Crime at Tattenham Corner Read online

  ANNIE HAYNES

  The Crime at Tattenham Corner

  The body lay face downwards in a foot of water at the bottom of the ditch. Up to the present it has not been identified. But a card was found in the pocket with the name of –

  The grisly discovery was overshadowed in the public imagination by Derby Day, the most prestigious event in the English horse-racing calendar. But Peep o’ Day, the popular favourite for the Derby and owned by the murdered man, won’t run now. Under Derby rules, the death means automatic disqualification.

  Did someone find an ingenious if ruthless way to stop the horse from competing? Or does the solution to the demise of Sir John Burslem lie away from the racetrack? The thoughtful Inspector Stoddart starts to investigate in a crowded field of sinister suspects and puzzling diversions.

  The Crime at Tattenham Corner was the second of the four Inspector Stoddart mysteries, first published in 1928. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  “We not only encounter thrilling surprises but are introduced to many admirably life-like characters. Miss Haynes is here at her best. Excellent as a detective tale, the book is also a charming novel.” Spectator

  The Mystery of the Missing Author

  Annie Haynes and Her Golden Age Detective Fiction

  The psychological enigma of Agatha Christie’s notorious 1926 vanishing has continued to intrigue Golden Age mystery fans to the present day. The Queen of Crime’s eleven-day disappearing act is nothing, however, compared to the decades-long disappearance, in terms of public awareness, of between-the-wars mystery writer Annie Haynes (1865-1929), author of a series of detective novels published between 1923 and 1930 by Agatha Christie’s original English publisher, The Bodley Head. Haynes’s books went out of print in the early Thirties, not long after her death in 1929, and her reputation among classic detective fiction readers, high in her lifetime, did not so much decline as dematerialize. When, in 2013, I first wrote a piece about Annie Haynes’ work, I knew of only two other living persons besides myself who had read any of her books. Happily, Dean Street Press once again has come to the rescue of classic mystery fans seeking genre gems from the Golden Age, and is republishing all Haynes’ mystery novels. Now that her crime fiction is coming back into print, the question naturally arises: Who Was Annie Haynes? Solving the mystery of this forgotten author’s lost life has taken leg work by literary sleuths on two continents (my thanks for their assistance to Carl Woodings and Peter Harris).

  Until recent research uncovered new information about Annie Haynes, almost nothing about her was publicly known besides the fact of her authorship of twelve mysteries during the Golden Age of detective fiction. Now we know that she led an altogether intriguing life, too soon cut short by disability and death, which took her from the isolation of the rural English Midlands in the nineteenth century to the cultural high life of Edwardian London. Haynes was born in 1865 in the Leicestershire town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, the first child of ironmonger Edwin Haynes and Jane (Henderson) Haynes, daughter of Montgomery Henderson, longtime superintendent of the gardens at nearby Coleorton Hall, seat of the Beaumont baronets. After her father left his family, young Annie resided with her grandparents at the gardener’s cottage at Coleorton Hall, along with her mother and younger brother. Here Annie doubtlessly obtained an acquaintance with the ways of the country gentry that would serve her well in her career as a genre fiction writer.

  We currently know nothing else of Annie Haynes’ life in Leicestershire, where she still resided (with her mother) in 1901, but by 1908, when Haynes was in her early forties, she was living in London with Ada Heather-Bigg (1855-1944) at the Heather-Bigg family home, located halfway between Paddington Station and Hyde Park at 14 Radnor Place, London. One of three daughters of Henry Heather-Bigg, a noted pioneer in the development of orthopedics and artificial limbs, Ada Heather-Bigg was a prominent Victorian and Edwardian era feminist and social reformer. In the 1911 British census entry for 14 Radnor Place, Heather-Bigg, a “philanthropist and journalist,” is listed as the head of the household and Annie Haynes, a “novelist,” as a “visitor,” but in fact Haynes would remain there with Ada Heather-Bigg until Haynes’ death in 1929.

