Death of a Gay Dog Read online

  Anne Morice

  Death of a Gay Dog

  ‘You’ll be the death of me one of these days. I’m telling you.’

  ‘I’ll be the death of myself first,’ I replied.

  The soignée young actress Tessa Crichton is in dazzling form when Robin, her husband and Scotland Yard detective, suggests sleuthing in the Sussex village of Burleigh. The area has recently seen a number of art thefts, but the stakes are raised considerably when murder most foul occurs at a local party . . .

  Tessa of course cannot resist a mystery. Her investigations run parallel with her husband’s, and although she is soon on the right track, there will be bizarre and dangerous consequences.

  Strange and brilliant characters, odd birds of paradise, are among the suspects in this cleverly-plotted whodunit. Here are character, action, humour – and a very high likelihood of being deceived (despite fair clues) about the identity of the murderer.

  Death of a Gay Dog was originally published in 1971. This new edition features an introduction and afterword by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  ‘An ingenious plot and good entertainment value – the type of whodunit that can safely be read late at night without fear of nightmares.’ Woman’s Journal

  ‘Certain to the add to the reputation of Tessa . . . entertainingly and cheerfully written.’ Manchester Evening News

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Titles by Anne Morice

  Copyright

  Introduction

  By 1970 the Golden Age of detective fiction, which had dawned in splendor a half-century earlier in 1920, seemingly had sunk into shadow like the sun at eventide. There were still a few old bodies from those early, glittering days who practiced the fine art of finely clued murder, to be sure, but in most cases the hands of those murderously talented individuals were growing increasingly infirm. Queen of Crime Agatha Christie, now eighty years old, retained her bestselling status around the world, but surely no one could have deluded herself into thinking that the novel Passenger to Frankfurt, the author’s 1970 “Christie for Christmas” (which publishers for want of a better word dubbed “an Extravaganza”) was prime Christie—or, indeed, anything remotely close to it. Similarly, two other old crime masters, Americans John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen (comparative striplings in their sixties), both published detective novels that year, but both books were notably weak efforts on their parts. Agatha Christie’s American counterpart in terms of work productivity and worldwide sales, Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, published nothing at all that year, having passed away in March at the age of eighty. Admittedly such old-timers as Rex Stout, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell were still playing the game with some of their old élan, but in truth their glory days had fallen behind them as well. Others, like Margery Allingham and John Street, had died within the last few years or, like Anthony Gilbert, Nicholas Blake, Leo Bruce and Christopher Bush, soon would expire or become debilitated. Decidedly in 1970—a year which saw the trials of the Manson family and the Chicago Seven, assorted bombings, kidnappings and plane hijackings by such terroristic entities as the Weathermen, the Red Army, the PLO and the FLQ, the American invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings and the drug overdose deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin—leisure readers now more than ever stood in need of the intelligent escapism which classic crime fiction provided. Yet the old order in crime fiction, like that in world politics and society, seemed irrevocably to be washing away in a bloody tide of violent anarchy and all round uncouthness.

  Or was it? Old values have a way of persisting. Even as the generation which produced the glorious detective fiction of the Golden Age finally began exiting the crime scene, a new generation of younger puzzle adepts had arisen, not to take the esteemed places of their elders, but to contribute their own worthy efforts to the rarefied field of fair play murder. Among these writers were P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Emma Lathen, Patricia Moyes, H.R.F. Keating, Catherine Aird, Joyce Porter, Margaret Yorke, Elizabeth Lemarchand, Reginald Hill, Peter Lovesey and the author whom you are perusing now, Anne Morice (1916-1989). Morice, who like Yorke, Lovesey and Hill debuted as a mystery writer in 1970, was lavishly welcomed by critics in the United Kingdom (she was not published in the United States until 1974) upon the publication of her first mystery, Death in the Grand Manor, which suggestively and anachronistically was subtitled not an “extravaganza,” but a novel of detection. Fittingly the book was lauded by no less than seemingly permanently retired Golden Age stalwarts Edmund Crispin and Francis Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley Cox). Crispin deemed Morice’s debut puzzler “a charming whodunit . . . full of unforced buoyance” and prescribed it as a “remedy for existentialist gloom,” while Iles, who would pass away at the age of seventy-seven less than six months after penning his review, found the novel a “most attractive lightweight,” adding enthusiastically: “[E]ntertainingly written, it provides a modern version of the classical type of detective story. I was much taken with the cheerful young narrator . . . and I think most readers will feel the same way. Warmly recommended.” Similarly, Maurice Richardson, who, although not a crime writer, had reviewed crime fiction for decades at the London Observer, lavished praise upon Morice’s maiden mystery: “Entrancingly fresh and lively whodunit. . . . Excellent dialogue. . . . Much superior to the average effort to lighten the detective story.”

