The Case of the Fighting Soldier: A Ludovic Travers Mystery
Christopher Bush
The Case of the Fighting Soldier
What was I to be this time? A Commandant again of a Prisoner of War Camp? Was I to get a sedentary job at the War Office itself, and begin the slow process of fossilisation? Was I due for some wholly new job of which the rank and file had never even heard? As it turned out, I most certainly was.
Ludovic Travers reports to room 299 of the War Office to receive new orders. He is sent up to Derbyshire to be a training officer for the local Home Guard, and to be plunged headlong into a new wartime mystery. It is not long before he meets the ‘fighting soldier’ of the title, a tough veteran of the Spanish Civil War and dozens of other bloody battlefields.
But when chewing-gum is discovered wedged into the barrel of a bomb launcher, it is obvious there’s an individual—or more than one—in the camp out to make sure someone doesn’t live to fight another day. And it’s not long before their diabolical intent leads to explosive murder. Once again, it will be down to Travers’s quick wits to make sense of it and bring the guilty to justice—with able support from George Wharton of Scotland Yard.
The Case of the Fighting Soldier was originally published in 1942. 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
Epilogue
About the Author
Titles by Christopher Bush
The Case of the Magic Mirror – Title Page
The Case of the Magic Mirror – Chapter One
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
A Mystery Writer Goes to War
Christopher Bush and British Detective Fiction’s Fight against Hitler
After the Francophile Christopher Bush completed his series sleuth Ludovic “Ludo” Travers’ nostalgic little tour of France (soon to be tragically overrun and scourged by Hitler’s remorseless legions) in the pair of detective novels The Case of the Flying Donkey (1939) and The Case of the Climbing Rat (1940), the author published a trilogy of Ludo Travers mysteries drawing directly on his own recent experience in British military service: The Case of the Murdered Major (1941), The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) and The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942). Together this accomplished trio of novels constitutes arguably the most notable series of wartime detective fiction (as opposed to thrillers) published in Britain during the Second World War. There are, to be sure, other interesting examples of this conflict-focused crime writing by true detective novelists, such as Gladys Mitchell’s Brazen Tongue (1940, depicting the period of the so-called “Phoney War”), G.D.H. Cole’s Murder at the Munition Works (1940, primarily concerned with wartime labor-management relations), John Rhode’s They Watched by Night (1941), Night Exercise (1942) and The Fourth Bomb (1942), Miles Burton’s Up the Garden Path (1941), Dead Stop (1943), Murder, M.D. (1943) and Four-Ply Yarn (1944), John Dickson Carr’s Murder in the Submarine Zone (1940) and She Died a Lady (1943), Belton Cobb’s Home Guard Mystery (1941), Margaret Cole’s Knife in the Dark (1941), Ngaio Marsh’s Colour Scheme (1943) and Died in the Wool (1945) (both set in wartime New Zealand), Christianna Brand’s Green for Danger (1944), Freeman Wills Crofts’s Enemy Unseen (1945) and Clifford Witting’s Subject: Murder (1945). Yet Bush’s three books seem the most informed by actual martial experience.
Like his Detection Club colleague Cecil John Charles Street (who published mysteries as both John Rhode and Miles Burton), Christopher Bush was a distinguished veteran of the First World War (though unlike Street his service seems to have consisted of administration rather than fighting in the field) who returned to active service during the second, even more globally catastrophic, “show” (as Bush termed it), albeit fairly briefly. 53 years old at the time of the German invasion of Poland and Britain’s resultant entry into hostilities, Bush helped administer prisoner of war and alien internment camps, initially, it appears, at Camp No 22 (Pennylands) in Ayrshire, Scotland and Camp No 9 at Southampton, at the latter location as Adjutant Quartermaster.
In February 1940, Bush, now promoted from 2nd Lieutenant to Captain, received his final, and most controversial, commission: that of Adjutant Commandant at a prisoner-of-war and alien internment camp established in the second week of the war at the recently evacuated Taunton’s School in Highfield, a suburb of Southampton. Throughout the United Kingdom 27,000 refugees and immigrants from Germany, Austria and Italy (after the latter country declared war on Britain in June 1940) were interned in camps like the one in Highfield. Bournemouth refugee Fritz Engel--a Jewish Austrian dentist who in May 1940, after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and inaugurated his infamous “Collar the lot!” internment policy, was interned at the Highfield camp--direly recalled the brief time he spent there, before he was transferred to a larger camp on the Isle of Man, for possible shipment overseas. “I was first taken into Southampton into a building belonging to Taunton’s School,” he wrote in a bracing unpublished memoir, “already surrounded by electrically loaded barbed wire. . . .” (See Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century, 1999.)
