Gerald and Chris Verner - a fascinating collaboration

Gerald Verner was a prolific writer of crime and thriller stories, sometimes under his own name, sometimes under pseudonyms. I've recently become interested in his work, and luckily enough I was put in touch with his son Chris and his agent Philip. Chris told me about a project that he undertook, concerning The Snark Was a Boojum! I was duly intrigued, and I asked if he'd consider talking about it in a guest post. He was kind enough to agree, and this is his story:

"My father began a trilogy featuring his flamboyant artist-detective Simon Gale with “Noose For A Lady” published by Wright & Brown in 1952, the novel of his BBC eight part Radio Serial Play of the same name. The book was made into a 73 min film in 1953 by Insignia Films Directed by Wolf Rilla which has recently been ‘discovered’ and released on DVD. A second book to feature Simon Gale “Sorcerer’s House” was published by Hutchinson in 1956. A third book “The Snark Was A Boojum!” was announced in the press the following year, begun but due to various personal problems never completed.

The murderer based his crimes on selected verses from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark”. The book was divided into three parts commencing with The Vanishing. Part two was The Hunting, concluding with part three The Snark! There were two versions of Part One of the book, a third person account and a revised version in the first person, describing events seen through the eyes of Jeff Trueman, a guest at Hunter’s Meadow. I read the revised version and immediately understood why my father had made the changes - the story works much more intimately. In 2015, persuaded by Gavin O’Keefe at Ramble House, I resolved to finish it. I began a process of completely revising the story from the beginning, major additions and rewrites for part two, and adding the final part, the solution: The Snark!

As I typed up Part One, I jotted down Gale’s character traits by looking up passages in Noose for a Lady and Sorcerer’s House. This also helped me to avoid inconsistency in the writing style, enabling me to adapt or borrow elements of the two books when my father’s pages ran out… Of course, eventually they did run out. It was like travelling along on a train and suddenly noticing there were no more rails ahead. I was suddenly on my own! In moving forward, I also had to go backwards and rewrote most of Part Two, cutting quite a lot out and putting different scenes in to make my plot work. The story wouldn’t let me go, and I couldn’t let it go, because I realised I would never be able to pick it up again once it had gone out of my head. Bit by bit I laid down new track, and inched along it, giving chapters to my wife Jenny to read, in order to get the point of view of someone not down in the cake mix. If it didn’t feel right I worked it again until it did. It was an intense process and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Suddenly, the book was finished, and in the surprisingly short time of 35 days.

I sent the completed manuscript to my agent Philip Harbottle with some trepidation on 16th April. The following day Harbottle sent an email to Gavin O’Keefe: “I have some exciting news for you!”  Then all hell broke loose! Four days later Ramble House issued a contract, a proof of the book, and a draft of the cover design by Gavin L. O’Keefe! By the 24th April the paperback was on sale at Amazon. That must be some kind of a record."

Forgotten Book - Documentary Evidence

Documentary Evidence seems to be one of the rarest of all Golden Age novels. Its author is Robertson Halkett - a pseudonym used twice by the prolific E.R. Punshon. But although Punshon's books aren't always hard to find, his Halkett novels are rare. Where Every Prospect Pleases, which I have written about before, is elusive enough, but not even the British Library has a copy of Documentary Evidence. Until recently, Tony Medawar was the only person I knew who had read it. Find a signed copy in a nice dustjacket, and you'll find yourself something really valuable. To say that it qualifies as a Forgotten Book is an under-statement!

But the revival of interest in Golden Age mysteries has changed the picture, and earlier this year, Ramble House published a nice new edition of the book, with an intro by Gavin O'Keefe. Gavin points out that this book appeared at much the same time as the first of the crime dossiers by Dennis Wheatley and Joe Links, and a couple of similarly structured books by Harry Stephen Keeler, once one of my father's favourites, and now extensively republished by Ramble House.

This story, as the title suggests, is told through a series of documents - letters, telegrams and so on - and I suspect that Punshon was paying homage to Dorothy L. Sayers, whose The Documents in the Case appeared six years earlier. Sayers' book is under-rated, in my opinion. It's no mean feat to write an intriguing and entertaining mystery in this way. What is especially unusual about Punshon's book is that it isn't a detective story but rather a thriller, as was the other Halkett novel.

