Martin Edwards – Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (страница 1)

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‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’

Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929

Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.

Copyright

COLLINS CRIME CLUB

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Constable & Co. 1943

Introduction © Martin Edwards 2018

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008265311

Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008265328

Version: 2017-12-14

Dedication

With love

to Roses

Contents

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

DONALD HENDERSON’S Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper earned considerable acclaim when it was first published in 1943, but for many years the book has been out of print. This neglect seems unaccountable, given that its admirers included Raymond Chandler. As readers of this welcome reissue will find, Henderson crafted a distinctive work of fiction; what is more, the story behind it is equally intriguing, while the tale of the author’s life is not only thought-provoking but also poignant.

Chandler wrote ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, his critical essay about the crime genre, which famously proclaims ‘down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid’, for the Atlantic Monthly. It appeared in December 1944, not long after Henderson’s book was published. Having flayed several leading writers of classic whodunits, Chandler talked at length about Dashiell Hammett’s gift for writing realistic crime fiction, before saying: ‘Without him there might not have been … an ironic study as able as Raymond Postgate’s Verdict of Twelve … or a tragi-comic idealization of the murderer as in Donald Henderson’s Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper …’

To have one’s book name-checked by such a major author, and in an essay which has been much-quoted over the years, would be a fillip to any struggling novelist’s career. Tragically, Henderson did not gain any long-term benefit from it; less than three years later he was dead, at the age of 41. In the course of his short and often troubled life, however, he published fourteen novels, as well as non-fiction books, stage plays and radio plays.

Until recently, little was known about Henderson, and even less had been written about him and his work. Thanks to the diligent and invaluable research of Paul T. Harding, much information has come to light, and Henderson’s fragmentary archive has been presented to the University of Reading. Paul Harding has also edited an unpublished memoir written by Henderson; its title The Brink comes from the final sentence, which sums up the author’s bleak worldview: ‘There is always a chasm gaping at one’s feet, and although merry enough about it, most people finally get a little tired of hovering on the brink.’

Donald Landels Henderson was born in 1905; he had a twin sister, but their mother died four days after giving birth. Henderson’s twin, Janet, also died in childbirth, when she was 28. Their father re-married when the twins were four, and Henderson was to say, ‘I cannot pretend to have enjoyed anything very much about my childhood or adolescence.’ He was educated at public school, and under pressure from his businessman father he took up a career in farming. But agricultural life didn’t suit Henderson, and a stint as a publisher’s salesman brought only misery. He enjoyed better fortune working for a stockbroker, but he abandoned the City in his mid-twenties during a turbulent period when he suffered a nervous breakdown.

Since his teens, he had enjoyed acting, and had also dreamed of becoming a writer. He joined a touring repertory company, and married an actress called Janet Morrison, a single parent who later gave up her son for adoption. The marriage soon failed, and the couple separated, although they did not divorce for some years.

Henderson began to combine writing with his acting career, but this was a period of worldwide economic depression—‘the Slump’—and money was always short. Chapter titles in The Brink such as ‘Poverty Street’, ‘Another Failure’, ‘Disaster’, and ‘The Awfulness of Everything’ give unequivocal clues to his melancholy during much of the Thirties. He had parts in plays such as Rope by Patrick Hamilton, a writer with whose dark thrillers his own work is sometimes bracketed.

After a failed theatrical venture in London, ‘I was not in a fussy mood … I got a room in Surbiton … and in a fearful burst of enthusiasm I sat down and wrote three novels running, scarcely leaving myself time to think them out, so anxious was I to get farther and farther away from the brink of the precipice. The books in question were Teddington Tragedy, His Lordship the Judge and Murderer at Large, and they were published between October 1935 and October 1936. In his memoir, Henderson supplies little detail about the influences on his crime fiction, although he acknowledges that the nineteenth-century case of the serial killer William Palmer was an inspiration for Murderer at Large.

Henderson’s account in his memoir of his time in farming gives, perhaps unintentionally, a hint about the dark side of his mind: ‘There were a lot of rats on the farm and I enjoyed many a rat hunt with the dogs. Sometimes you didn’t need dogs … We were constantly rat trapping, at which I became really expert, and I know of few greater thrills, including getting a book accepted, than hurrying along next morning to see if you have caught anything and finding that two angry, terrified little eyes are staring at you murderously. Or even more than two.’ His account of the homicidal career of Erik Farmer (was the surname a nod to his previous profession?), the loathsome protagonist of Murderer at Large, is equally chilling.

Procession to Prison, a crime novel about a ‘trunk murderer’, appeared in 1937; it was well received, but thereafter Henderson ‘could sell nothing I wrote for fully two years … The irony of the literary life, as I have experienced it, seems to lie in the fact that, when you are all but down and out, you can write well, but your luck is never any good from the selling point of view. Poverty breeds more poverty.’ Henderson tramped the streets of London and Edinburgh looking for work ‘with my press cutting book under my arm’, but without success. He had lost his nerve as an actor, and seems—although the chronology of his memoir is vague—to have spent two summers camping out in the open. After a spell in hospital, he tried to put together a book of famous trials, but failed to interest a publisher in the project.

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