The Case of the Magic Mirror: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Read online

  Christopher Bush

  The Case of the Magic Mirror

  “Good God!” I was staring like a lunatic. “Murdered, you say? When?”

  “Less than half an hour ago, sir.”

  TRAVERS: “I don’t know why I should call this case that of the Magic Mirror for there’s nothing in it reminiscent of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” even if the mirror did do a certain amount of magical revelation.

  “As a matter of fact the title is my obstinate own. In the first place, of the many murder cases with which I have been officially connected, this one which I am about to relate was easily the most unusual. On the face of it one could at first hardly call it a case at all, for its solution presented no difficulties. Then curious doubts arose, and the obvious was far from what it seemed, and finally the whole thing seemed incapable of any solution at all. Then when the solution did come, it was so absurdly simple that one doubted one’s sanity for not having seen it from the very first.”

  The Case of the Magic Mirror was originally published in 1943. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  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

  About the Author

  Titles by Christopher Bush

  The Case of the Running Mouse – Title Page

  The Case of the Running Mouse – Chapter One

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Winding down the War and Taking a New Turn

  Christopher Bush’s Ludovic Travers Mysteries, 1943 to 1946

  Having sent his series sleuth Ludovic “Ludo” Travers, in the third and fourth years of the Second World War, around England to meet murder at a variety of newly-created army installations—a prisoner-of-war camp (The Case of the Murdered Major, 1941), a guard base (The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel, 1942) and an instructor school (The Case of the Fighting Soldier, 1942)--Christopher Bush finally released Travers from military engagements in The Case of the Magic Mirror (1943), a unique retrospective affair which takes place before the outbreak of the Second World War. In the remaining four Travers wartime mysteries--The Case of the Running Mouse (1944), The Case of the Platinum Blonde (1944), The Case of the Corporal’s Leave (1945) and The Case of the Missing Men (1946)--Bush frees his sleuth to investigate private criminal problems. Although the war is mentioned in these novels, it plays far less of a role in events, doubtlessly giving contemporary readers a sense that the world conflagration which at one point had threatened to consume the British Empire was winding down for good. Yet even without the “novelty” of the war as a major plot element, these Christopher Bush mysteries offer readers some of the most intriguing conundrums in the Ludo Travers detection canon.

  The Case of the Magic Mirror (1943)

  “Phil Marlowe,” he said, “the shop-soiled Sir Galahad.”

  The High Window (1942), Raymond Chandler

  “You were always a bit of a Galahad—a trifle shop-soiled, perhaps, but always very pi [i.e., pious].”

  The Case of the Magic Mirror (1943), Christopher Bush

  That within one year of each other crime writers Christopher Bush and Raymond Chandler would coincidentally refer to their series sleuths as “shop-soiled Sir Galahads” passes belief. Chandler used the term first, in his third detective novel The High Window, and it is, indeed, one of the most celebrated turns of phrase of the many such that are found in the hard-boiled author’s canon. It seems fair to surmise that Bush read The High Window and borrowed the memorable image of the slightly tarnished knight when that same year he was writing The Case of the Magic Mirror. Certainly Bush would not have been the lone Forties British crime writer Chandler influenced. James Hadley Chase, author of the notoriously violent No Orchids for Miss Blandish (which ripped off another American book, William Faulkner’s controversial Sanctuary, and was famously denounced for its sadism by a fastidious George Orwell), was compelled to apologize for partially plagiarizing Chandler’s first detective novel, the landmark The Big Sleep (1939), in his own Blonde’s Requiem (1945). The extremely popular British author Peter Cheyney also was hugely influenced in his crime writing by American pulp fiction, likely including Chandler short stories, though Cheyney inaugurated both his Lemmy Caution and Slim Callaghan novel series a few years before The Big Sleep was published. While Christopher Bush certainly never transitioned into a full hard-boiled writer like Chase and Cheyney, he nevertheless with The Case of the Magic Mirror clearly began to show some influence in his work of the American tough school, with its reliance on first person narration by the sleuth and its settings rife with the dissolute rich and scheming femmes fatales. Mirror in particular is notable for having probably the most formidable female antagonist that his series sleuth Ludovic “Ludo” Travers was ever to encounter.

  The novel opens with Travers explaining that what he calls The Case of the Magic Mirror actually took place in 1939, but that he only wrote an account of it in the spring of 1942 during convalescence from an operation to remove a “lump of shrapnel from a premature bomb.” We quickly learn that the Mirror case arose out of an earlier criminal affair, the 1937 trial of several men charged with having engaged in a bookie swindling scheme. The men prosecuted and convicted for the crimes were Charles Rogerley, a racehorse trainer; Lenny Harper, a heavyweight boxer; Patrick Silvey, chauffeur to Joseph Passman, wealthy owner of a string of chain stores in northern England; and Rupert Craigne, a vainglorious stage actor married to Passman’s alluring stepdaughter Charlotte (née Vallants).

