The Trail of the Three Lean Men

INTRODUCTION

Charles Christmas Bush was born on the 25th of December 1888 at Home Cottage in Hockham, a heavily wooded village in Norfolk in the east of England. Christmas Bush, as he was known as a child, was of Quaker descent and his family had lived in the area for over four hundred years. He was educated in the village school and, in 1899, won a three year scholarship to Thetford Grammar, where he gained distinctions in Religious Knowledge, English and Geography while winning prizes for English and German. In 1902 he won a further two year scholarship and in 1903 his Form Prize. Outside school, Bush was a competent sportsman, playing in competitive draughts competitions and opening for the village cricket team. He also sang with his friend Ernest Hensley at the Primitive Methodist Chapel alongside his sister Hilda and her friend Ella Pinner, whom Bush would eventually marry. In short, Bush appeared to be a model child so it is perhaps surprising to learn that on the day after his eighteenth birthday he celebrated by going poaching with his brother and Ernest Hensley: all three were caught and, found guilty, were ordered to pay a fine or undertake hard labour. 

In 1904, despite his Quaker upbringing – and having lied about his age and the poaching conviction – Bush secured a temporary position as assistant master at a Catholic school in North Worcestershire, about which he wrote in an article, ‘Life in the Black Country’, published in the Norwich Mercury in March 1905. He returned to Norfolk to become an assistant master at Swaffham Boys’ School. He also resumed singing at chapel and also played cricket, opening for ‘Swaffham Singles’ and, lower down the order, for ‘Great Hockham Reading Room’ a team that included his brothers in conviction, the two Ernests. Later that year, Bush matriculated as an undergraduate at King’s College, London, where he studied modern languages, and on graduating, he returned to teaching, this time at a school in Wood Green, North London. 

Around this time Bush also married Ella Pinner though what happened next is unclear. Curtis Evans, the authority on the Golden Age of crime and mystery fiction, has determined that while the two remained married until Ella’s death in the late 1960s, they do not appear ever to have lived together. Evans has also established that it was when Bush returned from four years military service during the First World War that he returned to Wood Green School and fathered a child by a teaching colleague, Winifred Chart. Their son, born out of wedlock in 1920 and largely unacknowledged, would grow up to become the composer Geoffrey Bush, co-author with Edmund Crispin of the excellent puzzle short story ‘Who Killed Baker?’. 

Romantic entanglements aside, teaching had always been Bush’s ambition. However, he did not find it fulfilling and in the mid-1920s, as the result of a bet, he wrote a novel. To his amazement and delight, it was accepted and published. Set in 1919, The Plumley Inheritance (1926) concerns a treasure hunt and a mysterious murder, which prove – of course – to be connected. While not uncriticised by contemporary reviewers – Mr Bush has two strings to his bow, and the story might have been a better one if he had restricted himself to one – the book sold well. It was followed by The Perfect Murder Case (1929), whose manuscript Bush claimed the publisher had required him to halve in length, and then two titles in 1930: Dead Man Twice in the summer; and Murder at Fenwold for Christmas. 

Buoyant, Bush decided in 1931 to become a full-time writer and he eventually produced over 80 books. The 63 he wrote as Christopher Bush, which are being reprinted by Dean Street Press, feature several recurring characters, most notably Major Ludovic Travers who appears in all of them. Many are set in English villages not unlike Hockham, but Travers also solves crimes abroad in novels like The Case of the Three Strange Faces (1933), The Case of the Flying Ass (aka The Case of the Flying Donkey) (1939) and The Case of the Climbing Rat (1940). Bush also wrote four excellent Second World War mysteries, including three – The Case of the Murdered Major (1941) and The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) and The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942). 

Writing success brough wealth and, in the early 1930s, Bush fulfilled a promise to his mother by buying the cottage where he had been born. He added two wings and a tennis court to transform it into Home Hall and it is now a boutique hotel. At the same time, he also bought ‘Horsepen’, a 15th century house in the village of Beckley in Sussex, to which he later moved with his long-time partner Marjorie Barclay. In 1941, while a member of the Home Guard, Bush made headlines locally for restoring the medieval wood carvings on the house’s exterior, working to a Tudor design as specified by advisers from the Victoria & Albert Museum. 