So what did I make of the book, after years spent searching for it? Well, I'm delighted that Ramble House have satisfied my curiosity about it, but I can rather understand why Punshon abandoned the Halkett name afterwards, and concentrated on more conventional work. The story is about robbery and kidnapping, subjects which possibly don't lend themselves to the "document" format as well as a murder mystery, and for me, the best bits of the book are the jokes. There's an especially witty passage about the unlikely things that happen in real life. Not a masterpiece then, but an interesting structural experiment.

E.R. Punshon

Technology has its downsides, but one of its great benefits has been that technological advances in publishing have made it possible for a host of once obscure, and often unobtainable old books to become available again, at modest prices. Yes, the quality of those books is variable, but far better to read the occasional dud than not be able to check out the work of interesting writers. Recent months have seen a host of books, and indeed publishers, make their presence felt, and some of the authors concerned are certainly new names to me - an example is J.C. Lenehan, a minor Golden Age novelist whose work I have yet to sample.

E.R. Punshon is another to have benefited. I've talked about Punshon's books several times on this blog, as well as in The Golden Age of Murder, and I've mentioned his interest in social issues of his time, as well as the sometimes startling variability in quality of his work. He had a long writing career, though his hey-day was certainly in the Thirties, when Dorothy L. Sayers reviewed him very generously, and he was elected to membership of the Detection Club. I've even been lucky enough to find his Death of a Beauty Queen (one of his better books), with a splendid Detection Club-related inscription written in his rather spidery hand.

Fender Tucker's small press, Ramble House, has been publishing Punshon titles for a few years now, and Dictator's Way and Diabolic Candelabra are worth checking out. Their latest titles are both extremely interesting. Bobby Owen, Black Magic, Bloodshed and Burglary is a collection of short stories, which I look forward to reading. Punshon's recurrent weakness was verbosity (cunningly reflected in the book's title!), and the demands of the short story form no doubt provided a good discipline for him.

Documentary Evidence is an exceptionally rare "dossier" novel originally published under the name Robertson Halkett. And Six Were Present is the last of the Bobby Owen police stories, posthumously published in the Fifiies. All these books benefit from introductions by Gavin L. O'Keefe. I haven't mentioned Gavin before on this blog, but he is a talented chap - not only a researcher and writer but also an artist whose artwork adorns the covers of countless Ramble House books. There is a fun aspect to Ramble House's list (who else would publish the complete works of Harry Stephen Keeler?) that is extremely engaging.

I'm also a fan of Dean Street Press, masterminded by Rupert Heath, a well-known literary agent (several agents are moving into publishing, an interesting development that I'll talk about here one of these days.) DSP publish a wide range of books, including cricket books and detective stories by Tim Heald, a fine writer who unfortunately is not in the best of health just now. DSP have also done Golden Age enthusiasts proud, with an extensive series of reprints introduced by Curtis Evans, including plenty of Punshon titles, such as the excellent Information Received and Mystery of Mr Jessop.

I'll be discussing some of these Punshon books in more detail in due course, but in the meantime, I like to imagine how thrilled Punshon would have been in his later years, when he was still writing, but for a pretty small readership, to know that his books would enjoy a fresh life in the twenty-first century. For all technology's downsides, it gives us a great deal to delight in..  

Forgotten Book - Angel in the Case

Milward Kennedy is a Golden Age author whose books I've covered several times on this blog, because I'm intrigued by his work. I'm a great admirer of Anthony Berkeley, as was Kennedy, and Kennedy tried to emulate his friend's innovative approach to the writing of crime fiction. But if Berkeley was uneven - and he was - then Kennedy was very, very uneven. And although he wrote some excellent books, I'm afraid that he also wrote some that were extremely disappointing - I'm a huge fan of the Golden Age, of course, but there's no point in pretending that even the best writers of that era always made best use of their gifts..

Kennedy wrote a couple of novels in the Thirties under a different pen-name, Evelyn Elder (his second wife was called Evelyn and I'd speculate that there was an age difference between them, hence the pseudonym). The first, Murder in Black and White, has been republished in recent times by Ramble House. The second is Angel in the Case, and that's a very rare title indeed. I've been hunting it for ages, and now a kind person has made a copy available to me, so this is my choice for today's Forgotten Book.