  Charlotte Craigne’s late mother, with creditors pounding on the door of her charming Suffolk country house, Brazenoak Manor (which comes complete with a faithful old butler, Matthews, by the by, and the “most perfect Adam mirror” Travers has ever seen), deemed it expedient to wed the wealthy if socially dubious Joe Passman. It was Passman’s later testimony in the bookie-swindling case, along with that of his stepson-in-law Rupert Craigne, which sealed the fate of Patrick Silvey, prompting the latter man dramatically to vow vengeance upon Passman and Craigne as he was being dragged from the courtroom. (“You fat swine! By God, I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do! You too, you bloody lying swine!”) In 1939 some who had been involved with the case, like Ludo’s friend Superintendent George Wharton of the Yard, still suspect that Joe Passman in fact masterminded the whole swindle. Now Rupert Craigne has been released from jail and he is making a public exhibition of himself, loudly protesting his incarceration and insisting upon his innocence. Will Silvey, for his part, seek his promised revenge against Craigne and Passman when he shortly gets outside of prison walls again?

  This is the situation when Ludo Travers, at the behest of his wife Bernice, who is on her way to a month’s visit with friends in France, meets with Charlotte to see what he can do to help reconcile Charlotte’s husband, Rupert Craigne, to whom she is still devoted, with her stepfather, Joe Passman, upon whom she remains dependent. But Travers learns that Charlotte has more than a mere reconciliation in mind, heartwarming as that mi
ght be. Rather, she announces that she wants Ludo to dig up dirt on Joe, in connection with the bookie swindling affair, which she then can use to blackmail her stepfather into financially bailing out the now-penniless Rupert. When Travers balks at this underhanded behavior, however, Charlotte--who, unknown to Bernice, once carried on a torrid three-year affair with Ludo--proceeds to blackmail her ex-lover, producing a photo of a young boy and proclaiming that the lad is her and Ludo’s son. Disbelieving Charlotte’s claim but fearing Bernice’s possible reaction to it, Ludo assents to Charlotte’s command, but he plans in reality to dig up dirt on her rather than Joe, with the intention of blackmailing Charlotte into relenting her scheme. “If Charlotte could double-cross, so could I,” Ludo explains, “and blackmail was very much of a boomerang.”

  This criss-crossed conundrum makes a stupendous noir scenario that would have done any of the hard-boiled American masters proud. As in classic noir, the protagonist is pulled down into dubious doings through a past transgression with an unvirtuous woman, one who still holds a powerful sexual hold over him, despite the fact that she simultaneously repels him. And Charlotte’s hold over Ludo is of the sort which could well prove fatal. “I don’t know if a rabbit admires a particularly attractive stoat while he cowers and waits,” Ludo mordantly observes, “but the comparison is the only one I can make, for I found myself watching her every movement and gesture, fascinated as ever, but more and more scared as the minutes went by.”

  It is hard not to discern in this sticky and somewhat sordid fictional situation an allusion to a long-ago scandal from Christopher Bush’s own past life, Bush in 1920 having fathered an out-of-wedlock son (the future composer Geoffrey Bush) with Winifred Chart, a mathematics teacher at the co-educational Wood Green School in Oxfordshire, where Bush himself then taught. Evidence from Mirror and other Bush novels suggests that he may have felt “entrapped” by the news of Winifred’s pregnancy—or even, possibly, that he may have doubted that Geoffrey was indeed his son. (Never in his life did Bush acknowledge Geoffrey as such.)

  Whatever was the truth of the matter in Bush’s own life, Ludo Travers is adamant that “the kid’s not my son” (to quote the late Michael Jackson) and that he “shan’t have that damnable woman round my neck for the rest of my life” (to quote Ludo). Yet as Travers strives to escape from Charlotte’s clutches he finds himself confronting first one mysterious murder, then another, and yet another. It is one bloody slay ride that Ludo has let himself in for this time, and his and Charlotte’s final destination is shocking indeed.

  Curtis Evans

  I

  THE MUSIC GOES ROUND

  CHAPTER I

  CHELMSFORD ASSIZES

  I don’t know why I should call this case that of the Magic Mirror for there’s nothing in it reminiscent of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” even if the mirror did do a certain amount of magical revelation. I suppose I might have called the book anything: “The Case of the Engine-driver’s Nephew,” for instance, since Harper’s uncle was an engine-driver.

  As a matter of fact the title is my obstinate own, and I’m unconcerned as to whether or not you find it apposite. This book, you see, is my own peculiar property in various unusual ways. In the first place, of the many murder cases with which I have been officially connected, this one which I am about to relate was easily the most unusual. On the face of it one could at first hardly call it a case at all, for its solution presented no difficulties. Then curious doubts arose, and the obvious was far from what it seemed, and finally the whole thing seemed incapable of any solution at all. Then when the solution did come, it was so absurdly simple that one doubted one’s sanity for not having seen it from the very first.

