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  AND SO TO MURDER

  Born in 1906, John Dickson Carr was an American author of Golden Age ‘British-style’ detective stories. He published his first novel, It Walks by Night, in 1930 while studying in Paris to become a barrister. Shortly thereafter he settled in his wife’s native England where he wrote prolifically, averaging four novels per year until the end of WWII. Well known as a master of the locked-room mystery, Carr created eccentric sleuths to solve apparently impossible crimes. His two most popular series detectives were Dr. Fell, who debuted in Hag’s Nook in 1933, and barrister Sir Henry Merrivale (published under the pseudonym of Carter Dickson), who first appeared in The Plague Court Murders (1934). Eventually, Carr left England and moved to South Carolina where he continued to write, publishing several more novels and contributing a regular column to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In his lifetime, Carr received the Mystery Writers of America’s highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and was one of only two Americans ever admitted into the prestigious – but almost exclusively British – Detection Club. He died in 1977.

  AND SO TO

  MURDER

  JOHN DICKSON CARR

  Originally Published Under Pseudonym

  Carter Dickson

  THE LANGTAIL PRESS

  LONDON

  This edition published 2010 by

  The Langtail Press

  www.langtailpress.com

  First published 1940

  And So To Murder © 1940 Estate of Clarice M Carr,

  Richard H McNiven, Executor

  ISBN 978-1-78002-004-4

  CONTENTS

  I The Regrettable Behaviour of a Canon’s Daughter

  II The Tactless Eloquence of a Bearded Man

  III The Puzzling Uneasiness of a Film Studio

  IV The Deadly Significance of a Speaking-Tube

  V The Incredible Summons of a Blackboard

  VI The Soothing Benefits of a Lover’s Confession

  VII The Grim Employment of a Black-out Curtain

  VIII The Sad Fate of a Writer’s Theory

  IX The Unexpected Revelations of an Assistant Director

  X The Disquieting Effect of an Anonymous Letter

  XI The Singular Contents of a Leather Box

  XII The Doubtful Question of a Stray Cigarette

  XIII The Forty-Ninth Proof of an Evident Truth

  XIV The Unprofessional Conduct of Sir Henry Merrivale

  I

  The Regrettable Behaviour of a Canon’s Daughter

  1

  IN spite of herself she was excited. She had resolved that she would not allow this to show. She had pictured herself as being poised, airy, and at ease, unimpressed by the studios of Albion Films. But, now that she was actually in the office of Mr Thomas Hackett, who was to produce Desire, Monica found her heart thumping and her speech a trifle slurred.

  It annoyed her.

  Not that there was anything about the producer to alarm her. On the contrary. From all she had heard and read, Monica had expected to find the film-studio a kind of Bedlam, full of fat men with cigars shouting lunatic orders into telephones. Nor had she actually expected to find Mr Hackett sticking straws in his hair. But, at the same time, she was surprised and put a little off balance by the man who faced her from the other side of the desk.

  The whole place – grounds, buildings, offices – struck her as being too quiet. Pineham Studios, some three-quarters of an hour by train from London, spread over many green acres behind a tall wire fence fronting the road. The main buildings, long and low like a pavilion, of dazzling white concrete with little orange awnings at the windows, were backed by the great grey shapes of the sound-stages. The very sight of them brought a lump of excitement to Monica’s throat. But they seemed deserted, dozing under the blaze of the late August sunlight; a little sinister.

  Of course, she was not taken to the main building. The gate-keeper made this clear when her car – which she had hired at the station – pulled up before his lodge.

  ‘Mr H-Hackett!’ Monica shouted from the back of the car.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Mr H-Hackett!’

  ‘Mr Tom Hackett?’ inquired the gate-keeper craftily; though there was, in fact, only one Hackett at Pineham.

  ‘That’s r-right. My name is Monica Stanton. I have an appointment.’

  The gate-keeper took pity on her. ‘Old Building,’ he told the driver, who seemed to understand.

