The Case of the Silken Petticoat: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

INTRODUCTION

RING OUT THE OLD, RING IN THE NEW

Christopher Bush and Mystery Fiction in the Fifties

Mr. Bush has an urbane and intelligent way of dealing with mystery which makes his work much more attractive than the stampeding sensationalism of some of his rivals.

—Rupert Crofts-Cooke (acclaimed author of the Leo Bruce detective novels)

New fashions in mystery fiction were decidedly afoot in the 1950s, as authors increasingly turned to sensationalistic tales of international espionage, hard-boiled sex and violence, and psychological suspense. Yet there indubitably remained, seemingly imperishable and eternal, what Anthony Boucher, dean of American mystery reviewers, dubbed the conventional type of British detective story. This more modestly decorous but still intriguing and enticing mystery fare was most famously and lucratively embodied by Crime Queen Agatha Christie, who rang in the new decade and her Golden Jubilee as a published author with the classic detective novel that was promoted as her fiftieth mystery: A Murder Is Announced (although this was in fact a misleading claim, as this tally also included her short story collections). Also representing the traditional British detective story during the 1950s were such crime fiction stalwarts (all of them Christie contemporaries and, like the Queen of Crime, longtime members of the Detection Club) as Edith Caroline Rivett (E.C.R Lorac and Carol Carnac), E.R. Punshon, Cecil John Charles Street (John Rhode and Miles Burton) and Christopher Bush. Punshon and Rivett passed away in the Fifties, pens still brandished in their hands, if you will, but Street and Bush, apparently indefatigable, kept at crime throughout the decade, typically publishing in both the United Kingdom and the United States two books a year (Street with both of his pseudonyms).

Not to be outdone even by Agatha Christie, Bush would celebrate his own Golden Jubilee with his fiftieth mystery, The Case of the Russian Cross, in 1957—and this was done, in contrast with Christie, without his publishers having to resort to any creative accounting. Cross is the fiftieth Christopher Bush Ludovic Travers detective novel reprinted by Dean Street Press in this, the Spring of 2020, the hundredth anniversary of the dawning of the Golden Age of detective fiction, following, in this latest installment, The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel (1952), The Case of the Burnt Bohemian (1953), The Case of The Silken Petticoat (1953), The Case of the Red Brunette (1954), The Case of the Three Lost Letters (1954), The Case of the Benevolent Bookie (1955), The Case of the Amateur Actor (1955), The Case of the Extra Man (1956) and The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956).

Not surprisingly, given its being the occasion of Christopher Bush’s Golden Jubilee, The Case of the Russian Cross met with a favorable reception from reviewers, who found the author’s wry dedication especially ingratiating: The author, having discovered that this is his fiftieth novel of detection, dedicates it in sheer astonishment to HIMSELF. Writing as Francis Iles, the name under which he reviewed crime fiction, Bush’s Detection Club colleague Anthony Berkeley, himself one of the great Golden Age innovators in the genre, commented, "I share Mr. Bush’s own surprise that The Case of the Russian Cross should be his fiftieth book; not so much at the fact itself as at the freshness both of plot and writing which is still as notable with fifty up as it was in in his opening overs. There must be many readers who still enjoy a straightforward, honest-to-goodness puzzle, and here it is. The late crime writer Anthony Lejeune, who would be admitted to the Detection Club in 1963, for his part cheered, Hats off to Christopher Bush….[L]ike his detective, [he] is unostentatious but always absolutely reliable. Alan Hunter, who recently had published his first George Gently mystery and at the time was being lauded as the British Simenon," offered similarly praiseful words, pronouncing of The Case of the Russian Cross that Bush’s sleuth Ludovic Travers continues to be a wholly satisfying creation, the characters are intriguing and the plot full of virility. . . . the only trace of long-service lies in the maturity of the treatment.

The high praise for Bush’s fiftieth detective novel only confirmed (if resoundingly) what had become clear from reviews of earlier novels from the decade: that in Britain Christopher Bush, who had turned sixty-five in 1950, had become a Grand Old Man of Mystery, an Elder Statesman of Murder. Bush’s The Case of the Three Lost Letters, for example, was praised by Anthony Berkeley as a model detective story on classical lines: an original central idea, with a complicated plot to clothe it, plenty of sound, straightforward detection by a mellowed Ludovic Travers and never a word that is not strictly relevant to the story; while reviewer Christopher Pym (English journalist and author Cyril Rotenberg) found the same novel a beautifully quiet, close-knit problem in deduction very fairly presented and impeccably solved. Berkeley also highly praised Bush’s The Case of the Burnt Bohemian, pronouncing it yet another sound piece of work . . . in that, alas!, almost extinct genre, the real detective story, with Ludovic Travers in his very best form.