  Now if you are a connoisseur in murder stories you will say that there is nothing unusual in all I have said, since I have merely repeated the pattern of every intriguing case. If you do say that, then I must try to give additional proof of my statements, and the easiest way is to issue a challenge. This is it. In the following paragraph is the germ of that simple solution; enough material, in fact, to allow you to solve the whole thing well before the last page and to prove yourself more agile in deduction than those of us whose professional job it was to do the solving. Here is the paragraph, then, and remember, one paragraph only.

  This is the year 1943, and this book will deal with events that took place mainly in 1939. In the spring of 1942 I had an accident at the Camp where I hold a War Office appointment of sorts—nothing very serious beyond a lump of shrapnel from a premature bomb, but there had to be an operation and then two months’ convalescence. To pass the time I thought I would do some writing, and it was this particular case about which I at last made up my mind to write, and for this main reason. In spite of the war and various financial shocks I am lucky enough to be still very far from destitute, but nevertheless I am a cantankerous person in many ways where money is concerned. I hate seeing good money go down the drain, and more than once I had thought ruefully of the perfectly good money I had spent over the solving of that case. That is why I had quite a thrill when I decided to write this book and get some at least of the money back.

  So much for that, except that it involves some new explanation. Since you have probably studied that last paragraph with a certain care you will wonder why I hesitated about writing the book. There are various reasons, and none redound to my credit. For the first time in any murder case I had to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, which meant that I had to double-cross George Wharton. I had to submit to blackmail, and I persisted in being a moral coward. In fact, in the hackneyed words of the poet, I knew what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive. The more I became involved, the harder it was to disentangle myself, and from certain dry comments which my wife occasionally lets fall, I doubt if I have wholly disentangled myself even at this date. All of which goes to prove what I said at the beginning, that the case was the most unusual in my reasonably large experience, and I will further add that I hope to heaven it will be a long time before I get myself involved in one that even remotely resembles it.

  One last thing that made me decide to write this book, or rather seemed to set me free to write it, was that when I was tottering on the verge of decision I saw in a casualty list from Libya that Frank Tarling was missing, believed killed. Not that there is anything that redounds to Frank’s discredit. Far from it, for he was as good a man at his job as I am ever likely to see.

  The story really begins before my marriage, but that piece of hectic revelation had better be deferred till Charlotte appears in person. The vital beginning was in the autumn of 1937, at Chelmsford Assizes, with Sivley’s scream from the dock when he heard his sentence. Before he was hustled below he got out no more than two or three sentences, but they were enough to set the murder train in motion.

  I was at the Assizes and with George Wharton—Superintendent Wharton of Scotland Yard, where both awe and affection have nicknamed him the Old General. George figures very largely in this story, so in case you do not know him, here is a brief description. About his outward appearance everything is contradictory, and no man could look less like one of what is popularly known as the Big Four. He is tall and burly, but disguises that with something of a stoop. His huge walrus moustache and his antiquated spectacles give him the look of a harassed paterfamilias, or a hawker of vacuum cleaners with whom trade could not conceivably be worse. All that is part of his technique, for his back can be ramrod straight when wrath or indignation or excitement makes him forget the pose, and since he can read the smallest print with the best of us, the spectacles are donned for his own obscure and deceptive purposes.

  For George is a showman who is the master of his art. His sleeves are crammed with innumerable tricks and his personality vivid with innumerable disguises to be assumed on each apt occasion.

  George was going to Chelmsford Assizes to hold a special watching brief; not that the Jupiter Case, as the public knew it, was any new development in crime. It was
merely a slightly new twist to a very old trick—that of swindling the bookies by faking the times of telegrams. George told me that he was going and I suddenly decided to go too, though that was on the last day of a trial that had lasted three days. He called for me at my flat in St. Martin’s Chambers and it was in my car that we drove.

  “Why exactly did you want to come along to-day?” George asked mildly, and then with a sarcastic pursing of his lips: “Wanted a little cheap excitement—eh? Been reading the popular papers.”

  “Maybe, George,” I said. “But there’s a lot more in it than that.”

  As he badgered me I told him some of the reasons, and they were all connected with only one of the four accused—Rupert Craigne, or “Jupiter” Craigne, as he was nicknamed after the smashing success of Trouble on Olympus. But two things I did not tell George—the main reason why I was going and the reason why I had not been present on the previous two days.

  “Craigne and I were at school together,” I began.

  “You were!” said George incredulously. “What was he like there? As full of swank and conceit?”

  “Not excessively,” I said. “He was extraordinarily clever in a meretricious kind of way, and I never quite trusted him. He was erratic and very much out for self. Even in those days he hogged the limelight. Not that he had any need to, for he was a born actor.”

  I told George how Rupert Craigne and I had met frequently after the war, and how I had put a considerable sum into one of his early shows, and had done well out of it. I had had the chance of putting money into Trouble on Olympus but had not taken it.

  “Not like you, missing a chance like that?” George said. “You’d have made a packet. That play ran two years, didn’t it?”