After the Second World War, Bush’s novels took on more thriller-ish elements. For example, in The Case of the Amateur Actor (1955), Travers determines the connection between the disappearance of a teacher behind the Iron Curtain and the murder of a literary agent in London. However, while Bush is appreciated for the crime fiction published under his own name, he is known in East Anglia as ‘Michael Home’, author of 20 novels including nine set in Breckland, the vast and lonely borderlands between the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. The series has echoes of Bush’s own history, for example in the first – God and the Rabbit (1933), set in a thinly disguised version of Hockham village – a child wins a scholarship and becomes a schoolmaster while supporting his somewhat strait-laced mother from his dissolute and bullying poacher father. Curiously, Bush would claim that, as had happened with The Perfect Murder Case, the publisher had required the manuscript of God and the Rabbit to be cut by half. True or not, the novel was very well-received and a second followed quickly. In This Valley (1934) is a melodrama about a Methodist farmer and his son, an ambitious man with two women in his life and set on Fordersham farm, named for the ford near Bush’s childhood home. 

As well as the Breckland series, ‘Home’ also wrote an overtly autobiographical trilogy of novels – Autumn Fields (1945), Spring Sowing (1946) and Winter Harvest (1967) – as well as half a dozen novels of military intelligence. These include a Buchanesque trilogy about an intelligence agent set in North Africa, the superb standalone thriller The Cypress Road (1945) and two novels featuring Major John Benham of MI5 who investigates a mysterious German prisoner of war in The Strange Prisoner (1947) and the disappearance of a collection of paintings during the Nazis’ Occupation of France in The Auber File (1953). 

 ‘Home’ also wrote a handful of short stories for magazines like Good Housekeeping and the Illustrated London News, as well as an annual called Snapdragon which raised funds for Norfolk and Norwich hospital. And, while living in Beckley, he was active in the social and cultural life of the nearby town of Hastings not least as a member of the Twenty Club for men and women prominent in literature or art. He was also a popular speaker and a patron of local artists, on one occasion donating to an exhibition a portrait of Mr Michael Home by Mr Christopher Bush. 

But after his death it was revealed that Christopher Bush had another pseudonym. As ‘Noel Barclay’, a combination of the most common synonym for his given middle name and Marjorie’s surname, he wrote The Trail of the Three Lean Men (1932). The novel is something of a Ruritanian thriller and has more in common with the Benham books of ‘Michael Home’ than the detective stories of Christopher Bush. It is nonetheless the author’s rarest book and Dean Street Press are to be congratulated – and thanked – for making it widely available for the first time in a little under a century

In 1953, Bush and Marjorie moved from Sussex to the Great House in Lavenham in Suffolk where, while continuing to write, he again became a pillar of the community, opening art exhibitions and giving talks for example on the Breckland novels, and on how to be a writer. A modest man, he had no time for what he called literary arrogance, seeing himself as simply a public entertainer whose chief duty is to be thoroughly competent at whatever line of writing he decides to adopt. While never accorded the same respect by critics as, say, Christie or Sayers, he was elected by his peers to the Detection Club – an exclusive honour not accorded to as many writers as it is today. Many of Bush’s novels have good ideas and interesting settings and he has been praised in particular for his ability to create and de-construct the unbreakable alibi, a trait shared with the Alibi King himself, Freeman Wills Crofts. 

With Marjorie Barclay’s death in 1968, Bush lost his enthusiasm for writing. He died at Lavenham on the 21st of September 1973, but he is still remembered today in Hockham where, in 1967, he unveiled the current village sign.

Tony Medawar

CHAPTER I

THE THREE LEAN MEN

Seeing Munro Burnside was a last resource. What I should have done if things had not turned out as they did, I haven’t the faintest idea, but I know it would have been something desperate and foolish like joining the Foreign Legion – if they’d have had me. Not that I had a great deal to whine about compared with hundreds of poor devils who were in a far leakier boat. I did at least have that fifty pounds in the bank and was hanging on to it at the risk of emaciation, though I now knew the time had come when it would have to be broken into, and it had stood for me rather as a symbol than mere money; as something that represented the better days that would ultimately come and the better days that had long since gone. Moreover it was June, and one doesn’t need a lot of clothes in June, or much food either for that matter, and if one wangles it circumspectly, even a bourgeois bed can be dispensed with.

In a way I suppose, I had myself to blame, since I was always an improvident bird; not from any spendthrift’s make-up but because of a continually cheating sense of security. Let me explain that. An uncle brought me up and ultimately I went to Upton where I was a quiet sort of cove who might very well have dropped out without being much missed even if I did get into the second cricket eleven. In 1917 I was seventeen years old and though on the short side, had about me an air of young dignity and reticence that made me look not unlike the twenty I claimed to be when the doctor asked me my age. The first thing my uncle heard about it was when I wrote from a training camp, and then maybe he thought it was too late to do anything about it or else he guessed that with the incredible folly of youth that could see glamour even in a war like that, I should have broken from my hobbles again and joined up under another name.

