, and perfectly self-possessed. Oh dear, what will Miss Gilman think?

She is a member of Mr. Big's operation, which also includes Barfield, a small sandy-haired man with the sharp features of a rat or a ferret; Wilburton, tall, slim, dark man of about forty, very well dressed. His complexion was sallow, his features were clean-cut and aristocratic...with a set of very white, even teeth; and his voice was the low, well-modulated voice of a man who had been to a public school and a university. What on earth are he and Miss Lane doing mixed up in criminal activities? As the story develops, we find out. A pointer is surely that Valerie's surname is actually McLeod, and is the daughter of a director of Wessex Bank, which had failed disastrously two years' earlier. Her father, Robert McLeod, had been sentence to 14 years imprisonment and had died in jail. The other three directors were Leonard Morris and Marcus Silverstein and, guess what, Sir John Gilman, none other than Jane's father. There is also Murdoch, a big, broad-shouldered, swaggering fellow, dark-haired and dark-complexioned...with an air of truculence about him. An off-the-shelf Crime-Book baddie, then.

Trent/Brownlie's first job is to break into Sir John's home and crack the safe, where a pile of jewels are kept. He manages to forewarn the police and when he opens the safe, there is only a thin box with what turn out to be fake glass jewels. Clearly someone has tipped the authorities off. A second attempt is made - not by grabbing jewels but by kidnapping Jane Gilman. The author keeps the tension going all the while; there are some clever scenes of double-cross (where Jane is rescued by Trent); Jane and Valerie meet up, with the former intensely suspicious of where Trent's affections are going; and we find out who the Mr. Big is quite early on (on page 87, although I guessed it a few pages earlier) - Silverstein. He is known to both his gang and the police as The Angel, due to his drawing one at the bottom of his directives. The tale maintains a rattling pace. We meet Smannel, Silverstein's devoted manservant (all leading characters, whether good or bad, had their Jeeves figures in the 1930s); Murdoch is killed by a terrific right hook from Trent, a punch that would have felled a buffalo (all 1930s heroes knew how to box); Trent also recovers the real jewels in a tightly-written scene set in Harwich; and Dick Dastardly (alias Silverstein) pits his not inconsiderable wits against the forces of law and order. The latter's escape plans, once he realises all is lost, is suitably exciting - taking in cars, a motor launch, a private aeroplane and a small cargo boat off the North Wales coast. Spoiler alert: Silverstein dies in a splendid shoot-out; Miss McLeod marries Wilburton and departs to South Africa to start a fruit farm; and Miss Gilman marries the layabout Rex Trent. Far-fetched? Of course. A well-paced narrative? Absolutely. 

The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.55 - 1938?

The Man who shook the Earth is the first of the three short stories that make up the book. I am afraid I was not particularly impressed with any of them. One problem with the shorter novel is that there is less time to develop characters; the novelette is an art form and as often as not it doesn't come off. However, M.R. James and others have proved it deserves a place in the literary pantheon. Any interest in this first tale really lies in the focus on the atom (which apparently is the cause of a minor earthquake near Harrogate). Nuclear fission (splitting the atom) was not achieved until December1938 - by two German chemists who identified barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons, but physicists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton first artificially split an atom in 1932 by bombarding lithium with protons. Hence, Sydney Horler was very quickly on the scene with his tale of the evil Oscar Schutt  (he's a mixture of many breeds - there's a bit of Dutch, a bit of German, and a whole heap of Mexican in him; knowing the author's racist views, that means Schutt is bound to be a wrong'un) and his plans to use this knowledge for wealth and power. The characters are so lightly sketched that it is difficult to feel much empathy/sympathy for them. There's Harry Dunstan, bred-in-the-bone and dyed-in-the-wool bachelor, a mining engineer on six months' leave from South Africa; Jim Mannering,  a very celebrated writer of fiction, but in the care-free days of the past, he had been almost equally famous as a newspaper special correspondent, and a pal Dunstan had known for ten years; and Julie Farrar, a cousin of Jim, who is her only living relative, who is a junior reporter and has come over from the USA.