  With such a critical sendoff, it is no surprise that Anne Morice’s crime fiction took flight on the wings of its bracing mirth. Over the next two decades twenty-five Anne Morice mysteries were published (the last of them posthumously), at the rate of one or two year. Twenty-three of these concerned the investigations of Tessa Crichton, a charming young actress who always manages to cross paths with murder, while two, written at the end of her career, detail cases of Detective Superintendent “Tubby” Wiseman. In 1976 Morice along with Margaret Yorke was chosen to become a member of Britain’s prestigious Detection Club, preceding Ruth Rendell by a year, while in the 1980s her books were included in Bantam’s superlative paperback “Murder Most British” series, which included luminaries from both present and past like Rendell, Yorke, Margery Allingham, Patricia Wentworth, Christianna Brand, Elizabeth Ferrars, Catherine Aird, Margaret Erskine, Marian Babson, Dorothy Simpson, June Thomson and last, but most certainly not least, the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie. In 1974, when Morice’s fifth Tessa Crichton detective novel, Death of a Dutiful Daughter, was picked up in the United States, the author’s work again was received with acclaim, with reviewers emphasizing the author’s cozy traditionalism (though the term “cozy” had not then come into common use in reference to traditional English and American mysteries). In his notice of Morice’s Death of a Wedding Guest (1976), “Newgate Callendar” (aka classical music critic Harold C. Schoenberg), Seventies crime fiction reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, observed that “Morice is a traditionalist, and she has no surprises [in terms of subject matter] in her latest book. What she does have, as always, is a
bright and amusing style . . . [and] a general air of sophisticated writing.” Perhaps a couple of reviews from Middle America—where intense Anglophilia, the dogmatic pronouncements of Raymond Chandler and Edmund Wilson notwithstanding, still ran rampant among mystery readers—best indicate the cozy criminal appeal of Anne Morice:

  Anne Morice . . . acquired me as a fan when I read her “Death and the Dutiful Daughter.” In this new novel, she did not disappoint me. The same appealing female detective, Tessa Crichton, solves the mysteries on her own, which is surprising in view of the fact that Tessa is actually not a detective, but a film actress. Tessa just seems to be at places where a murder occurs, and at the most unlikely places at that . . . this time at a garden fete on the estate of a millionaire tycoon. . . . The plot is well constructed; I must confess that I, like the police, had my suspect all picked out too. I was “dead” wrong (if you will excuse the expression) because my suspect was also murdered before not too many pages turned. . . . This is not a blood-curdling, chilling mystery; it is amusing and light, but Miss Morice writes in a polished and intelligent manner, providing pleasure and entertainment. (Rose Levine Isaacson, review of Death of a Heavenly Twin, Jackson Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, 18 August 1974)

  I like English mysteries because the victims are always rotten people who deserve to die. Anne Morice, like Ngaio Marsh et al., writes tongue in cheek but with great care. It is always a joy to read English at its glorious best. (Sally Edwards, “Ever-So British, This Tale,” review of Killing with Kindness, Charlotte North Carolina Observer, 10 April 1975)

  While it is true that Anne Morice’s mysteries most frequently take place at country villages and estates, surely the quintessence of modern cozy mystery settings, there is a pleasing tartness to Tessa’s narration and the brittle, epigrammatic dialogue which reminds me of the Golden Age Crime Queens (particularly Ngaio Marsh) and, to part from mystery for a moment, English playwright Noel Coward. Morice’s books may be cozy but they most certainly are not cloying, nor are the sentiments which the characters express invariably “traditional.” The author avoids any traces of soppiness or sentimentality and has a knack for clever turns of phrase which is characteristic of the bright young things of the Twenties and Thirties, the decades of her own youth. “Sackcloth and ashes would have been overdressing for the mood I had sunk into by then,” Tessa reflects at one point in the novel Death in the Grand Manor. Never fear, however: nothing, not even the odd murder or two, keeps Tessa down in the dumps for long; and invariably she finds herself back on the trail of murder most foul, to the consternation of her handsome, debonair husband, Inspector Robin Price of Scotland Yard (whom she meets in the first novel in the series and has married by the second), and the exasperation of her amusingly eccentric and indolent playwright cousin, Toby Crichton, both of whom feature in almost all of the Tessa Crichton novels. Murder may not lastingly mar Tessa’s equanimity, but she certainly takes her detection seriously.

  Three decades now having passed since Anne Morice’s crime novels were in print, fans of British mystery in both its classic and cozy forms should derive much pleasure in discovering (or rediscovering) her work in these new Dean Street Press editions and thereby passing time once again in that pleasant fictional English world where death affords us not emotional disturbance and distress but enjoyable and intelligent diversion.

  Curtis Evans

  One

  (i)

  ‘Well, Tessa! What would you say to a few days in the country?’ Robin asked. ‘Since that rotten old film doesn’t look like getting off the ground just yet, it might be good for your morale to get out of London, for a bit.’

  Some wives, I dare say, would take such proposals, out of the blue, with a grain of salt. Speaking as the wife of a C.I.D. detective, I took it with a spadeful:

  ‘Rotten old crime being also at a standstill just now?’ I inquired.

  ‘Not exactly, no.’

  ‘Then perhaps you have something special in mind?’

  ‘Well, somewhere not too far away. We don’t want to spend the whole time travelling, do we?’

  ‘Oh, don’t we?’