  Haynes’ relationship with Ada Heather-Bigg introduced the aspiring author to important social sets in England’s great metropolis. Though not a novelist herself, Heather-Bigg was an important figure in the city’s intellectual milieu, a well-connected feminist activist of great energy and passion who believed strongly in the idea of women attaining economic independence through remunerative employment. With Ada Heather-Bigg behind her, Annie Haynes’s writing career had powerful backing indeed. Although in the 1911 census Heather-Bigg listed Haynes’ occupation as “novelist,” it appears that Haynes did not publish any novels in book form prior to 1923, the year that saw the appearance of The Bungalow Mystery, which Haynes dedicated to Heather-Bigg. However, Haynes was a prolific producer of newspaper serial novels during the second decade of the twentieth century, penning such works as Lady Carew’s Secret, Footprints of Fate, A Pawn of Chance, The Manor Tragedy and many others.

  Haynes’ twelve Golden Age mystery novels, which appeared in a tremendous burst of creative endeavor between 1923 and 1930, like the author’s serial novels retain, in stripped-down form, the emotionally heady air of the nineteenth-century triple-decker sensation novel, with genteel settings, shocking secrets, stormy passions and eternal love all at the fore, yet they also have the fleetness of Jazz Age detective fiction. Both in their social milieu and narrative pace Annie Haynes’ detective novels bear considerable resemblance to contemporary works by Agatha Christie; and it is interesting to note in this regard that Annie Haynes and Agatha Christie were the only female mystery writers published by The Bodley Head, one of the more notable English mystery imprints in the early Golden Age. “A very remarkable feature of recent detective fiction,” observed the Illustrated London News in 1923, “is the skill displayed by women in this branch of story-telling. Isabel Ostrander, Carolyn Wells, Annie Haynes and last, but very far from least, Agatha Christie, are contesting the laurels of Sherlock Holmes’ creator with a great spirit, ingenuity and success.” Since Ostrander and Wells were American authors, this left Annie Haynes, in the estimation of the Illustrated London News, as the main British female competitor to Agatha Christie. (Dorothy L. Sayers, who, like Haynes, published her debut mystery novel in 1923, goes unmentioned.) Similarly, in 1925 The Sketch wryly noted that “[t]ired men, trotting home at the end of an imperfect day, have been known to pop into the library and ask for an Annie Haynes. They have not made a mistake in the street number. It is not a cocktail they are asking for….”

  Twenties critical opinion adjudged that Annie Haynes’ criminous concoctions held appeal not only for puzzle fiends impressed with the “considerable craftsmanship” of their plots (quoting from the Sunday Times review of The Bungalow Mystery), but also for more general readers attracted to their purely literary qualities. “Not only a crime story of merit, but also a novel which will interest readers to whom mystery for its own sake has little appeal,” avowed The Nation of Haynes’ The Secret of Greylands, while the New Statesman declared of The Witness on the Roof that “Miss Haynes has a sense of character; her people are vivid and not the usual puppets of detective fiction.” Similarly, the Bookman deemed the characters in Haynes’ The Abbey Court Murder “much truer to life than is the case in many sensational stories” and The Spectator concluded of The Crime at Tattenham Corner, “Excellent as a detective tale, the book also is a charming novel.”

  Sadly, Haynes’ triumph as a detective novelist proved short lived. Around 1914, about the time of the outbreak of the Great War, Haynes ha
d been stricken with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis that left her in constant pain and hastened her death from heart failure in 1929, when she was only 63. Haynes wrote several of her detective novels on fine days in Kensington Gardens, where she was wheeled from 14 Radnor Place in a bath chair, but in her last years she was able only to travel from her bedroom to her study. All of this was an especially hard blow for a woman who had once been intensely energetic and quite physically active.

