The Case of the Murdered Major: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Read online

  Christopher Bush

  The Case of the Murdered Major

  The tea had brought a pleasant warmth and Travers snuggled down in bed. Once more he was busy with something that had vastly cheered him of late—a perfect scheme for the murder of Stirrop.

  There were difficulties from the first day the blustering and objectionable Major Stirrop set foot in the Prisoner-of-War camp. Captain Ludovic Travers, his adjutant, saw trouble—dire trouble—looming ever nearer. For there was something sinister about the camp, and there were strange happenings among the prisoners. One day, when Travers was making his count, there was one prisoner too many; the next the numbers tallied rightly—only to be wrong again within an hour or two.

  An escape plan is uncovered, and then Major Stirrop was murdered. And not only the Major—for another strange death is later brought to light. Travers will join forces once more with his old friend Superintendent George Wharton to get to the bottom of this mystery, one of Christopher Bush’s most intriguing and thrilling.

  The Case of the Murdered Major was originally published in 1941. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  “Great is the gain to any tale when the author is able to provide a novel and interesting environment described with evident knowledge.” Guardian

  TO JOSEPHINE HASWELL MILLER, R.S.A.,

  WITH LOVE,

  BUT PROVIDED ONLY THAT SHE

  GIVES US THE PICTURE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Dedication

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part II

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part III

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part IV

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  About the Author

  Titles by Christopher Bush

  The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel – Title Page

  The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel – 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,” pr
onounced 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 Murdered Major (1941)

  Cheekily though enigmatically dedicated to Scottish artist Josephine Haswell Miller, the first woman elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Arts, “with love, but provided only that she gives us the picture,” The Case of the Murdered Major is the first volume in Christopher Bush’s wartime Ludovic Travers mystery trilogy and the first in the long Travers saga to depart from strict third person narration. (Events are told in the first person by an anonymous individual serving in the British Army—someone who rather resembles the author.) After Major all of the Travers mysteries are narrated by Ludo himself, further solidifying the link between the author and his detective and suggesting the influence on Bush of American hard-boiled detective fiction, particularly the contemporary tales of Anglo-American author Raymond Chandler, which are narrated by Chandler’s famously cynical and wisecracking PI, Philip Marlowe. (For more on this point, see my introduction to Bush’s The Case of the Magic Mirror.)

  Bush begins The Case of the Murdered Major by detailing both Ludo’s experience in the Great War (some of which--the time spent in Egypt and in administering a prisoner of war camp--recalls the author’s own Great War service) and his life between the wars, up to his recent nuptials with Bernice Haire, which took place sometime between The Case of the Leaning Man (1938) and The Case of the Green Felt Hat (1939). Aside from the fact that it is a corking detective story, this makes Major a good choice for the neophyte Bush reader.

  With war having recently been declared on Germany, Ludo and Bernice, who herself is now serving as a Red Cross volunteer, are pleased to learn that Ludo--now, like the author, in his fifties--has been offered an appointment as Adjutant Quartermaster (rank of Captain) at No. 54 Prisoner of War Camp in the city of Shoreleigh. Having accepted his commission, however, Ludo arrives in Shoreleigh to find it “a grim sort of place, with mean and sprawling suburbs and everywhere factory chimneys belching their smoke,” and the camp itself “something of a shock”—for Ludo had had in mind “his old camp in Egypt, with its tents and flimsy reed-thatched buildings.”

  At No. 54 Camp the building Ludo sees before him is “a Victorian monstrosity—a huge out-of-date hospital that had long been the town’s white elephant” and now stands forebodingly surrounded by “a double apron of barbed wire.” The main entrance of the building, which the narrator likens to a “beautifully set blanc-mange,” bears a certain resemblance to that of the main building of the POW and alien internment camp at Taunton’s School at Highfield, Southampton, where Bush in 1940 had served as Commandant, with its “semi-circle of regular circular pillars, rising to the top of the first floor, where it supports a semi-circular species of balcony.” All in all No. 54 Camp affords a perfect example of the “closed community” setting, which the late modern crime writer P.D. James deemed ideal for a detective novel. “A closed community has a particular attraction for a mystery writer,” James once observed. “Apart from its fascination as a microcosm of the wider world outside, the closed community . . . can be a hotbed of intrigue, jealousy or dislike, emotions which can erupt into the ultimate crime.”

  Tensions at the closed community at No. 54 Camp steadily and ominously increase over the period from September 1939 to January 1940 (the first German prisoners--“the crew and the German passengers of a Hun ship”--arrive in December). Finally they culminate in the murder of the much hated Commandant, Major Percival Stirrop—“a bantam of a man, full of quick and self-important nervousness, with all the jargon of the Service and several of those little ingratiating tricks of manner that appear so charming until discovered to be no more than mechanical and second-rate veneer.” Pompous Percival is fond of telling what those who know him eye-rollingly refer to as The Story of My Life, but the Major’s tedious song of himself reaches a definitive finale when he is discovered dead in the snow outside the main building, with no footprints left around him, though his death most decidedly is an unnatural one.

