Агата Кристи – Ask a Policeman (страница 1)

ASK A POLICEMAN

BY

ANTHONY BERKELEY

MILWARD KENNEDY

GLADYS MITCHELL

JOHN RHODE

DOROTHY L. SAYERS

&

HELEN SIMPSON

COPYRIGHT

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This 80th anniversary edition published in 2012

First published in Great Britain by Arthur Barker Ltd 1933

Copyright © The Detection Club 1933, 2012

The Authors asserts the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007468621

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007468652

Version: 2018-08-06

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

Foreword: Ask a Detective Writer by Martin Edwards

Preface: Detective Writers in England by Agatha Christie

PART I

DEATH AT HURSLEY LODGE BY JOHN RHODE

PART II

I. MRS. BRADLEY’S DILEMMA BY HELEN SIMPSON

II. SIR JOHN TAKES HIS CUE BY GLADYS MITCHELL

III. LORD PETER’S PRIVY COUNSEL BY ANTHONY BERKELEY

IV. THE CONCLUSIONS OF MR. ROGER SHERINGHAM. BY DOROTHY L. SAYERS

PART III

“IF YOU WANT TO KNOW—” BY MILWARD KENNEDY

Final Note

Footnotes

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

ASK A DETECTIVE WRITER

By MARTIN EDWARDS

ASK A POLICEMAN, first published in 1933, was the fourth in a sequence of collaborative mysteries produced in quick succession by members of the Detection Club. The Club was set up three years before this book was written, as an elite and rather secretive social network of leading detective novelists. It continues to flourish to this day, although current members include prominent thriller and espionage writers as well as specialists in the whodunit.

Ask a Policeman followed two radio serials, Behind the Screen and The Scoop, and a full-length detective novel, The Floating Admiral. These collective ventures generated enough revenue for the Club to rent premises in Soho, where, as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, members convened “chiefly for the purpose of eating dinners together and of talking illimitable shop.”

In the early Thirties, detective fiction was hugely popular, and many writers treated the detective story as a game in which they pitted their wits against their readers’. It was supposed to be important to “play fair”. Father Ronald Knox, a founder member of the Club, went so far as to devise a jokey Decalogue of ten commandments for the genre (“not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, for instance)—which he and his colleagues were happy to break whenever it suited them.

Anthony Berkeley, who organized the dinner meetings that led to the foundation of the Club, and Dorothy L. Sayers, a towering presence in its ranks, headed a group of talented crime writers who became increasingly determined to explore criminal psychology and write novels of literary merit. Yet they too relished the intellectual exercise of creating elaborate puzzles.

Writing a round-robin mystery presents a variety of challenges for any team of authors, and Club members had to decide how to top the success of The Floating Admiral. Their answer was to come up with a fresh concept—they would write a story in which they exchanged detectives with each other. This gimmick afforded contributors the chance to poke fun at the genre, and at the quirks of their colleagues’ most famous sleuths. But transforming the idea into a readable story was bound to prove complex, with each contributor in turn needing plenty of space to develop the narrative in a distinctive way. This explains why, although 13 members provided ingredients for the mix in The Floating Admiral, just half a dozen created Ask a Policeman.

The original dust jacket blurb captured the gleeful spirit of the enterprise:

“Here is something delightfully new in ‘thrills’—a story which combines the interest of detection with the fun of parody. A problem is propounded; ingenious, and, for the solvers, malicious, and in itself a parody of a thousand and one detective stories. A great newspaper proprietor dies in his study, and suspicion falls upon an Archbishop, a Secretary, a Police Commissioner, and the Chief Whip of the political party in power. There is, too, a Mysterious Lady. What, then, can the Home Secretary do but call in the Amateur Experts? There are four of them; each takes a hand and each produces a different solution.”

The industrious and prolific John Rhode set the scene in a long introductory section. Rhode was the main pen-name of Cecil John Street (1884–1965), a former army officer who had won the Military Cross. His most famous detective was Dr. Lancelot Priestley, a rather severe intellectual who featured in a long line of novels but is absent here. Rhode was an efficient plot-builder, and created the perfect victim, a tyrannical media mogul whom every other character in the story seemed to have a possible motive to kill. In keeping with the fashion of the time, a plan of the scene of the crime was included.

The story was introduced by an exchange of letters between Rhode and Milward Kennedy. Kennedy (1894–1968) also concealed his identity under several pseudonyms—his real name was Milward Rodon Kennedy Burge. He worked in Military Intelligence during the First World War, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre prior to taking up a career in diplomacy. Like Anthony Berkeley, he wanted to push out the boundaries of the detective story, and several of his books experiment with the form. None of his characters, however, appeared in more than two books, and the absence of a series detective may help to explain why his fame did not last. To Kennedy fell the unenviable task of tying up the loose ends of the story, and one of the in-jokes of this book is that he gave the job of making sense of the case that had taxed Lord Peter Wimsey and others to a character who was, like himself, a civil servant. Another is his tongue-in-cheek admission to breaking the “Rules to which my fellow-members of the Detection Club always, and I on all occasions but this, make it a point of honour to adhere”.

Once Rhode had set the scene, the baton passed to Helen Simpson. Born in Sydney in 1897, she was both gifted and charismatic; Sayers, a close friend, said after Simpson’s untimely death from cancer in 1940, “I have never met anybody who equalled her in vivid personality and in the intense interest she brought into her contacts with people and things.” Simpson tried her hand at poetry and plays before collaborating with Clemence Dane on Enter Sir John, which introduced Sir John Samaurez, the actor-manager of the Sheridan Theatre. Sir John sets about clearing the name of a young actress who has been charged with murder, and makes such a success of the task that, by the time Ask a Policeman appeared, the two of them are husband and wife. Enter Sir John was turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock called Murder! Simpson co-wrote two more books with Dane, as well as producing several solo novels, including Under Capricorn, which later became another Hitchcock movie. Turning to politics, Simpson was adopted as Liberal Parliamentary Candidate for the Isle of Wight before the cruel intervention of the disease that killed her. The energy, wit and skill with which, in this book, she tackles her portrayal of Gladys Mitchell’s detective, Mrs. Bradley, seem typical of how she approached everything in her life.

Gladys Mitchell had been elected to membership of the Club shortly before this book was written. She too admired Simpson, describing her in an interview with B.A. Pike as “brilliant, witty, charming and highly intellectual”; she even allowed Simpson to bestow a second forename, Adela, upon her detective. Mitchell (1901-1983), combined writing with a career as a schoolteacher; she introduced Mrs. Bradley in a convention-defying mystery called Speedy Death, and continued to write about her for more than half a century. Her books often contain bizarre elements, but she attracted a devoted band of readers, including Philip Larkin, who called her “the Great Gladys”. Mrs. Bradley, a psychiatrist and consultant psychologist to the Home Office, has the looks of a “sinister pterodactyl”, but when The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries aired on BBC Television in 1998-9, she was played by Diana Rigg, a casting decision so eccentric as to be worthy of Mitchell herself.