  In a foreword to The Crystal Beads Murder, the second of Haynes’ two posthumously published mysteries, Ada Heather-Bigg noted that Haynes’ difficult daily physical struggle “was materially lightened by the warmth of friendships” with other authors and by the “sympathetic and friendly relations between her and her publishers.” In this latter instance Haynes’ experience rather differed from that of her sister Bodleian, Agatha Christie, who left The Bodley Head on account of what she deemed an iniquitous contract that took unjust advantage of a naive young author. Christie moved, along with her landmark detective novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), to Collins and never looked back, enjoying ever greater success with the passing years.

  At the time Christie crossed over to Collins, Annie Haynes had only a few years of life left. After she died at 14 Radnor Place on 30 March 1929, it was reported in the press that “many people well-known in the literary world” attended the author’s funeral at St. Michaels and All Angels Church, Paddington, where her sermon was delivered by the eloquent vicar, Paul Nichols, brother of the writer Beverley Nichols and dedicatee of Haynes’ mystery novel The Master of the Priory; yet by the time of her companion Ada Heather-Bigg’s death in 1944, Haynes and her once highly-praised mysteries were forgotten. (Contrastingly, Ada Heather-Bigg’s name survives today in the University College of London’s Ada Heather-Bigg Prize in Economics.) Only three of Haynes’ novels were ever published in the United States, and she passed away less than a year before the formation of the Detection Club, missing any chance of being invited to join this august body of distinguished British detective novelists. Fortunately, we have today entered, when it comes to classic mystery, a period of rediscovery and revival, giving a reading audience a chance once again, after over eighty years, to savor the detective fiction fare of Annie Haynes. Bon appétit!

  The Crime at Tattenham Corner

  Adjoining the entrance to England’s famed Epsom Downs Racecourse in Surrey is the village of Tattenham Corner. For many decades horseracing enthusiasts have eagerly alighted at Tattenham Corner railway station to attend the Derby Stakes. Just over a century ago, on 4 June 1913, however, appalled Derby spectators witnessed something deeply shocking take place on the track. Suffragette Emily Davison dashed onto the course, directly in the path of Anmer, King George V’s colt, colliding with horse and rider. Davison, who suffered a fractured skull and internal injuries, died four days later—a martyr, in the admiring eyes of her co-activists, to the cause of woman suffrage.

  Mystery writer Annie Haynes’ companion, Ada Heather-Bigg, was, like the martyred Emily Davison, a firm believer in the principle of gender equality, including woman suffrage. Back in 1881 Heather Bigg had made newspaper headlines in the United Kingdom and the United States when she won the University College of London’s Joseph Hume Scholarship in Political Economy, defeating all her male opponents for the prestigious award. Two years before the so-called “Suffragette Derby” of 1913, Heather-Bigg, when filling out the “infirmity” category on the British census form, underscored the word dumb, pointedly explaining in the designated spaces for herself and Haynes, as well as those for the three women servants residing in their household, without a vote.

  Presumably Haynes shared her companion’s views on woman suffrage, but it seems doubtful that the detective novelist would herself have endorsed Emily Davison’s particular form of direct action. One of Haynes’ great personal interests in life was racing; and she very much enjoyed having a bit of a flutter on the horses. On the occasion of the 1923 Liverpool Cup, Haynes nearly bet on a specific horse due to a recent dream she had had, in which she had opened the Bible to the following passage: They shall shout out of their lips and their tongues shall be as poisoned arrows. Upon awakening from her dream she looked at the list of entrants in the Liverpool Cup and found a horse named Poisoned Arrow, running at 12-1. In spite of this striking coincidence, the author shied from betting on a horse at such long odds; yet in the event Poisoned Arrow indeed won the race, just as Haynes’ dream had foretold, in a most impressive upset, with the 2-1 favorite, Pharos, coming in third.

