Dead Man’s Quarry: A Golden Age Mystery Read online

  Ianthe Jerrold

  Dead Man’s Quarry

  A GOLDEN AGE MYSTERY

  “The murderer was also riding a bicycle... why, if we can trace it, we shall have the murderer!”

  On a cycling holiday in idyllic Herefordshire countryside, Nora and her friends make a gruesome discovery – the body of their missing comrade at the bottom of a quarry. But an apparently accidental fall turns out to have been murder – for the man was shot in the head.

  Fortunately John Christmas, last seen in The Studio Crime (1929), is on hand with his redoubtable forensic associate, Sydenham Rampson. Between them they shed light on an intricate pattern of crimes... and uncover a most formidable foe.

  Dead Man’s Quarry is the second of Ianthe Jerrold’s classic and influential whodunits, originally published in 1930.

  Introduction

  On the strength of The Studio Crime (1929), the first of Ianthe Jerrold’s pair of exceptional Golden Age detective novels, the author, an accomplished member of the literary Jerrold family (see the introduction to The Studio Crime), was invited to join the newly-launched Detection Club, a social organization of some of Britain’s best crime writers, all of whom had pledged in their genre writing to respect both the King’s English and the principle of “fair play” with one’s readers. Jerrold accepted the invitation, thereby becoming one of the Club’s original members, along with such mystery fiction luminaries as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, A.E.W. Mason, the Baroness Orczy, E.C. Bentley, H.C. Bailey, Helen Simpson, Clemence Dane, Anthony Berkeley, Henry Wade, John Rhode, R. Austin Freeman and Freeman Wills Crofts. Near the end of her first year as a member of the Club, Jerrold published a second detective novel, Dead Man’s Quarry (1930), a work reflective of her recent acceptance into the ranks of the crème de la crème of British detective novelists.

  Where The Studio Crime is a city tale, taking place in London’s St. John’s Wood and its environs, Dead Man’s Quarry is a country novel, set in the beautiful Wye Valley, in the borderland known as the Welsh Marches. In this wild region Ianthe had traversed Hergest Ridge with her sister Phyllis, to whom she dedicated Dead Man’s Quarry (“To PHYLLIS who, in her enthusiasm for wild strawberries, kept us waiting at the foot of Hergest Ridge long enough to give rise to the most lurid surmises and to the plot of this story.”) The novel presents to readers some of the most characteristic features of classic English mystery: quaint villages, rustic cottages and inns, an ancestral manor, and a frontispiece map. The latter feature is no mere furbelow, for the opening chapters of the novel detail the rural ambles of a cycling party composed of the middle-aged Dr. Browning and his two children, precocious adolescent Lion and his art student sister, Nora; Isabel Donne, an enigmatic classmate of Nora’s; Felix Price, a moody young photographer; and Charles Price, Felix’s boorish cousin, recently returned from Canada, where he had been packed off years ago, to claim the local baronetcy after the death of the old squire, Sir Evan Price.

  Abruptly a cloud looms over the cycling tour when one of its members mysteriously vanishes; and this cloud darkens menacingly after a brutally slain body is found in a local disused quarry. On hand to investigate these goings-on is amateur detective John Christmas, Jerrold’s sleuth from The Studio Crime, providentially vacationing in the area with his bracingly unimaginative scientific researcher cousin, Sydenham Rampson (“I need a wet blanket,” Christmas explains, “and the scientific mind is the wet blanket par excellence.”) The circle of suspicion is large, encompassing members of the cycling party itself, various village locals and country visitors and certain individuals within the household of Rhyllan Hall, the ancestral home of the Price baronets, including Felix Price’s haughty father, Morris, the longtime manager of the Price estate; Felix’s calm and capable sister, Blodwen; and the Rhyllan Hall librarian, Mr. Clino, a distant relative of the Price family and closet mystery fiction addict.