  It was intolerably hot. The green lawns, the gravel drive, the cars parked in the drive, all winked with high-lights under the sun. They drove along a gravel road past the main buildings, down a hill beneath thick-arched trees, and emerged (surprisingly) beside what resembled a small, picturesque red-brick manor-house with a cupola. Ivy climbed the face of the house. A miniature river, with ducks, flowed shallow and glittering in a little valley near the windows. It was idyllic. It was Arcadian. It made you want to go to sleep. And upstairs, in a sunny office overlooking the stream, Monica was taken to Mr Thomas Hackett.

  Mr Hackett was quiet, curt, and masterful – like the hero in Desire.

  ‘We’re happy to have you here, Miss Stanton,’ he said. ‘Happy. Please sit down.’

  He nodded towards a chair. With a curt, masterful gesture he yanked a box of cigars out of his desk, and thrust it at her. Then, becoming sensible of the impropriety, he returned the box to the desk and slammed the drawer with the same business-like air.

  ‘But you’ll have a cigarette? Good! I never touch tobacco myself,’ he explained, with an air of virtuous austerity. ‘Miss Owlsey! Cigarettes, please.’

  He plumped down in his chair and eyed her keenly. Mr Hackett (a personality) worked for a mysterious personage named Marshlake, the head of Albion Films, who put up the money but whom nobody ever saw except dodging round corners. Mr Hackett bristled with practicality. His age was an alert thirty-five. He was short, stocky, and dark of complexion, with a broad face, a toothbrush moustache, and a radiant dental smile which nevertheless had an austere no-nonsense touch about it.

  ‘Of course,’ said Monica, determined to be fair, ‘I’m terribly happy to be here – to have this opportunity –’

  Mr Hackett’s tolerant smile acknowledged the justice of this.

  ‘– and yet I don’t want to be here under false pretences. My agent told you, didn’t he, that I’ve never had any experience with writing film-scripts?’

  Mr Hackett seemed startled. His eyes narrowed.

  ‘No experience?’ he demanded.

  ‘None.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’ Mr Hackett persisted craftily, as though he refused to fall into any such trap as believing this.

  ‘Of course I’m sure!’

  ‘Ah, I didn’t know that,’ murmured the producer in a soft, sinister voice; and Monica’s heart sank.

  Mr Hackett considered. Then he jumped up, and strode with curt steps up and down the office. He seemed sunk in brooding thoughts.

  ‘That’s bad. That’s very bad. That’s not so good – I’m just thinking aloud, you understand,’ he explained, suddenly looking at her and then relapsing into the same trance. ‘On the other hand, we don’t ask you to produce a shooting-script. Howard Fisk, who will direct Desire, never uses a shooting-script. I’m telling you. Never!’

  (Monica conquered an impulse to say that it was very clever of him. But, having no idea of what a shooting-script might be, she remained discreetly silent.)

  ‘Can you write dialogue?’ demanded Mr Hackett, stopping abruptly.

  ‘Oh, yes! I wrote a play once.’

  ‘This is different,’ said Mr Hackett.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Very different,’ said Mr Hackett, shaking his head mysteriously. ‘But the point is (now
listen to this): you can write dialogue. Good, bright, snappy dialogue?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll try.’

  ‘Then you’re hired,’ said Mr Hackett handsomely. ‘Not too much dialogue, mind,’ he warned. ‘Keep it visual. Keep it to the minimum. In fact’ – he thrust out his hands, defining the situation – ‘practically no dialogue at all. But you’ll learn. (I’m just thinking aloud, you understand.) Miss Stanton, I make my decisions and I stick to ’em. You’re hired.’

  Since Monica had already been hired, after a bitter battle on the part of her literary agent, this decision may sound superfluous. But it was not. In the film business, all things are with Allah.

  For her part, Monica was so happy that she almost stuttered. It was a delirious kind of happiness, which sang in her veins and made her feel slightly drunk. She wanted to get up and say to a mirror: I, Monica Stanton, of St Jude’s vicarage, East Roystead, Herts, am actually sitting in the offices of Albion Films, talking to the producer who made Dark Sunshine and My Lady’s Divorce. I, Monica Stanton, who have so often sat in the picture palace and seen other people’s names glorified, am now to see my own name among the credit-titles and my own characters come to life on the screen. I, Monica Stanton, am to be a part of this vast, dazzling world –

  And here it was.