Let me start with the good news. The book is furnished with wonderful maps of the scene of the crime - they are just about the most appealing of any that I've ever seen in a Golden Age novel, detailed and attractive. Now for the bad news. To my mind, the story is dire. The writing is perfectly good, but the story did not hold any appeal for me at all.

The book begins with a police investigation into the drowning of a wealthy man called Curtis. He is a publisher, and the guests (and suspects) at his country house include a poet and a couple of writers. Scope here, I thought, for Kennedy to provide us with some entertainment, but apart from a passing nod to the Detection Club oath, the material is flat and uninteresting from start to finish. The eponymous Angel is an attractive female house guest, but I found her no more engaging than the rest of the cast. The mystery was desperately dull even before an American gangster was introduced (invariably a Bad Sign in a British Golden Age whodunit) with no attempt at characterisation, and precious little humour. Kennedy could do much better than this, fortunately. It''s a real shame about Angel in the Case, but I can only say that I wish that Kennedy had devoted more time to elaborating the story in an appealing way rather than concentrating on the maps.

Forgotten Book - Dictator's Way

Thanks to the sterling efforts of Ramble House, a very likeable publisher indeed, a few of E.R. Punshon's long-forgotten books have become available again to modern readers. Dictator's Way, first published in 1938, is among them, and it is notable above all for the insight it gives into the issues preoccupying thinking men and women like Punshon at the time - the grim state of international affairs and the threat posed by totalitarian dictators.

This is an entry in the Bobby Owen series, and another reason why Dictator's Way is of note is that it introduces Olive, a resourceful young woman who was to become the love of Bobby's life. The path of true love does  not run smooth at first, but it seems to me that Punshon, like Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake, Ngaio Marsh and others was following the lead set by Dorothy L. Sayers in having a youngish male detective meet, during the course of his cases, the woman whom he would marry. In each case they are strong women, not content to sit on the sidelines of life, and this helps the reader to appreciate them.

Punshon had liberal/leftish political views, and takes the opportunity to show his contempt for Hitler, Mussolini and Oswald Mosley in the course of a story dealing scathingly with the so-called "Redeemer" of Etruria. This political perspective gives the book spice, and also gives the lie to the often repeated but false claim that Golden Age writers were just a bunch of cosy reactionaries. Why have so many otherwise sensible people made such a claim? I suspect it's because, for the most part, the really successful Golden Age writers were conservative in outlook, although I'd describe some of them at least as questioning conservatives.

Anyway, on to the book. It contains thrillerish elements and a loveable working class rogue whom I found rather irritating. The whodunit element of the story isn't especially memorable. You can see why Punshon fell into neglect - but you can also see why good judges found something to admire in his work. It's often a mixed bag, but his thoughtfulness makes him a Golden Age writer about whom I'd like to know much more. But my knowledge of his life doesn't extend far beyond what's to be found on the internet. I don't suggest he's a superstar, but I do think he deserves to be remembered.  Ramble House are doing a great job in bringing some of his books back to life.

Forgotten Book - The Great Orme Terror

Having spent many childhood holidays (and a good deal of time since) on the North Wales coast, I was delighted to learn of the existence of a book boasting the wonderful title The Great Orme Terror. For those unfamiliar with Llandudno and its environs, I should explain that the Great Orme is a rocky promontory close to that charming seaside resort. I had no idea that it had featured in a crime novel. But Garnett Radcliffe produced The Great Orme Terror in 1934, and thanks to that splendid publisher of Forgotten Books, Ramble House,I've now read it. Ramble House specialise in rescuing lost books, and as a result of their initiative, novels by the likes of Rupert Penny and Hake Talbot, both notable Golden Age writes, have become available again at modest cost. But Garnett Radcliffe, an Irish-born specialist in weird tales, was not your typical Golden Age writer.