  Fans of Golden Age mystery will note amusing passages in Dead Man’s Quarry where the characters talk what to Ianthe Jerrold at this time would have been Detection Club “shop”—i.e., detective fiction itself. “All great detectives have simple, rural tastes,” Christmas pronounces at one point to Nora Browning, who for a time acts as the sleuth’s official Watson (Miss Watson, he dubs her). “Sherlock Holmes kept bees. Sergeant Cuff grew roses. I, when I retire, shall cultivate the simple aster.” On another occasion young Lion Browning, a confirmed materialist, opines that R. Austin Freeman is far superior to Arthur Conan Doyle as a writer of crime fiction (“More scientific,” he pronounces.) Elderly Mr. Clino ashamedly admits that detective stories have “become quite a vice with me,” after he has been caught with copies of The Purple Ray Murders and Murder in the Purple Attic (one surmises these novels are part of some “purple” series.) “In fact, as time goes on I read more and more of them and less and less of anything else. It’s rather regrettable, really, for they’re mostly bad….I try to cure myself of the habit, sometimes, by reading Scott and Thackeray, who used to be my favorites. But I find that my taste is so vitiated that I can no longer read good authors with enjoyment.” He reflects that “there is always Wilkie Collins. But one can’t go on reading ‘The Woman in White’ forever.”

  In her mystery criticism Dorothy L. Sayers ballyhooed Wilkie Collins’s Victorian-era sensation novels, contrasting what she deemed the genuine literary art in those works with the mere craft of 1920s/30s detective fiction, which in her view tended to engage only the problem-solving part of the brain, leaving the human emotions untouched. Such criticism cannot be directed justly at a detective novel like Dead Man’s Quarry, which boasts not only a clever puzzle, but also has, like Jerrold’s “mainstream” novels from this time, an interesting setting, engaging characters, charming writing and a poignant depiction of complicated human relationships. In Dead Man’s Quarry Jerrold anticipated the so-called “manners mystery” most strongly associated today with the Thirties detective novels of Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, in which authors strove to more compellingly portray characters and their social interactions. In my view Jerrold’s novel is a worthy companion to such Crime Queen classics as Sayers’s Strong Poison (1930), Allingham’s Death of a Ghost (1934) and Marsh’s Artists in Crime (1938). It is, as one contemporary review pronounced, “well-written and well-contrived.”

  After the publication of Dead Man’s Quarry, Ianthe Jerrold, who had married George Menges (a brother of the celebrated concert violinist Isolde Menges) in 1927, and with him acquired a rambling Tudor farmhouse in the Wye Valley, produced no other detective novels during the rest of the decade. The five additional novels that Jerrold published in the 1930s are all mainstream works (in 1940, however, there appeared another detective novel, Let Him Lie, followed eight years later by a spy thriller, There May Be Danger; both were credited to an Ianthe Jerrold pseudonym, “Geraldine Bridgman”). Perhaps Mr. Clino’s words in Dead Man’s Quarry had signaled an intended abandonment of the genre by one of its most distinguished, if least prolific, Golden Age adepts. Between 1945 and 1966 Jerrold would publish eight more mainstream novels under her own name, yet she was not entirely finished with crime fiction. Aside from penning the two Geraldine Bridgman books, Jerrold contributed a gripping inverted mystery tale, “Blue Lias,” to Detection Medley, a massive Detection Club anthology edited by John Rhode, and she published four short stories in 1951/52 in The London Mystery Magazine: “Brother in the Barrow,” “Cranford Revisited,” “The Deadlier Twin” and “Off the Tiles” (“Cranford Revisited” sounds especially intriguing.) Additional Ianthe Jerrold mystery fiction may yet await rediscovery and republication. For now, classic
mystery fans should derive considerable satisfaction from the reappearance in print of Dead Man’s Quarry and The Studio Crime, a pair of superlative English mysteries that embody the best qualities of Golden Age detective fiction.

  Curtis Evans

  To PHYLLIS

  who, in her enthusiasm for wild strawberries, kept us waiting at the foot of Hergest Ridge long enough to give rise to the most lurid surmises and to the plot of this story.

  CHAPTER ONE

  TEA FOR SIX

  Nora Browning, pausing uncertainly a moment in the dim, low-ceilinged passage of the inn, wondering behind which of its closed doors she would find the waitress, experienced a slight shock on seeing her own grave face looking at her from an unexpected mirror placed in a dark corner beside the back door. The mirror was dark and old and greenish, and the appearance in it of her own face against the background of the chocolate-coloured painted wainscoting peculiar to country inns pleased and surprised her, as if somebody had paid her a compliment on her looks. Forgetful of her mission, which was to order boiled eggs for tea, she went closer to the glass and looked critically at her own reflection.

