The Crime-Book Society paperback edition No.62 - 1939?
'Peter Drax' was the nom de plume for Eric Elrington Addis (1899-1941). Born in Edinburgh, he attended the city's university and served in the Royal Navy, retiring in 1929. He then studied law and practised as a barrister in the 1930s. When the Second World War broke out, he rejoined the navy, serving on HMS Warspite.. He was killed in action on 31 August 1941, having been mortally wounded in an air rad on the Royal Navy base at Alexandria, Egypt. He left a wife and two children. He published six crime novels between 1936 and 1939, Death by Two Hands aka Crime within Crime (1937) was the fourth. A further novel, Sing a Song of Murder, unfinished by Drax on his death, was completed by his wife - Hazel Iris (Wilson) Addis, and published in 1944.
While commuting to his office in the 1930s, Addis read thrillers himself, and concluded that most of them had far too many unlikely events and characters in them. His aim was to write thrillers that were 'credible'; as contemporary publicity put it, police who are not endowed with supernatural powers and crooks who are also human, i.e. 'real' people. I feel, in this tale, he achieved just that.
The novel is set mainly in the environs of Chalk Street, Camden Town. (In fact, there is no such thoroughfare as 'Chalk Street' - there is Chalk Farm Road, which runs through Camden Market and is part of Camden High Street). The author quickly sets the scene: Chalk Street was crowded from end to end and from pavement to pavement with a slow-moving jostling crowd. Costers' barrows lined the gutters. One of these petty traders is Mr. Rivers - nearly every stall or barrow had its attendant crowd except his. He never shouted. He never waved his arms about or told the story of an adventurous life, to catch the attention of the crowd, He stood behind his barrow with his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his tightly buttoned overcoat. He was wearing a flat cloth cap. A cigarette hung limply from his mouth. As well as this 'legal' trade, Rivers engages in petty crime. One of his conduits is Barney - an avid reader of American True Life Romance Magazines - who keeps two pet mice, usually along the brim of his wide black felt hat. One was fawn and white and was called Fanny. The other, her husband, was a portly brown and white gentleman mouse called George. The reader should remember them, as one provides a vital clue to solving a murder.
Rivers also meets up with a twenty-five year-old Spike Morgan - his eyes were a cold blue, and there was a hardness in his face that put ten years on his age. He was wearing a stained raincoat and a light fawn felt hat with a green band. He is a petty criminal and always hard up. A chance to make a financial killing presents itself. Alma Robinson, the 24 year-old orphan niece of Rivers, is coming up to London, as her aunt has just died. Her 'boyfriend' (or at least he likes to think so) Will Dorset, says he will be driving to London with a consignment of expensive fox furs on the forthcoming Friday. Rivers finds out about this and determines on a potentially lucrative theft.
Alma boards with a friend of her uncle, Mrs. Kemp - a great barrel of a woman clad in a dirty and enveloping overall which fell in straight lines from her bosom to her feet...when she laughed huskily she showed a double row of broken teeth. It comes as no surprise to the reader that she easily slips into nefarious practices. The description of the Kemps' house, Number Three Napier Terrace, absolutely fits the author's determination for credibility. Seedy, dirty, untidy, it fits the sort of abode Mrs. Kemp and her spineless husband, Joe, would doss down in. Whilst Alma is reluctantly settling in, and meeting the seedy lothario Spike, Barney is telling Rivers about the consignment of fox skins due in the Great Wen that Friday. What should have been a simple robbery (the skins are stolen from the van by Spike and an even murkier friend, Len Harmon, while Barney keeps a look-out), degenerates into first one murder at the scene and then another (of Rivers) in London. Len had crowded more crime into the twenty-two years of his life than most of his kind and will be responsible for one of the murders.
The author's descriptions of this string of sordid events is very realistic; as are his portrayals of the various individuals caught up in the caper. Rivers and his pretentious flat over his shop; Izzy Hyams, the Jew who purchases the stolen fox skins and secretes them in his warehouse; the forces of law and order, such as Detective-Sergeant Leith, the local rozzer, who has had both eyes on Rivers, Barney, Spike and others of their ilk for a long time, and his superiors such as Chief-Inspector Thompson; all these incidents, places and people combine to produce an almost 'plodding' tale. But that is what makes the story so 'natural'. The individuals are very real, and the errors on both sides are totally believable. There are no moments of 'clever' detection or unlikely escapes by the petty criminals. The denouement, when it finally comes, is not surprising. The guilty are found guilty, thanks to a mixture of perseverance and luck; as Detective Leith says at the end, "They're a couple of bad eggs all right." And Alma gets the happy, if rather dull, future she deserves. As the Saturday Review of Literature commented, 'Little people in [the] grip of tragic destiny...brilliantly done.'
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