  Suspects in the baffling crime are limited, in the classic manner, by the enclosed nature of the camp setting. How could an outside malefactor have “entered the camp that night,” wonders the narrator, explaining: “If he had contrived to mount the wall, and by means of a pole had propelled himself beyond the masses of coiled wire, he would have landed in a six-foot drift of snow which the first winds had blown up from the north. Had he struggled through the snow, a sentry must have seen him and given the alarm. And after killing Stirrop, he had to get outside the camp again. . . .”

  Even with outsiders seemingly ruled out of the equation, there are plenty of inside men (and one woman, the memorable Bertha Dance) for investigators to pursue, including Ludo himself, who to work off steam had composed a neat little crime tale, complete with a perfect alibi, called The Case of the Murdered Major! (Awkward when that turns up, what?) Then there is the disturbing matter of the prisoner counts which keep indicating that there is an additional unknown and possibly quite deadly denizen of Camp No. 54 lurking within its confines.

  Eventually George Wharton of Scotland Yard appears on the scene, looking “more like a patient vendor of vacuum cleaners and less like the tough, go-getting detective of novel and screen.” But the unprepossessing appearance of the “Old General,” as he is affectionately known at the Yard, deceives, for Wharton remains as keen as ever when it comes to scenting criminals. The Old General enjoys possibly his finest hour in The Case of the Murdered Major, though Ludo, who on this occasion is cast in the shade by the consummate professional sleuth, has plenty reason to find personal satisfaction with the outcome.

  Curtis Evans

  PART I

  GETTING ACQUAINTED

  Characters

  (a) Administrative Staff of No. 54 P.W. Camp

  Major Stirrop, Commandant

  Captain Travers, Adjutant/Quartermaster

  Captain Winter, Interpreter

  Doctor Dulling, Medical Officer

  R.S.M. Ramble

  R.Q.M.S. Mafferty

  Provost-Sergeant Ebbing

  Provost-Sergeant Stamp

  Sniffy Brown, Batman

  Private Timms, Batman

  Miss B. Dance, Shorthand-typist

  (b) Guard. Company of 2/5th Midshires

  Captain Byron

  Lieutenant Dowling

  2nd-lieutenant Pewter

  (c) Others

  Captain Tester, Late Ι.A.

  Captain Lading, M.I.

  Colonel Caithby, Shoreleigh Garrison H.Q.

  Supt. G.N. Wharton, New Scotland Yard

  These characters are not in the order of their appearance, but there should be no difficulty in making their acquaintance

  CHAPTER I

  TRAVERS ARRIVES

  Did you soldier in the last war? Do you regard yourself as conversant with the old army routine—its maligned quartermasters, its grim adjutants, its splenetic colonels, its ramrod sergeant-majors, its orderly-rooms, stores, drills, and a score of other things which are a part of memory? Suppose, for instance, that you—old-stager as only other people call you—were offered a job of work in this war. Would you jump at it like a shot and assume you could soon pick up the old threads, and in less than no time be an oiled, efficient cog in the dear old machine?

  If so, you might get
something of a shock, which brings us to this story, and the experiences of Ludovic Travers.

  Perhaps you have met Ludovic Travers before. You recall his six-foot-two of lamp-post leanness, his huge horn-rims; his diffident, attractive smile, dislike of conventions, insatiable curiosity, eccentricities that never concealed good breeding, and the whole man permeated, as it were, with a likeableness that never lost a friend or made an enemy.

  In the Great War private influence managed to conceal queer eyesight, and Ludovic Travers became a full-blown private of infantry. As a sergeant in 1915 he won a Military Medal at Loos. Then he accepted a commission and 1917 found him a Company Commander in Egypt. Then dysentery knocked him over pretty badly, and when at last he left a convalescent camp he was offered the job of adjutant to a Prisoner of War Camp. There, until the end of the war, he stayed.

  It was not till the winter of 1919 that he came home, At the death of his father he came into a considerable sum of money, but his way of life remained the unobtrusive same, except perhaps that he liked to drive a really good car. He wrote those well-known economic essays—pills of shrewdly informed innards with whimsical chocolate coating—and was recognised as a financial expert of some importance. Something in that line brought him into contact with Scotland Yard, and, both before and after his marriage with Bernice Haire he was one of those unofficial experts whom the Yard has always on tap.

  But it needed no special prescience on the part of Travers to recognise long before it came that war was inevitable. Like millions more, he was unsettled by perpetual crises, moved to fierce indignations, and anxious to do something about it all. The call for ex-officers gave him his chance. He passed his medical—bat-eyes and all—and was esteemed fit for any home service. Then came the great day when he came back to the flat to find Bernice flourishing a letter.