So, where and how do I begin to describe this book? You could call it a guilty pleasure, I guess, though that's being rather kind. At around the same time that Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy L. Sayers were doing their utmost to raise standards of sophistication in crime writing, Garnett Radcliffe was moving relentlessly in the opposite direction. Lurid thrills were his forte - nobody could describe The Great Orme Terror as sophisticated.

"Fiction in any form,has always intended to be realistic," according to Raymond Chandler in his famous essay The Simple Art of Murder. Had he read The Great Orme Terror, he might not have expressed himself so boldly. And yet Radcliffe does make plenty of references to places I know well - Mochdre, Llanrwst, Abergele, Rhos and so on - which suggests he thought he might make his story more credible if he rooted it in recognisable locations.

But really - what a story! It begins with the arrival in Wales of Dr Constandos from the Middle East, who brings remarkable news for the lovely young tennis player Mona and her admirer, the monocled Lord Basil Curlew about golden treasure in a Spanish galleon sunk just off the Great Orme. Mona reckons she has a moral right to the gold (I really wasn't convinced about that) and she and Lord Basil determine to find it. Unfortunately, various villains are also after the loot - and they include characters such as a nasty chap with green fingers known as The Lizard, the mysterious and bestial Gravenant, and assorted examples of Johnny Foreigner. The local cop, Superintendent Fibkin, really isn't much use at all, when faced with such devilish adversaries..

The bad guys have at their command, among other things, an army of weird death-robots, and mean to stop at nothing -certainly not torture and murder - to get their wicked way. Much of the drama unfolds (and here I, like Radcliffe I suspect, lost the plot completely) in a house at the foot of the Great Orme which rejoices in the name of Sperm. As Lord Basil memorably declares, "This uncertainty about Mona is like a damn toothache. I'm going to find her if I have to shoot up Sperm like a fellah in Wild West show. I'm - er- deuced fond of that kid." That might just be the most extraordinary piece of dialogue I've ever read. Words fail me, but they certainly didn't fail Garnett Radcliffe....

Forgotten Book - Diabolic Candelabra

Diabolic Candelabra is surely one of the oddest titles of a Golden Age novel written by a leading author. This book was first published in 1941, and was the work of E.R. Punshon, a pillar of the Detection Club and one of Dorothy L. Sayers' favourite detective novelists. It certainly fair to call it a Forgotten Book, but I'm pleased to say that Ramble House (a truly commendable small press) have made affordable copies available again, while one or two glowing reviews of the book have appeared on the internet in recent times, with a particularly detailed and positive review from John Norris on his excellent blog Pretty Sinister Books.

This is another case for Punshon's policeman Bobby Owen, who is now an inspector, married to Olive, and working in the countryside rather than London, where he began his career in Information Received. As usual with Punshon, the storyline is discursive, and the mystery has a number of ingredients, several of them unusual. Punshon's characteristic wit is much in evidence, and I thought I detected a sly and subtle dig at Anthony Berkeley.

The story is set in the early days of the Second World War, and Punshon gives an interesting idea of the extent to which war did and did not affect rural England - despite all the anxiety, people at home still got on with their lives. The mystery of an appealing and unfamiliar flavouring for chocolate kick-starts the book - an odd beginning, perhaps, but somehow typical of Punshon's off-beat approach. The plot thickens rapidly, and various story-lines enmesh a strange hermit who lives in hovel in a wood, a strange young girl, an unpleasant doctor, one or two odd tradesman, and an aristocratic family whose heirlooks may or may not include works by El Greco and some valuable candle-sticks.

When murder is done, there are no fewer than twelve suspects, although I managed to spot the villain at a fairly early stage, partly because Punshon's over-elaborate story construction perhaps yields more clues than he intended. I always have mixed feelings about his books, because they invariably contain pleasing elements, and equally often seem (to me, but not to good judges including Sayers) rather self-indulgent. But he contrives a dramatic finale and one or two genuinely memorable passages. An interesting writer, certainly, who definitely does not deserve to be forgotten. If you haven't sampled him before, Diabolic Candelabra is not a bad place to start.     

Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments

I’ve just received my copy of the latest title published by Crippen & Landru, a wonderful American small press. This is Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments, by Philip Wylie, a writer of whom I must admit I’ve never heard. But Doug Greene, who created Crippen & Landru, is a sound judge, and I’m sure it is a book packed with interest.