  ‘Sussex might do. Somewhere near the Downs and a golf-course, and not too far from the sea. Do we know anyone who fits that bill?’

  He was well aware that we did, and I was puzzled by the direction things were taking. It was beginning to sound as though he really did envisage a quiet, off-duty holiday, but I had still to be convinced of it.

  ‘So what’s Aunt Moo been up to?’ I asked.

  ‘Why nothing, I sincerely hope. Oh, I see what you mean! Yes, that might suit us splendidly. What’s the name of her village?’

  ‘Barley, to Aunt Moo. Spelt Burleigh and pronounced that way to all the rest of us.’

  ‘Do you think she’d like to have us for a long week-end?’

  ‘I could ask her.’

  He was running his hand along the book-shelf where his road-maps were neatly stacked, and he pulled one out and spread it over the table behind the sofa where I was sitting.

  ‘Burleigh . . . Burleigh . . . Yes, here we are! Inland, about twelve miles from Brighton; eighteen or so from Lewes. Just the thing. Could you try her now, or will she be at dinner?’

  ‘I think I’d rather leave it till the morning.’

  ‘Unlike you to throw away a chance to snatch up the telephone,’ Robin remarked.

  ‘Maybe, but I’d like to find out a bit more about this jaunt of ours, before I get involved up to my neck. Illumination may strike, if I hang on for a bit. Some of my best ideas come to me during the night.’

  ‘That’s true,’ he admitted.

  ‘And some of my best questions come to me during the evening. Like, for instance, what else is Burleigh near to, apart from Brighton and golf-courses?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a very posh neighbourhood. Bankers and stockbrokers thick on the ground.’

  ‘And what is so appealing about them?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, a good many go in for art collections, as a sideline.’

  ‘So this is to be a culture holiday, is it?’

  ‘In a sense. I imagine your Aunt Moo has the entree to all the best places, hasn’t she?’

  ‘If so, it could only be on her late husband’s account. She wouldn’t know a Leonardo from a Landseer. And what’s behind this sudden interest in country-house collections?’

  ‘I am curious to see if all the collections are in the right country houses.’

  ‘At last!’ I murmured, throwing myself back against the sofa. ‘So we’re getting to it at last!’

  ‘Yes, we are, but there may easily be nothing in it, I promise you, darling. Just a little hunch of mine that I wouldn’t mind following up. Shall I tell you?’

  ‘What a question!’

  ‘Well then,’ he said, taking a pencil from his pocket and drawing a circle on the map, ‘here we have a radius of twenty-five or thirty miles from Burleigh. There have been a series of art robberies over the past few months, all bearing the hallmark of the same organisation; and three of them occurred within the area I’ve marked.’

  ‘What’s so special about that? You said, yourself, that the district was stiff with tycoons.’

  ‘I know, but there’s an item in the evening paper which makes the coincidence a bit too large to swallow. If you ever read anything apart from the theatre reviews, you’d have seen it already. It’s on the front page.’

  I gathered up the newspaper, folded it into the right sequence and read out the headline: ‘Half Million London Art Theft.’

  ‘London?’ I repeated.

  ‘Just read on.’

  I went through the first paragraph and looked up: ‘I still don’t get it, Robin. It says here that in the early hours of this morning thieves broke into the Mayfair home of Sir Maddox Brand, well-known art-expert and TV personality, currently on a goodwill visit to Moscow, and stole forty paintings valued at over half a million. Is he really a well-known TV personality? I’ve never even heard of
him.’

  ‘Then he can’t be, can he?’

  ‘Stop teasing, Robin. Is he?’

  ‘Not necessarily. It’s what they always say when they can’t think of anything else, but I gather he’s a minor celebrity. Anyway, stick to the point.’

  ‘I’d be glad to, if I could discover what it was.’

  ‘You’ll find it right at the end. The news story is all in the first paragraph, naturally, but they’ve padded it out with some biographical bits and pieces. As you’ll see, one of them refers to his so-called luxury Surrey mansion. Found it?’

  ‘Yes, but we’re in the wrong county.’

  ‘Oh, that’s another reporter’s convention. “Luxury Surrey mansion” is no doubt a phrase which comes tripping off the typewriter all by itself, but this one happens to be in Sussex. It’s a place called Haverfield Court, about four miles from Burleigh.’

  ‘Oh, marvellous! Do you suppose he’s the master mind behind the gang, and has now stolen his own pictures to put you off the scent?’

  Robin laughed: ‘If so, he can’t have realised that he’d have you on his trail. Shall we go down and arrest him?’

  ‘Yes, what fun! I’ll chat him up in the rose garden while you sneak down to the cellar and check through the loot.’

  ‘I don’t know that it’ll be quite so simple as that. Some rather unsensational spade-work may be required first.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’re not counting on Aunt Moo for that. I’ve already warned you about her aesthetic standards. She’ll be able to tell you how much he pays the charwomen, and whether he has English or New Zealand lamb for Sunday lunch, but that’s about all.’

  ‘Never mind. It’s all grist to the mill.’

  ‘I beg your pardon!’

  ‘I said it was all grist to the mill. It’s an expression.’