Similarly, Desider Furst, another interned refugee Austrian Jewish dentist, wrote in his autobiography, Home is Somewhere Else: “[Our bus] stopped in front of a large building, a school, and the bus was surrounded by young soldiers with fixed bayonets. We had become prisoners. A large hall was turned into a dormitory, and we were each issued a blanket. The room was already fairly crowded. . . . We were fed irregularly with tea and sandwiches, and nobody bothered us. We were not even counted. I had the feeling that it was a dream or bad joke that would end soon.” He was wrong, however: “After two days we were each given a paper bag with some food and put onto a train [to Liverpool] under military escort. The episode was turning serious; we were regarded as potential enemies.”
Soon finding its way in one of Bush’s detective novels was this highly topical setting, prudently shorn by the author of the problematic matter of alien refugee internment. (Churchill’s policy became unpopular in the UK and was modified after the Arandora Star, an internee ship bound for Canada, was torpedoed by the Germans on July 2, 1940, leading to the deaths of nearly 1000 people on board, a tragic and needless event to which Margaret Cole darkly alludes in her pro-refugee wartime mystery Knife in the Dark.) All of Bush’s wartime Travers trilogy mysteries were favorably received in Britain (though they were not published in the U.S.), British crime fiction critics deeming their verisimilitude impressive indeed. “Great is the gain to any tale when the author is able to provide a novel and interesting environment described with evident knowledge,” pronounced Bush’s Detection Club colleague E.R. Punshon in his review of one of these novels, The Case of the Murdered Major, in the Manchester Guardian.
For his part Christopher Bush in August 1940 was granted, after his promotion to to the rank of Major, indefinite release from service on medical grounds, giving him time to return full throttle to
the writing of detective fiction. Although only one Ludovic Travers mystery appeared in 1940, the year the author was enmeshed in administrative affairs at Highfield, Bush published seven more Travers mysteries between 1941 and 1945, as well as four war thrillers attributed to “Michael Home,” the pseudonym under which he had written mainstream fiction in the 1930s. Bush was back in the saddle--the mystery writer’s saddle--again.
The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942)
Christopher Bush’s The Case of the Fighting Soldier opens in October 1941 (about six months after the events detailed in the previous Ludovic Travers detective novel, The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel), with Ludo learning that the military is transferring him yet again, this time to No. 5 School for Instructors of Home Guard at rugged Peakridge in Derbyshire, where he is to serve on the lecturing staff and likely as second-in-command. For this latest turn of events in Ludo’s hectic wartime life the author was able to draw on his own experience during the First World War as a bombing instructor at the Royal Naval Air Service Station at Felixstowe, Suffolk.
While the setting of Soldier heavily relies on Bush’s previous experience at a military training station, the dramatic underpinning of the novel--the final installment in the Ludo Travers military mystery trilogy--concerns the current-day rivalries and resentments between so-called “Regular” (full-time professional soldiers) and “Not-So-Regular” members of the army. We learn that many of the surviving British volunteers in the International Brigades, which fought for the Republican, or anti-fascist, cause in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1938, are employed as Home Guard instructors, “owing to their knowledge of anti-tank warfare and devices, and of guerilla tactics.” Yet the Regulars--“the products of the Staff College”--condescendingly regard these “Not-So-Regular” veterans of that Spanish “sideshow” with the mere “tolerance and mild amusement that one gives to crude but enthusiastic amateurs who have the additional demerit of not being pukka [aka genuine].” Enmity predictably ensues.
At No. 5 School at Peakridge the Spanish veterans, who form their own faction of sorts, are two in number. The first man is Mr. Ferris, aka Ferrova (he claims a Spanish father and an English mother), of whom Superintendent George Wharton of Scotland Yard, a self-professed democrat who is acquainted with Ferris, admiringly pronounces, “He was one of those who didn’t spend his time hollering about liberty; he went off to Spain to fight for it.” The second man is Captain Mortar, a brash mercenary who boastfully styles himself a “fighting soldier,” on account of his vast experience in a variety of “shows”—the Great War, the Spanish Civil War and conflicts in Bolivia and Mexico. (He is said to have “cursed like hell because he couldn’t be in South America and Abyssinia at the same time.”)
When Captain Mortar winds up rather graphically dead, “practically disintegrated” by a terrible explosion in his room (a drawing of the slain man’s severed arm is included in the text), there is no shortage of suspects in what proves to have been a most cunning murder, for the self-professed “fighting soldier” antagonized most of the people at No. 5 School. Superintendent Wharton arrives on the scene, after some strings are pulled at Travers’ prompting, to investigate the crime, but Ludo acquits himself more impressively at detection in this outing than in his two previous ones, making a key deduction by drawing on his considerable capacity for deciphering crossword clues.