My confidence is reinforced by a fascinating short introduction to the book by Bill Pronzini. I’ve never met Pronzini, but I’ve read some of his stories, and also his two wonderful and witty Gun in Cheek books, which celebrate some of the wackiest crime books of all time, by the likes of Harry Stephen Keeler.

Pronzini says Wylie included but was not limited to psychology, philosophy, biology, ethnology, technology, physics, atomic energy, modern education, women’s rights, environmental issues, engineering, UFOs, deep-sea fishing, orchid growing, Hollywod film-making, mainstream science fiction, and mystery and detective fiction.’ Wow!

Pronzini also outlines the remarkably wide range of books that Wylie, who died almost 40 years ago, published. The blurb of the book, which comprises six longish stories, describes Wylie’s detective fiction as ‘among the most ingenious and innovative of his generation’. Sounds fascinating. Doug does a great job in exhuming forgotten classics – I encourage mystery fans everywhere to support his efforts, and those of fellow American Fender Tucker, of Ramble House.

The Longevity of Detective Fiction

An interesting feature of Rupert Penny’s The Talkative Policeman, which I mentioned the other day, was his introductory note, in which he expounds on what he sees as the lack of longevity of the detective story: ‘The detective shall find his grave at last as surely as the lifeless flesh he theorised upon.’

He identifies Holmes as the sole exception to this: he and Watson ‘are, first and foremost, characters, and the rest is incidental. At a guess, it is not impossible that Lord Peter Wimsey may one day qualify to keep them company.’ No mention of Poirot or Miss Marple here, and by the time Penny wrote this, Wimsey had solved his last major case!

For Penny, plainly, the plot was the thing, and this was no doubt why, after the Second World War, he did not return to the genre: it had moved on, and elaborate puzzles of the kind he favoured were no longer in fashion. It is a shame that he abandoned the genre, though, since he (like the much more eminent Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley, who also gave up writing crime novels in the post-war era) had genuine talent as a writer, a talent which in his case never fully flowered.

I suppose Penny would have been amazed had he been told that, more than seventy years after his debut novel was published, it has reappeared in a fresh and appealing version, courtesy of Ramble House. Of course, it is true that minor writers like Penny are forgotten by most readers nowadays, but the appeal of ingenious mysteries has by no means faded. The detective as a character, and the detective story as a form, have proved much more flexible, and thus enjoyed much greater longevity, than some of their creators over the years have anticipated.

Forgotten Books - The Talkative Policeman

Rupert Penny was one of the most interesting writers of the late Golden Age, and his 1937 debut novel, The Talkative Policeman, is my choice for today’s entry in Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books. It is a book that was for many years almost impossible to find, but is now available at a modest price in a pleasing paperback edition, thanks to that splendid small press Ramble House, who have reprinted all the elusive Penny titles.

The book features a Challenge to the Reader, in the Ellery Queen style, and Penny claims (Ias far as I know, rightly) that he was the first British writer to adopt this explicit method of testing the reader’s ability to guess the solution to a highly convoluted puzzle. The book introduces Chief Inspector Beale, of Scotland Yard, a very likeable detective, who is accompanied almost at all times by his chum Tony Purdon, who acts as Watson to Beale’s Holmes. Nobody ever seems to object to Purdon’s presence at witness interviews, and this illustrates the artificiality of the story, in which plot complication is really all that matters (even though there are hints that Penny could have created more rounded characters had he chosen to do so – he did not lack literary talent.)

Beale is rapidly called in by the local force when the Rector of the small village of Wyre is found murdered. He has been battered to death by a blunt instrument. Yet he seems to have led a blameless life – so what can possibly be the motive for the crime?

Penny provides not one but two crime scene maps, and a miscellany of charts as a vast range of plot issues (including that old Golden Age stand-by, train times) are canvassed. The discussions are often very intelligent, and Penny (real name, Basil Thornett) was clearly a very smart guy – I gather he worked at Bletchley, the decoding centre, during the Second World War.