The machine gunners licked some sort of shape into me and Providence saw to it that the bullet that knocked me out did its work cleanly through the shoulder. The same Providence ensured that I never went back to France but to Palestine instead, and there I was in time for Allenby’s last show and went up to Damascus without a scratch. Being a bloke of no occupation I was not demobbed till the summer of nineteen – and with the rank of sergeant.

After that things were resumed for me much where they left off. I went up to Oxford and spent three drowsy years at Cranmer and there again I was a person of the supremest inconsequence and looking – so I was told – not a year older than when I joined up. Perhaps my five foot six and mournful, brown eyes had something to do with that, and my face was of the yearning type that suited admirably the wholly ridiculous poetic sort of soul who looked inanely at me when I performed my daily exercise with a razor. There was a time when I was so ashamed of this gutless looking self of mine that I dressed rather loudly and tried to grow a moustache, but the latter turned out such a romantic, Ronald-Colman-like streak that it made me more of a disembowelled poet than ever, and I shaved it off and took to smoking a perfectly monstrous pipe instead.

Three days after I came down, my uncle died suddenly and his affairs were so involved – farming ventures were responsible for the trouble – that all I found myself with was seven hundred pounds all told. I had never worried about what I was to do in life; we had never discussed it and I had always assumed that I should potter about peacefully and be much the same kind of gentle loiterer that my uncle was himself. But I had always had furtive inclinations towards journalism and now I saw my chance. I planned that I could live on two hundred a year, and I did. My rooms were in Hampstead and there I wrote three novels, only one of which was published and it brought me the sum of twenty-five pounds and the knowledge of what sort of agreements the unsuspecting and trustful author may sign. I also tried my hand at short stories, with what knowledge of life and with what qualifications heaven alone knows, and to this day I go red when I think of them. A dozen or so were printed in the cheapest of magazines, and as they were spread over a period of four years, they were for me what an occasional winner is to the punter – a will-of-the-wisp incentive to go on making a fool of myself. Articles of course I had a shot at, and I wrote a war play, and where they are now, unless it be in some pile ready to wrap up fish-and-chips or spring onions, I haven’t the faintest interest or idea.

But I did grow up in those four years, and I even began to look something approaching my age. London is a great place for the unfrocked or uncloistered, and what the war mostly did for me, it rounded off. The day was my time for work, and my nights were spent everywhere – music halls, the streets, occasional theatres, at least two affairs with women – one, that looked like being too serious, I only escaped by a miracle, and that again I blush over to this day. I went to the Ring on Sundays and with a careless catholicity varied that with the Albert Hall. I did myself well in Soho restaurants and once ventured inside a night club. Then I had dancing lessons from a delightful woman at Earl’s Court and joined a club which a casual acquaintance recommended, but I will say this for myself, I had no deceptions about being a great fellow in those days; I knew I should never be that, but I did get about a lot and I saw all sorts of people and I got plenty of local colour if I’d only had a gift for making use of it.

All the time, you see, I had nothing to worry about. There was still money in the bank and sooner or later I hoped I’d be making enough to live on. And then I had a tremendous stroke of luck. I tried the Messenger with an article on the Turk – it was one of those occasions when Turkey was prominent in the news – and to my enormous surprise I had a letter from Munro Burnside saying he would like to see me. It seems that he knew my uncle and had known me as a small boy, though I had long ago forgotten his name. One thing led to another, and to make a short story of it, I got a chance with the Messenger, and, more amazing, I must have made good. To this day I don’t know how I did it. When I think of the self-conscious and decidedly nervous young person who sidled with curate-like modesty into the general room, I can’t for the life of me conceive how I lasted more than a week. But I lasted longer than that. I was doing quite well in an unobtrusive sort of way, and once more I had no worries whatever about the future, even without the shelter of Munro Burnside’s wing. I think too, I was fairly popular with the rest of the gang; I know I spent up as I went along and I still had a hundred in the bank.

They say that no man expects to die; the whole human race is bound for the ultimate and inevitable grave – but not one’s self. That was the reason, when the news first got round that the Messenger was on its last legs, why I once more refused to worry. True I had never a relation or encumbrance in the world to worry about, but that was not the thought at the back of my mind. I knew I knew my job and I suppose Munro Burnside was somewhere in the distance of my assurance as a satisfying background, and I knew whoever failed to get transferred to the Cyclone, when it absorbed us, it would not be myself. But it was myself when the time came and that was the greatest jolt I had ever had. Munro Burnside of course went over to the Cyclone but I had no intention of getting back under his wing. Pig-headedness that was, and a certain resentful pride, and I also had the effrontery to think I could make good at the old writing game where I had left it off. But there were better men than myself adrift from the Messenger, and since my day there had been men at the other game who had got a firm hold and whose names were known where mine was not.