In the United States Bush was especially praised in smaller newspapers across the country, where, one suspects, traditional detection most strongly still held sway. Bush is one of the soundest of the English craftsmen in this field, declared Ben B. Johnston, an editor at the Richmond Times Dispatch, in his review of The Case of the Burnt Bohemian, while Lucy Templeton, doyenne of the Knoxville Sentinel (the first female staffer at that Tennessee newspaper, Templeton, a freshly minted graduate of the University of Tennessee, had been hired as a proofreader back in 1904), enthusiastically avowed, in her review of The Case of the Flowery Corpse, that the novel was the best mystery novel I have read in the last six months. Bush has always told a good story with interesting backgrounds and rich characterization, she added admiringly. Another southern reviewer, one M. of the Montgomery Advertiser, deemed The Case of the Amateur Actor another Travers mystery to delight the most critical of a reader audience, concluding in inimitable American lingo, it’s a swell story. Even Anthony Boucher, who in the Fifties hardly could be termed an unalloyed admirer of conventional British detection, from his prestigious post at the New York Times Books Review afforded words of praise to a number of Christopher Bush mysteries from the decade, including the cases of the Benevolent Bookie (a provocative puzzle), the Amateur Actor (solid detective interest), the Flowery Corpse (many small ingenuities of detection) and, but naturally, the Russian Cross (a pretty puzzle). In his own self-effacing fashion, it seems that Ludovic Travers had entered the pantheon of Great Detectives, as another American commentator suggested in a review of Bush’s The Case of The Silken Petticoat:

Although Ludovic Travers does not possess the esoteric learning of Van Dine’s Philo Vance, the rough and ready punch of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, the Parisian [sic!] touch of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, the appetite and orchids of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, the suave coolness of The Falcon or the eerie laugh and invisibility of The Shadow, he does have good qualities—especially the ability to note and interpret clues and a dogged persistence in remembering and following up an episode he could not understand. These paid off in his solution of The Case of The Silken Petticoat.

In some ways Christopher Bush, his traditionalism notwithstanding, attempted with his Fifties Ludovic Travers mysteries to keep up with the tenor of rapidly changing times. As owner of the controlling interest in the Broad Street Detective Agency, Ludovic Travers increasingly comes to resemble an American private investigator rather than the gentleman amateur detective he had been in the 1930s; and the novels in which he appears reflect some of the jaded cynicism of post-World War Two American hard-boiled crime fiction. The Case of the Red Brunette, one of my favorite examples from this batch of Bushes, looks at civic corruption in provincial England in a case concerning a town counsellor who dies in an apparent badger game or honey trap gone fatally wrong (a web of mystery skillfully spun noted Pat McDermott of Iowa’s Quad City Times), while in The Case of the Three Lost Letters, Travers finds himself having to explain to his phlegmatic wife Bernice the pink lipstick strains on his collar (incurred strictly in the line of duty, of course). Travers also pays homage to the popular, genre altering Inspector Maigret novels of Georges Simenon in The Case of Red Brunette, when he decides that he will try to get a feel of the city [of Mainford]: make a Maigret-like tour and achieve some kind of background. . . .

Christopher Bush finally decided that Travers could manage entirely without his longtime partner in crime solving, the wily and calculatingly avuncular Chief Superintendent George Wharton, whom at times Travers, in the tradition of American hard-boiled crime fiction, appears positively to dislike. I generally admire and respect Wharton, but there are times when he annoys me almost beyond measure, Travers confides in The Case of the Amateur Actor. There are even moments, as when he assumes that cheap and leering superiority, when I can suddenly hate him. George Wharton appropriately makes his final, brief appearance in the Bush oeuvre in The Case of the Russian Cross, where Travers allows that despite their differences, the Old General is the man who’d become in most ways my oldest friend.

Ring out the old, ring in the new may have been the motto of many when it came to mid-century mystery fiction, but as another saying goes, what once was old eventually becomes sparklingly new again. The truth of the latter adage is proven by this shining new set of Christopher Bush reissues. Just like old crimes, vintage mystery fans may sigh contentedly, as once again they peruse the pages of a Bush, pursuing murderous malefactors in the ever pleasant company of Ludovic Travers, all the while armed with the happy knowledge that a butcher’s dozen of thirteen of Travers’ investigations yet remains to be reissued.