Harry is summoned to Yorkshire by Jim, but also takes Julie with him.  The two men meet up with Schutt - whose eyes in the swarthy, sullen face were so malignant that Harry, had he been imaginative, would have construed it as a personal warning. When, later, part of the eerie landscape around the famous Brimham Rocks appears to explode, the two men realise Schutt is up to no good. This is confirmed when a letter is sent to the Prime Minister, which states: chance has placed in my hands a terrific weapon...in short, I can proclaim myself Master of the World...I hold the earth in thrall. Another missive, to the Manager of Barkins Bank, Harrogate contains a similar threat if he does not hand over £500,000 (£461/2 million today). Schutt captures Harry and Julie, but they are saved when another mini earthquake destroys the underground cavern they are being held in. They manage to escape, but Schutt cops it. This brief tale ends with the final Chapter entitled Julie Shows A Dimple. With Harry and Jim, she is feted by the London Commissioner of Police; gets a cable from America  saying she can have a contract of $15,000 a year for five years as a reporter due to her filing the story on Schutt; but decides to go to South Africa instead. Why? To be with Harry, of course.

The second story, Blood Money, starts off with the amateur golfer, John Roslyn, winning the British Open Championship in a fight to the death with the American professional, Worton. The scene switches to a  thatched, ivy-festooned cottage in West Dean, Sussex, where young Jessie Temple, she with the exquisitely shaped leg, is staying with her old nurse Polly Wiffen. Jessie's uncle, Richard Seidler, has just died; down to the cottage from London comes her late uncle's solicitor, Septimus Clive. Startling news - she has been left £200,000 in her uncle's will. Clive urges her to make her own; if she does not, the money will go to the unpleasant younger uncle, Aubrey Seidler. Well, we know what's coming; Aubrey will try and get his hands on the will first. Danger lurks, particularly as there is a suspicion uncle Richard's death might not have been hunky-dory. 

Meanwhile, John Roslyn has put up at a very unsavoury Inn in the same village. His drink is drugged and he is relieved of £25 whilst he slept. On waking, he eavesdrops on a discussion downstairs - certain words emerged clearly: ...quite near...the old fool...two hundred thousand quid...the Temple girl. Well, any red-blooded Englishman, particularly one who had just won the British Open, would be bound to act. In quick succession, Septimus is hijacked outside the cottage; Rosslyn turns up, just in time to rescue Jessie from two thugs, who are then bound and locked in the cellar. The story moves briefly to London, where we first meet naughty Uncle Aubrey; but it is quickly made clear that he is not the real villain. Instead it is Vincent Chaddlerly, a monstrously fat man known to the cognoscenti as The Lurcher, who is owed money by Aubrey. Hearing of the potential £200,00, he decides to instigate the plan to capture Jessie and relieve her of her fortune. Although Roslyn is captured and imprisoned in with Septimus, it's not for long. Luckily Scotland Yard, as ever, get involved. The Lurcher is caught and so is Jessie - in Roslyn's arms.

The last story, The Death of Allan Mandeville, is the shortest, just 56 pages long. The author himself considered it the best piece of fiction he has yet delivered to any publisher. Hmm. Alumni from Oxford University are gathered in an old house near Tintagel in Cornwall. Rev. J.D. Healey, a modern cleric, with an international reputation as a preacher and marked down for a bishopric; Sir Charles Knightley, the most famous pathologist in the country. Home Office expert; Bernard Morton, with a world-wide reputation as a Professor of Physics, and perhaps the most-quoted authority on spiritualism. (It all sounds very Buchanesque - vide The Runagates Club). John Loraine, the host just back from a long spell in Africa, had extended the invitation to Mrs Isabel Mandeville, a woman of early middle age, and her younger sister, Phyllis Daneforth, a girl of twenty. Her philandering husband, Allan Mandeville is the last to arrive. It soon become clear that they all, ever since the Oxford days,  intensely dislike and despise him, not least the two women. Isabel Mandeville confides in John Loraine (they were once sweethearts) that for nearly three years, I've lived through hell...I found the man I had married was a beast. Her husband has also been propositioning her sister.

Something has to be done. In fact, it is planned. Mandeville is given the room through which a ghostly lady roams; she strangled her husband in that very room hundreds of years ago, but on the very date in question. Mandeville is found dead the next morning, strangled. The bedroom door had been locked from the inside. The killing is ingeniously effected. The story ends with everyone finding out how it was done, but with all agreeing to keep it from the authorities. So, it was "Death by misadventure" at the Coroner's court.