  2

  Now Mr Thomas Hackett, for reasons that will be indicated, was the most worried man on the Pineham lot. But, even so, he was astounded to meet Monica Stanton in the flesh. For he had gone so far as to read Desire; and he wondered, privately, how most of it had got past the censor.

  It was not that he expected Monica to resemble the voluptuous and world-weary Eve D’Aubray, the heroine of Desire. Just the opposite. In Mr Hackett’s experience, the ladies who wrote passionate love-stories were usually either tense business-women or acidulated spinsters who petrified every male in the vicinity. He was prepared for any sort of Gorgon. What he was not prepared for was the eager, well-rounded, modest-looking girl who sat opposite him and regarded him with intelligent but innocent eyes. Without being a striking beauty, Monica was nevertheless one of those pretty, hearty, fresh-complexioned girls who radiate innocence.

  In the depths of his soul, Mr Hackett was perhaps a little shocked. He felt that she ought not to know about that kind of thing. He wondered that her mother had allowed her to write the damned book.

  Monica’s mother was not living. But she had an aunt – and the aunt wondered, too.

  Everybody now knows the history of that best-selling novel by Monica Stanton, aged twenty-two, only child of the Rev. Canon Stanton, a country clergyman; and that Monica had seldom in her life been allowed to venture beyond the confines of East Roystead, Herts. What everybody does not know is the uproar it caused in her own home.

  When the manuscript was first submitted, a certain publisher said:

  ‘Champagne by the bucket. Diamonds by the hatful. Nobody goes about in anything less than a Rolls-Royce. And love-affairs – suffering Moses! This Captain Royce, the hero, is a devil of a fellow; though I think the author should be cautioned about letting him go tiger-shooting in Africa. But –’

  ‘But?’ asked his partner.

  ‘In the first place, the girl can write. She’ll get over this. In the second place, we don’t want her to get over it. This book is a winner. It’s everybody’s day-dream. The lending libraries will yell for it, or I never hope to back another.’

  He was right.

  Monica had written it, passionately, out of every day-dream she had ever dreamed. It was not that she disliked East Roystead or even the million small duties of a parson’s daughter. But sometimes she was bored to literal tears by them. Sometimes she looked at her life, lifted her fists impotently, and cried: ‘Grr!’ This feeling was not sweetened by the presence of her aunt, Miss Flossie Stanton, one of those jolly, ‘sensible’ women who cause more mutinies than any tyrant. So, under the lamp, Monica’s imagination bloomed. In Eve D’Aubray, the heroine, she created a grande amoureuse whose prowess would have been looked on with respect by a combination of Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, and Lucrezia Borgia.

  Monica (let this be understood) tried to keep the thing a secret. The book was ultimately published under a pen-name. Nobody at home would even have known she was driving away at the story, if her aunt, in the usual course of turning over all Monica’s belongings once every fortnight or so, had not come across a sheaf of manuscript in the dressing-table drawer.

  Even then the family remained serene, because nobody bothered to find out what it was all about. Monica, between hot humiliation and defiant pride, announced that she was writing a book. The announcement fell flat. Her aunt smiled vaguely and said: ‘Are you, my dear?’ – immediately changing the subject, in a somewhat pained way, to inquire whether Monica had found time in the midst of her tremendous literary labours to give the day’s order to the greengrocer.

  The first stir of the thunderbolt occurred with the delivery of a letter of acceptance and a real cheque from the publishers. The breakfast-table at St Jude’s vicarage sat as though stunned. That good man, Canon Stanton, remained with the coffee-pot poised in the air for so long that the maid could stand the sight no longer, and came in and took it out of his hand. Miss Flossie Stanton went through a variety of emotions. But the cheque convinced her.

  Whereupon Miss Stanton promptly put on her hat and went round the neighbourhood to brag about it.

  It was Miss Flossie’s own fault. She was very casual, but she swanked like billy-o. She crammed it down people’s throats. It did not occur to her to wonder what the book might be about. Originally ‘Monica’s-little-book; so-clever-you-know,’ bore the non-committal and genteel title of Eve D’Aubray, which Miss Stanton vaguely associated with Mrs Gaskell and thought rather nice. Even when the book was in print, six months later, it still did not occur to her to read it.