I enjoyed the period feel of this book, but it became over-long and one of the key characters almost disappeared from sight, a structural weakness. I confess I failed the Challenge to the Reader (though I did prefer my own solution to Penny’s, that was no doubt due to prejudice on my part!) The criticism often made of this kind of book is, of course, that the author pays too much attention to complicating the puzzle, and not enough to characterisation and setting. But a ‘fair play’ puzzle does have much to commend it, in my opinion. Where this book suffers in comparison to the best of Christie, for instance, is that there is too much technical stuff, and an inadequately portrayed culprit and motive. But the journey towards the denouement is an agreeable time-passer and the book has genuine historic interest.

Forgotten Book - The Lucky Policeman

Although I didn’t contribute to Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books when I was sailing in the Med last Friday, I was busy at the time sitting in the sun and devouring a minor classic of the past which deserves to be highlighted this week.

Rupert Penny is a British writer who flourished briefly just before, and at the start of, the Second World War. He wrote convoluted puzzle stories in the best traditions of classic Golden Age detective fiction – and then he disappeared from sight (at least as a crime writer – a lover of flowers as well as ciphers and puzzles, he spent time working in Bletchley and he later became a doyen of the British Iris Society.)

Penny’s books were published in the UK by Collins Crime Club, but have become very scarce and expensive. Happily, that excellent publisher Ramble House has brought out several of his books, and supplied my copy of The Lucky Policeman. Suffice to say that it is the most enjoyable Penny novel I have read so far.

The set-up is excellent. An American shrink, Hilary Peake, has come to England and set up a private asylum (oddly, to my mind, it only has two patients, one of whom plays no effective part in the mystery, rather dashing one of my own theories about the puzzle.) When Simon Selby escapes from his quarters and disappears, we are presented with a variant on the ‘locked room’ concept, but matters take a more serious turn when a series of murders take place in the New Forest nearby. The local police are duly baffled, and send for Penny’s regular detective, the likeable Inspector Beale. Beale, as usual (although inexplicably) is accompanied by his pal and personal Watson, Tony Purdon, though Tony doesn’t play much of a part in the story.

There is a direct challenge to the reader to guess what has happened – shades of Ellery Queen and C.Daly King. I confess that I fell for Penny’s red herrings and got the solution wrong .The explanation for the mystery is cunning, if inevitably far-fetched and all in all this was wonderful holiday reading. Ramble House deserve heartfelt congratulations for making this lost classic available to modern puzzle fans at a very reasonable price.

A Shot Rang Out

Jon L. Breen is one of the best mystery critics around, and Ramble House have done a great service to crime fans by publishing a collection of the American writer’s selected mystery criticism, A Shot Rang Out. This is, I think, a book to dip into rather than to read straight from cover to cover – though you could enjoy doing just that – and it offers the delights of the bran tub: turn to any page and you will find something of interest, and perhaps something unexpected.

The contents are very varied. There are in-depth author studies of writers as diverse as Henning Mankell, P.D. James and Chester Himes, and ‘short takes’ on another hundred writers, including perceptive choices such as that splendid British writer Mat Coward. There are essays on distinct topics, including a witty and wise piece on ‘advice to writers’, a quick but neat attack on plagiarism, and a very good outline of ‘round-robin’ or ‘group’ mysteries, notably The Floating Admiral.

Why is Breen such a good critic? It’s because he is an enthusiast for the genre, but not by any means afraid to point out shortcomings. In this he reminds me of Julian Symons, who could be acerbic, but at heart was and always remained a true fan of crime and detective fiction. Commenting on one of my short stories, ‘The House of the Red Candle’, Breen is complimentary about the characterisation and atmosphere, but less so about the plot (‘easily seen through by the alert reader’) and I have to admit that his criticism is fair. (When, in a review of Waterloo Sunset not contained in this book, he was very positive, I basked in the praise, knowing that he would not be generous about the writing if he didn’t mean it.)

As I said, a book to dip into. I haven’t read it all yet, but so far I haven’t read a single segment that wasn’t informative. A Shot Rang Out is one of the best collections of mystery criticism ever published.

Now – when will some enterprising soul gather together Dorothy L. Sayers’ mystery criticism?

P.S. - Today I'm travelling to Bristol for Crimefest. Posts will continue between now and the end of the convention, which I will then reflect on next week.