Curtis Evans

PART I

DEATH BY DROWNING

1

THE CRITIC AND THE BLONDE

Did you ever see anybody step up publicly to the late George Bernard Shaw and give a contemptuous tug to his beard? Or watch some indignant Picasso-addict crash down a Constable canvas on the head of Munnings? Or a disgruntled concert-goer make his way to the rostrum and take a swing at Beecham? I doubt if you did. But I saw something almost as good. I was there when a beautiful blonde kicked the shin of the one and only Clement Foorde, and that’s a story, believe me, which I could one day tell to the more sophisticated of my children—if I had any.

I wasn’t six feet away. A grandstand seat, as they say. I actually saw—

But maybe I’m getting too far ahead. Maybe, too, you haven’t any use for flashbacks: those moments when you’re just getting comfortably into the story and then there’s a fade-out and you’re suddenly back heaven-knows-where and among heaven-knows-whom. Not that that famous episode in the Café Rond—which, by the way, isn’t its real name—is in the nature of a cinematographic flashback. It was plumb in the middle of a murder, if I may put it like that. For murders—the planned and tricky kind—don’t just happen. There’s what I might call a period of growth: that interval which Shakespeare speaks of as

Between the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion. . . .

There is, in fact, that moment when a murder first comes to the murderer’s mind, or it may not even be that. It may be the beginnings of circumstances which will ultimately make murder seem the only way out. Between the first circumstance and the actual murder is an interval which may be weeks or months or even years. In the case to which I refer, it was a matter of months, and that affair in the Café Rond came in the middle of those months. And after that unconscionable deal of self-defence, permit me to tell you what actually did happen that early evening of March in the bar—commonly known as the Stoke-hole—on the ground floor of the Café Rond.

You will pardon, I hope, a brief repetition if you are already aware that some few years ago I was lucky enough to acquire an old-established detective agency in Broad Street. I’m entitled also to call it a high-class concern, but in any case it’s something for my own spare time when I don’t happen to be employed by the Yard as what they call an unofficial expert. Norris is my manager, but he had suddenly gone down with a bad chill, and for the whole of a week I had virtually lived in Broad Street directing things generally and lending a hand on an arson enquiry for one of our best clients—an important insurance company.

By the Monday evening everything was in hand and Norris arrived to relieve me. A client had been in the office, and he and I shared a taxi to Swan and Edgar’s Corner. I was feeling mentally tired, and, although it’s not four hundred yards to my flat at St. Martin’s Chambers, I decided that I badly needed a drink, so I made my way across to the Café Rond.

It was almost half-past six and the bar was pretty full. There was plenty of chatter and so much of a smoke haze that I had to give my hornrims a polish before I could see clearly to the far end. Behind the bar, and against a long background of multi-coloured bottles, a cocktail-wallah and a couple of barmen were busy as beavers. A fat man slid off a stool and put on his hat, and I was on that one vacant bar stool before its temperature had sunk by half a degree and ordering a treble whisky and splash. Then I had a good look to my right, and there was Clement Foorde.

I won’t say I was surprised, even if I knew that he was rarely at the Café Rond. There was a time when he was a frequent visitor of the Café Royal, which is almost next door, but for the last year or two, someone had told me, his visits even there had been very few. Nor was I gratified to be in the presence of so public a figure. After all, he and I are members of the same club, and so, for that matter, is Ashman, about whom you have yet to hear. Perhaps I was just mildly titillated, and in the vaguest of ways, at being so near. Had I leaned forward I could have stroked the voluminous cape or the silky head of swept-back white hair. I could almost have counted each hair in the moustache and the little imperial that barely reached the bottom of his chin, and I could see each detail of the setting of the handsome antique ring that flashed as he gently waved a white, gesticulating hand.

He was in one of the deep leather chairs with a low table between him and his listener, a donnish-looking man whom I did not know. And though I should have been capable of unashamedly listening, I could hear nothing of what was being said; the chatter of the room was too noisy for that. My drink had come, and as I took the first heartening pull at it my elbow jogged my neighbour on my left, and I turned to see Howard Breck, one of the star writers on the Sentinel. I grinned by way of apology and gave a little nod.

Don’t often see you here, Mr. Travers? he said.

I stray occasionally, I told him.

He leaned forward till his lips almost brushed my ear.

Honoured tonight, aren’t we?

I felt a bit self-conscious as I whispered back that apparently we were.

The old maestro looks in good fettle, he said. Know who the cove is with him?

Never saw him before, I said. But isn’t that Tom Latimer over there in the corner?

Why not? he told me, and shrugged his shoulders as he finished his drink.

I asked him to have another, and I was wondering why two newspaper men of the standing of himself and Latimer of the Record should happen to be in the Café Rond at the same time.