  But the tea-tables of East Roystead had read it. They were waiting. It was on Black Friday, a day in July, when Miss Stanton at the tea-table of Mrs Colonel Granby ventured the remark that she had heard it was such a nice story and wondered what it might be about. And the tea-table – trembling with secret joy – arose as one woman and told her.

  That was the end.

  Miss Stanton returned to the vicarage, burst into her brother’s study like a dying tornado, and collapsed on the sofa. Canon Stanton resignedly put down his pen.

  ‘James,’ said Miss Stanton, in a voice like a G-man questioning a gangster under powerful lights, ‘have you read that book?’

  Families have painfully literal minds.

  3

  And so Monica Stanton acquired the reputation of being an abandoned woman.

  This is not to say that her reputation became entirely on a par with that of Eve D’Aubray in the book. After all, the people of East Roystead had known her all her life, and were quite well aware that her scope (for one thing) was more limited than Eve D’Aubray’s. It was not alleged that she had first sold her honour for a diamond necklace worth twenty thousand pounds, because nobody in East Roystead ever had a diamond necklace worth twenty thousand pounds. It was not alleged that she had gone cruising in the Mediterranean with an Italian count, because everybody knew that the Stantons spent their holidays at Bournemouth.

  East Roystead felt that they had to be fair.

  But there it stopped. Even those who conceded that the whole thing was chiefly imagination still argued – with touching faith in the sincerity of authors – that nobody could write a whole book on one subject without having some knowledge of it.

  Furthermore, Monica was known as a ‘quiet one’; and this made it worse.

  The first few weeks at the vicarage were chaotic. Miss Stanton’s anguished plaint was divided into three counts: (a) how they should survive the disgrace; (b) how a niece of hers could ever write of such things; and (c) how a niece of hers had ever learned of such things in order to write about them.

  This last count appeared to be the most important. Miss Stant
on dwelt on it to an almost gruesome extent.

  Not that she ever had it out with Monica. She would demand details; and then, flushing, would lift her hand and refuse to hear them. When Monica, desperate, would demand to know exactly what she was talking about, Miss Stanton would reply, with powerful and sinister inflexion: ‘YOU know’ – and hurry in to have it out with the Canon instead.

  Miss Stanton wanted to know who the man was. She reviewed, libellously, the names of all the young men in the neighbourhood. In fine, she nearly drove the Canon mad; and in him Monica found an unexpected ally.

  Miss Stanton regarded him with dismay.

  ‘James, I cannot understand you. Good heavens, you cannot mean to say that you actually condone these horrible goings-on?’

  ‘What goings-on?’ said the Canon.

  ‘This book, of course.’

  ‘A book, my dear, cannot properly be described as a goings-on.’

  ‘James, you are the most infuriating man I have ever known. You know quite well what I mean. This awful book –’

  ‘It is a trifle immature, let us admit. And perhaps a little ill-advised. At the same time, I must confess that I found it mildly entertaining –’

  ‘James, don’t be revolting!’

  ‘My dear Flossie,’ said the Canon, with slight asperity, ‘I am tempted to be vulgar and say: Come off it. You appear to be confusing fiction with autobiography. Recently we both made the acquaintance of Mr William Cartwright, who writes the detective novels. He made quite a favourable impression on you, if I remember correctly. You do not seriously suggest that Mr Cartwright spends his spare time in cutting people’s throats?’

  Miss Stanton clutched at a tragic straw. All her troubles seemed centred on this.

  ‘If only,’ she wailed, ‘if only Monica had written a nice detective story!’

  This deserves to be included under the head of historic remarks which start family rows.

  Anyone who has had some experience with family life will testify that when the female head of a household gets hold of a remark or a piece of repartee which seems to her a good thing, she freezes to it. She never lets go. The members of her family are treated to it, in exactly the same words, on an average of a dozen times a day. Gradually it saps their vitality. They grow morbid under it. They brace themselves for its coming, each time they see the lady open her mouth.