Fiction and True Life
The second book I borrowed from my sister in these tedious times was something called 50 Crime Murder Mysteries and Detective Stories. There was no credit given to anyone for the publication, which was from an Indian house I remembered coming across ages back when looking for cheap editions of English books. But there were names given against each of the 50 stories, and I soon found out that most of them were the criminals whose activities were described.
There were over 30 of these, including several I had heard of, such as Bruno Hauptmann who killed the Lindbergh baby he kidnapped, the bodysnatchers Burke and Hair, the two American youngsters Leopold and Loeb who killed for kicks. Their stories were retold in a manner that was dramatic in intent, but became repetitive and added little to catalogues of brutality and callousness.
Far otherwise were the detective stories, a few of them by masters in the field I knew, such G K Chesteron, Leslie Charteris, Edgar Wallace and E W Hornung, whose Raffles stories I had read in a collection in Johannesburg on my last journey abroad before coronavirus struck.
These, needless to say, were gripping tales, but so were those by a dozen others, several of them about American private investigators who seem compelled to be rough and impecunious while evincing brilliant insights. These too I found vastly entertaining.
Many of them involved twists that were not very credible, but that does not really matter in such stories. One was based on the fact that the victim was blind, another sprang from a practical joke by someone pretending to be dead who was then killed when the investigator was being summoned, another involving a contract for a killing given by a jealous husband when he was drunk which was a hoax to cover up the disappearance of the targeted victim.
Edgar Wallace had a detective who got criminals looking for a supposed stash of money to dig up a site for which he could not get a warrant, so the body he had deduced was buried there was found. There were a couple more buried bodies, one of a wife reported as having disappeared, the other of the person who was meant to be suspected of a murder which involved a suicide note hammed up so it was immediately recognized to be false.
All very entertaining, though my own favourite was the Hornung, perhaps because no one died, and indeed nothing was stolen. Raffles was after all a gentleman burglar, and part of Hornung’s appeal is to set his genius against the dull devotion of his friend Bunny. Them I had first come across when in the early eighties Chanaka Amaratunga produced ‘The Return of A J Raffles’, a play by Graham Greene based on the Hornung characters in which he had made explicit a homosexual relationship between the two and also drawn in Lord Alfred Douglas for good measure.
But I do not think I read Hornung after that, until I came across the compendium in Johannesburg, and read as much as possible in the one night we had there before going off to the Kruger the next morning. So it was great fun finding this story in this compendium, not least because the plot was quite zany, involving the house of a young lady Bunny had loved but had to abandon when he passed a worthless cheque.
Raffles persuaded Bunny to come with him through suggesting that the house had changed hands. But the pair are disturbed by the young lady coming down the stairs and, though she helps Bunny to get away, clearly he can never approach her again. Interestingly, it seems to me that this had been one reason behind Raffles’ determination to break into the house, though perhaps my reading was based on memories of that long ago play.
The pictures are of Hornung and Greene and then a sketch of Raffles, followed by Chesterton and Wallace and Charteris.