I suppose it isn’t in order to ask if you and Latimer happen to be here just because Foorde is here? I asked him as the waiter produced his Martini.

Good God, no! he told me blasphemously. And that was the moment when things began to happen.

I admit that I ran only a casual eye over the girl—or should I say woman?—as she came past us, for at that moment I couldn’t possibly have conceived that she was anything different as a customer from, say, myself. My mind, I believe, registered the fact that she was what is known as an uncommonly good-looker, that she was a blonde, and that the fur cape she wore was probably nutria.

Pardon me, but aren’t you Clement Foorde?

Her voice had a hardness of timbre and was curiously penetrating. The chatter was suddenly less noisy as I swivelled round on my stool.

Yes, my dear lady.

Foorde was hoisting himself to his feet. The voice was suave and almost unctuous.

It was you who wrote that letter to the Press about Bobby Ashman’s book?

Did I? he said slowly, and with a pose of trying to remember. The rather full lips had a faint, ironical smile.

You know what I’m talking about, she told him fiercely. You’re a filthy-minded old swine—that’s what you are!

And with that she kicked him hard on the shin. Foorde staggered back, tripped against the chair and fell. She stood above him for a moment, face flaring and breasts heaving, and then she turned and went. No one stopped her as, head high, she went quickly along that room. I felt a movement at my elbow as I turned. Breck had gulped his drink and was hard on her heels. He was not two yards behind her as she went through the swing-doors. And it was then, I think, that I realised that Latimer had gone too.

I turned round to look at Clement Foorde, but he was back on his feet and the man with him was handing him his hat. Foorde had said never a word. One might have expected some epigram: some a propos remark on the impetuosity of youth or a word of bland apology for that brief fraças, but Foorde was moving off unruffled, and his friend—an even taller man—was holding him gently by the arm as the room made way for the two of them. Ripples of chatter followed their wake and burst to a babel as the swing-doors closed. I remember staring for a moment at my empty glass, and then I slid from my stool and made my own way to the doors.

I think now that things had happened even more quickly than I have told them. I know that I stood for a minute when I was outside, and the first thing I was thinking of was the girl who had attacked Foorde. Her back had been to me, but I remembered the blonde hair as it curled back above the fur cape. I remembered the high cheekbones and the poise of her, and the level, bitter clearness of her voice, and how that voice had had just a hint of the vulgar. And then my mind went to Foorde himself, and it was of him I was thinking as I slowly walked towards home: of a man who had become something of a legend; of the veritable sacrilege of that scene in the Café Rond.

Clement Foorde, I said slowly to myself. There must have been few moments when he was unselfconscious: a poseur by what must have long become second nature and who probably struck an attitude in his bath. A brilliant brain, mind you: a many-faceted man, even if the brilliance shone best in a light where fine quality paste can pass for the real thing. About the theatre he could write with affection and insight, and his memory—or his volumes of cuttings—must have been prodigious. As the leading dramatic critic of his age he wielded an enormous power. A play damned by him stayed damned, and his praise was a passport to popularity. But, as I said, there was a hard brilliance about his writing and too deft a scattering of epigrams which, one maliciously felt, were taken as needed from a notebook carried on his person and in which he recorded his own ephemeridae and, more surreptitiously, the cynicisms and witticisms of his friends.

There were facets, as I said. In the Clarion he regularly reviewed selected books, and an excellent summary of that side of him was provided by a cartoon of Harold Wadsworth’s showing the great man in malicious enjoyment, with the caption—

CLEMENT FOORDE REVIEWING CLEMENT FOORDE

REVIEWING A WORK BY MR. X.

As an author himself—I refer particularly to Decadence and the Drama and Fin de Siècle—he wrote of what he would call his beloved theatre. That writing had the grand manner: the certainty of one who has much to say and has no difficulty in giving an impression of unique experience and authority. In his autobiographical First Curtain—it was to be followed by at least two sequels—he was, to me at least, the poseur who endeavours with his tongue in cheek to prove he is no such thing. In it, too, his passion for the epigram was as irritating as, say, the alliteration of Swinburne or Chesterton’s prepossession with paradox.

But a great figure nevertheless: flamboyant; the Cyrano of critics, flaunting his panache, and flaunting at his own selected times a personality he had polished and perfected. But not too much of a public figure: nothing common-hackneyed in the eyes of men. At racing, which was one of his passions, I’ve been told that the popular meetings never saw him, but Ascot he never missed, nor Goodwood. Those small dinners at his town flat were extremely rare, but the last word in the recherché. And he had also a kind of anchoritic