I stuck it for two years and then I began to be afraid. My suits had got down to one fairly presentable one and an unmentionable one, and the same with shoes, and my overcoat had lasted out till the April. Of my bank balance I had spent half and I was holding on to that last fifty as I told you. I weighed about a stone less and I couldn’t well afford it, and I looked as little like a youthful poet as my wildest ambitions in my Oxford days could ever have dreamed. What had happened in those two years and the shifts I had been at don’t matter. All I will say is that I was desperately scared, so much so that I made up my mind to do the unpardonable thing – make an excuse to see Munro Burnside.

It was a gorgeous afternoon of June, the kind of afternoon that always makes me think of a bed of stocks under a lozenge window; and I knew that Munro Burnside would be in Bouverie Street just before five, because I had made it my business to be dead certain of that one point. I’d invested fourpence on ammonia and had sponged my blue suit and altogether I wasn’t looking too ravenous as I watched from the shade of Crome’s doorway for his arrival. He came swinging along, prompt to time, wearing that light brown dust-coat sort of thing that he has on winter and summer, and ten minutes after he’d passed the swing floors I was inside too. The commissionaire handed me on to the waiting room and then a very handsomely dressed individual asked me if I had an interview, He rather irritated me, I don’t quite know why,

Yes, I said, and gave him a card on which I had the temerity to scribble Personal, though that was to avoid filling in the usual form. When he’d gone I sat there and cursed myself for a fool.

And so I was, though not the way I’d figured it out. Things went well till I got inside that room where Munro Burnside came over to meet me with his hand out and a: Well, how are you? and then I knew not only that I was far too well dressed in that dim light that the drawn blinds made, but that I couldn’t go through with it. Before I knew where I was I’d let him think it was a purely courtesy visit and I was airily explaining what I’d been doing and giving the reasons why I hadn’t looked him up, though that seems cheek enough knowing just who the pair of us were,

No hurry, my boy, he said, as I began the preliminary shuffle that showed I had to go and that he was busy. Then he shook his head. I’ve always got ten minutes for your uncle’s nephew though I’m not up to all this modern hustle. But you must come and have lunch with us. Let me see now . . . and he began thinking forward while I sat there twiddling my hat and keeping the frayed side of the band towards me for all that.

Thursday suit you? At twelve thirty? he said, and went over to the window and drew the blinds. The room changed from dusk to midday in a flash and as he turned he seemed to see me for the first time – that is, as I was. He stopped short and gave that queer little sideways cock of the head with which the caricaturists always show him.

You’re much thinner than when I saw you last. If I hadn’t been the fool I was, I’d have known he was taking me in from crown to sole, but I smiled at him brazenly.

Oh, I don’t know, sir. I’m perfectly fit and that’s the main thing.

Hm! yes. He nodded in agreement, then fired the question at me. "You wouldn’t take a job – a beginner’s job – on the Cyclone here?"

My face must have given me away. I flushed, I know that.

Well, sir . . . I stopped and licked my lips there, then I looked up at him. I may as well tell you the truth, sir, but that’s what I came to ask you this afternoon. I know it was an unpardonable thing to do – sending in that card. . . .

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. He leaned back in his chair, finger tips together, and looked at me much as a kindly doctor might have looked at a poor patient.

I know. They’ve been to me – dozens of them; as though I could do anything. He shook his head. Things are bad – very bad. We’ve a waiting list as long as from here to Hyde Park and what I could do I did for men with families and so on. You see I didn’t put you in the category of those in desperate need. You’ll forgive me for saying that?

I’m not, sir. I mean I’ve not got down to bottom yet, but I don’t think it’s far off.

I know. He nodded again. It was a cruel suggestion for me to make, because I haven’t anything to offer you. And yet I was thinking about you only the other day. Something you might perhaps do.

I looked up again quickly enough at that.

That was an extraordinary good series you did for us, he went on. I mean that series on London Streets. You’ll pardon my saying so, but I didn’t think you had it in you.

Neither did I, sir.

He smiled. It’s good to hear you say that. But it was great work. The stuff that’s always safe to print. Matthews could have done it better, so could Cope, but yours had something that sophistication might have left out. You never knew Tom Varlow? He fired the question so unexpectedly that I couldn’t have answered it, and in any case I didn’t quite catch the name, and I told him so.

Tom Varlow, he repeated. "Taking him all round, the best youngster the Messenger ever had. But he’d be before your time and, he smiled dryly, the old Messenger wasn’t the kind of thing you people read at Upton."

He got to his feet again and stood with arms tucked beneath his coat tails and back to the fireplace as if it had been February.

"Tom was killed in the war. A clever youngster he was and he’d have gone far. Excellent linguist and so on – and an