Of Wharton we learn that he is a follower of Georges Simenon’s hyper-realistic tales of policeman Jules Maigret, which were then enjoying their first boomlet of popularity in England. Inspector Maigret, Travers divulges, “was the only detective of fiction about whose quiet exploits George had frankly confessed he liked to read. And no wonder. Physically the two seemed the spit of each other, and each was a product of the same hard school and imbued with what I might call the depths of domesticity.” George appears at the camp in the guise of one “Captain Wharton,” a new instructor (like Travers, Wharton is a veteran of the Great War), announcing that he plans “to get this school into my skin”—an ambition which prompts Ludo to liken Wharton to the fictional Maigret, who famously solves cases by absorbing atmosphere. Wharton is duly outraged that his friend would make such a comparison, when it is, he, Wharton, who first set the example for the fictional Maigret:
“Maigret, my foot!” Wharton snorted. “I was working that line and wearing out my flat feet long before Maigret was thought of. Maigret be damned!”
“Right-ho, George,” I said. “We’ll consider him damned.”
In the years since the publication of The Case of the Fighting Soldier, the fame of Inspector Maigret impressively waxed, to be sure, while that of Travers and Wharton undeniably waned. Yet happily Bush’s great detective duo has been issued a reprieve from sleuthing purgatory by Dean Street Press, allowing their entertaining and intriguing exploits to be enjoyed yet again by a new generation of detection devotees.
Curtis Evans
Chapter I
On a certain morning of October, 1941, I was rung up in my office by Command. A relief was coming that morning to take over the camp from me, and I was to report at the War Office two days later. The War Office, I was assured, would communicate with me direct as to the exact time.
I was not in the least surprised, for I had known for some weeks that my camp, as then constituted, was on its last legs, and that some of us were due for a change. This is a funny war for what one might call chopping and changing. All the trains are full of troops who seem to be going somewhere new, and on the roads you see convoys who are changing areas. Maybe the War Office has inveigled recruits by assuring them that if they join the Army they will see, not the world, but England. Maybe there was all this scurrying about in the Great War, though most of it was in scurrying to France and then being lucky enough to be able to scurry back again. Now there is no France to scurry to, so the bright lads at the War House have to do the best they can.
The War Office duly sent an urgent postal telegram to the effect that I was to report at Room 299 at fourteen hours on the Thursday. That gave me ample time to initiate my successor, pack my few belongings, and get into touch with my wife and George Wharton. Bernice said she could get at least one night off from the hospital, since bombing had temporarily ceased, but George was not at the Yard, so I left him a message.
Just before two o’clock on that Thursday afternoon I was once more entering the vast annexe to the War House. The last time I was there I was in a state of mild trepidation, but now I was inured to change and anticipating with a cynical indifference the fate in store for me. What was I to be this time? A Commandant again of a Prisoner of War Camp? In charge of a camp of Italian prisoners working on the land? Was I to get a sedentary job at the War House itself, and begin the slow process of fossilisation? Was I due for some wholly new job of which the rank and file had never even heard? As it turned out, I most certainly was.
The youngish major who interviewed me was not a bad fellow, though his chest was unadorned by ribbons, even of the Coronation variety. He did the usual fingering of papers and documents while he was talking, as if to dissociate himself from things and to let me tactfully know that both he and I were in the hands of some Higher and vastly Inscrutable Providence.
“We want you to take up an appointment at Peak-ridge,” he said, and waited to observe my reactions.
“That’s Derbyshire, isn’t it?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he told me briskly.
“But I’ve just come from there,” I protested mildly, and was quickly wondering how I could add that my orders might have been sent direct to my old camp, and the taxpayer saved a certain expense. He frowned slightly.
“Surely that’s all to the good, I mean, if you know the country and all that.” Then he was going hastily on with his little piece. “The official title of the place is, No. 5 School for Instructors of Home Guard. There’ve been only two schools in the country hitherto, but this is something quite new. It’s a fortnight’s Course, for one thing, as against a week
at the old schools.”
I’m afraid a slightly cynical smile accompanied my question.
“What do I become exactly? An administrative officer to the Home Guard?”
“Oh, no no,” he hastened to reassure me. “You’ll be one of the lecturing staff and probably second-in-command.”
Thereupon he told me things which I knew perhaps far better than he did. The Home Guard—then the Local Defence Volunteers—had been called into being after Dunkirk to meet the imminent threat of invasion. Slowly it had become better armed and equipped, and now it actually had, in many cases, weapons superior to those of the Regular Forces. What the Home Guard now needed therefore was skilled instruction in those weapons and in the very latest methods of attack and defence, and since the paper strength of the Home Guard was in the region of two million, an enormous number of trained instructors were needed. Hence the new schools, Peakridge among them.
The camp had been specially built and sited. It was a hutted one, and would accommodate the large resident personnel and two hundred and fifty students. These would be drawn from all ranks of the Home Guard, and liberal out-of-pocket compensations would be given and the Course itself made attractive so as to ensure full and steady support. There was a magnificent central lecture and cinema hall combined, and Peakridge had been chosen because it was handy for the industrial North and Midlands, and because the very sterile and hilly nature of the land made magnificent country for bombing, detonating, and guerrilla work. The main line station was two miles from the camp, and that, he seemed to think, was the perfect distance. One Course would follow hard on the heels of another, and after every two Courses the staff would get six days’ leave. I tried to appear suitably gratified when he told me that.