  Nora was not in the habit of noticing casual reflections of herself. She had grown up on good terms with her own face, which was indeed neither beautiful enough nor plain enough to trouble her, and until a few months ago she had paid it only sufficient attention to see that it was clean and not too unfashionably shiny. Lately, she had taken more interest in mirrors, and more time than had been her wont in pinning up her thick plaits of light brown hair, a process that often ended in a mental comparison between her own dissatisfied reflection looking back at her and another face, that of Isabel Donne. Isabel, with her fine pale skin and golden freckles, her elfish pointed chin and humorous narrow lips that made a teasing contrast with heavy-lidded dreaming hazel eyes, her fine reddish-golden hair cut straight and turning in softy like a child’s around her small white neck, was a young woman to turn many a young man’s head and to make many another young woman look with dissatisfaction at her own reflection. A committee of art professors nurtured on the Greek might have awarded the apple to Nora. But Felix Price was a modernist.

  However, Nora, having the calm philosophical temperament that usually accompanies classic features, did not intend to allow her holiday to be spoilt either by her own love affairs or those of her companions. The county of Radnorshire was glorious after six months in London, the weather was only capricious enough to give variety to the landscape, and a bicycling tour with congenial companions was an excellent way of enjoying both. Moreover, Nora had recently sold two polychromatic and peremptory posters to the Underground Railway, and had received a commission to design two more. To a young artist, there is nothing like professional success for putting love in its proper place.

  Having communed for a few seconds with her own pleasing features, Nora took leave of them with a childish and hideous grimace; but quickly composed them to their usual serenity as she saw from the reflection in the mirror that some patron of the Tram Inn was standing in its sunny front doorway, looking down the dim tunnel-like passage towards her. Turning quickly, in some embarrassment, she was in time to see the stranger, as if equally embarrassed, move away from the door and disappear. At the same moment the waitress came out from one of the doors giving on the passage.

  “Could we have some boiled eggs with our tea, please?”

  The girl looked at her thoughtfully and replied in the soft sing-song voice peculiar to the county:

  “I expect you could.”

  She paused a moment, as if considering the possibilities of her chicken-yard.

  “How many eggs would you be wanting?”

  “Well—twelve?” suggested Nora diffidently.

  The girl looked faintly surprised, and having performed a simple division sum in her head, replied pensively:

  “That’ll be two each, I expect.”

  “One each would do,” said Nora, not wishing to appear greedy, “if eggs are scarce.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty eggs,” replied mine host’s daughter reassuringly. “I expect you could have twelve. And you’d like them soft-boiled, I expect?”

  “Please. And plenty of bread and butter.”

  She sauntered back along the passage, sniffing the peculiar cool, pleasant odour of cider, stone floors and saw-dust that permeates small country inns, and entered the low-pitched square parlour with its windows full of geraniums and pot-ferns, and its hideous chairs of yellow wood and black horsehair ranged in prim rows against its panelled walls. Isabel, who was lying on the slippery hair sofa reading a volume of The Girl’s Friend for 1885, looked up as she entered.

  “Do listen to this, Nora. They had a short way with girlish aspirations in the days of Victoria the Good.

  ‘Answers to Correspondents. Anxious: Certainly not; we make it a rule never to give young girls recipes for making themselves slimmer; be thankful, my dear Anxious, that you are not too thin. Heliotrope: Surely you are perfectly aware, without advice from us, of the impropriety of corresponding with a young man to whom you are not engaged.’ Poor darlings!”

  “At least,” said Dr. Browning mildly, looking up from a book on the flora of South Wales, “your Victorian adviser wastes no words. She comes straight to the point in an admirable manner, and writes English. Very different from the illiterate compositions I sometimes notice in the domestic papers nowadays. I may add that, as a doctor, I heartily endorse her advice to Anxious.” Isabel smiled over her dog’s-eared volume at Nora’s father.

  “What about the advice to poor romantic Heliotrope?” Dr. Browning looked around him.

  “Middle-age is in a minority in this gathering,” he remarked. “As a middle-aged man and a coward, I beg to be excused.”

  Charles Price, sitting with an air of discipleship on a stool by Isabel’s sofa, laughed, rather loudly and stridently. His laugh was in keeping with the rest of him. Just a little larger than life in every way, this new-found cousin of Felix’s. Colonials in England often had an air, thought Nora, of being too large for their surroundings. She regarded the new baronet as no ornament to his title and estate, and privately thought it a pity he had ever returned from the prairie he was so fond of talking about.

  Felix, standing by the window and putting a film-roll in his camera, laughed too, a little constrainedly. He was probably regretting now, thought Nora, the friendly impulse that had made him invite his cousin to join the party at Worcester. The carefree holiday spirit of the journey had been a little damped since the advent of Sir Charles. Perhaps it was as well that this was the last day of the holiday. It was natural that Isabel, who never lost her head or heart, should prefer a mutual flirtation with Charles to the devotion of Felix, who was a romantic and single-minded youth, incapable of flirting; but it was unfortunate for poor Felix and the rest of the party, although, to do Felix justice, his breeding rose superior to his misfortune.

  Lion, Nora’s young brother, looked up from the large and elaborate map of his own designing that was the dearest treasure of his heart. With youth’s god-like indifference to emotional storms and stresses, its wise concentration on the essential things of life, he asked severely:

  “Got the eggs?”

  “I expect so,” said Nora absently. “Yes, I’ve ordered them.”

  “Did you tell them to boil mine exactly three minutes and a quarter?”

  “No, my son, I didn’t waste my breath. I said soft-boiled and hoped for the best.”

  “There’s no harm,” murmured Lion reproachfully, “in telling people how to boil eggs properly, even if they don’t generally listen. If these eggs really turn out soft-boiled I shall mark this inn on my map in green ink, with a label, ‘Here We Had Soft-boiled Eggs for Tea.’ Nearly all the other inns are marked in black, meaning Hard. Have you got my green ink, Felix? I may as well have it ready.”

  “Optimist,” said Felix with a smile, feeling in his haversack and producing three or four little bottles of coloured ink
. “How’s the map getting on? Have you got as far as where we stopped last night?”

  “Yes,” said Lion gravely. “These little purple spots are the fleas.”

  “What’s that long, eel-like thing a little lower down?”

  “That’s Charles meeting us at Worcester,” replied Lion, looking complacently at his handiwork. “It’s rather like him, I think.”

  “Living image of him,” said Isabel who had left her sofa to look over the boy’s shoulder at this painstaking record of their holiday. “What are all these little figures?”

  “Dates and times of arrival at the various villages and points of interest,” explained Lion with studied nonchalance.

  “I see, Mr. Bradshaw. When you’ve finished it we’ll all subscribe to have it framed.”

  Charles, hoisting his long limbs up from the stool by the now deserted sofa, inquired:

  “Did you remember to put in the banana you dropped and ran over this morning?”

  The others laughed, but Lion answered with dignity:“This is a small-scale map. There isn’t room in it for unimportant matters like bananas.”

  “Hard luck on the banana,” commented Isabel, “to be snubbed like that after being squashed as flat as a pancake.”

  “It didn’t suffer,” said Lion gently, removing his map from the table as the waitress came in with the tea. “It was a painless, instantaneous death.”

  With some ceremony the waitress placed an enormous cosy of Berlin woolwork over the teapot and withdrew. Nora, who was the kind of girl upon whom such duties naturally devolved, began to pour out the tea. The others drew up their chairs. Sir Charles hastened to seize Isabel’s chair out of her hand and placed it at the table with a flourish, seating himself next to her rather hastily, as if he feared that Felix would forestall him. Idiot! thought Nora irritably, watching from under her eyelashes. She liked Charles less every time she looked at him. His elaborately gallant manner to herself and Isabel, the open court he paid to her pretty friend, offended Nora’s fastidious taste. She did not consider such displays appropriate to the occasion of a country holiday, and missed the atmosphere of casual and kindly good-fellowship which had been suddenly dissipated at Worcester. Charles’s good-fellowship was something to make one put cotton-wool in one’s ears, so extremely noticeable it was.