  Having narrowly missed her chance at winning riches by descrying the mysteries of the racing form, Haynes at least was able to receive income from her popular mystery novels, in two of which--The Crime at Tattenham Corner (1929) and The Crystal Beads Murder (1930)—she drew on her knowledge of the horseracing milieu. In The Crime at Tattenham Corner, Haynes’s series sleuth, Detective-Inspector William Stoddart, is tasked, along with his steadfast assistant Alfred Harbord, with investigating the shooting death of Sir John Burslem, financial magnate and owner of the racehorse Peep o’ Day. Burslem’s body was found in a ditch in Hughlin’s Wood, near Tattenham Corner, on the very day of the running of the Epsom Derby, in which Burslem’s horse Peep o’ Day was, until its owner’s sudden death, the favorite (on Burslem’s death, Peep o’ Day is automatically scratched).

  Suspicion focuses on Sir Charles Stanyard, the sporting baronet, whose horse Perlyon was Peep o’ Day’s main rival at the Derby Stakes. Stanyard also is known to have been jilted by Sophie Carlford (youngest daughter of Viscount Carlford), who then became the second—and much younger—wife of Sir John Burslem. Lady Burslem certainly acts as if she has something to hide, as does Sir John’s valet, Ellerby, who vanishes soon after the murder. Pamela Burslem, Sir John’s daughter from his first marriage, needs no convincing from anyone on the subject, insinuating to all and sundry that Sir Charles, likely with Lady Burslem’s connivance, was responsible for her father’s death. But just what does Mrs. James Burslem (“Mrs. Jimmy”), wife of Sir John’s absent Tibetan explorer brother, know about the affair, and what precisely can be reliably divined from the séances performed by Miss Winifred Margetson, Mrs. Jimmy’s American spiritualist friend? (This aspect of the novel may be a nod to the author’s’ prophetic horseracing dream.) Much investigation must be done by Stoddart and Harbord--not to mention a little romancing, strictly in the line of duty, on the inspector’s part--before an arrest can be made. “As we follow their disentangling of the mystery,” noted the Spectator in 1929, “we not only encounter thrilling surprises but are introduced to many admirably life-like characters.” Can you solve The Crime at Tattenham Corner before Annie Haynes’ series sleuths? Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets….

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER 1

  The big clock outside struck 7.30. Early as it was, Inspector Stoddart was already in his room at Scotland Yard.

  He looked up impatiently as his most trusted subordinate, Alfred Harbord, entered after a sharp preliminary tap.

  “Yes, sir. You sent for me?”

  The inspector nodded. “You are detailed for special duty at once. We are starting in the runabout immediately, so if you want to send a message –” He nodded at the telephone.

  Harbord grinned. “My people are pretty well used to my irregular habits, thank you, sir.”

  The inspector rose. “The sooner we are off the better, then.” He handed Harbord a typewritten paper. “Wired up,” he said laconically, “from the Downs.”

  Mysterious death at an early hour this morning. Some platelayers on their way to work in the cutting beyond Hughlin’s Wood, not far from Tattenham Corner, found the body of a man of middle age in a ditch. He is evidently of the better class and supposed to be a stranger in the district. The body lay face downwards in a foot of water at the bottom of the ditch or dyke. Up to the present it has not been identified. But a card was found in the pocket with the name of –

  The corner o
f the paper had been torn off, evidently on purpose. Harbord read it over.

  “Hughlin’s Wood,” he repeated. “I seem to know the name. But I can’t think where the place is.”

  “Not a great many miles from Epsom,” the inspector said, as he locked his desk and dropped the keys into his pocket. “Centuries ago, Hughlin’s Wood used to stretch all round and over that part of the Downs, but it has dwindled to a few trees near Hughlin’s village. These trees go by the name of Hughlin’s Wood still. I can tell you the rest as we go along.”

  Harbord followed him in silence to the little two-seater in which the inspector was wont to dash about the country. He was an expert driver, but it needed all his attention to steer his car among the whirl of traffic over Westminster Bridge, passing Waterloo and Lambeth.

  The inspector glanced at “The Horns” as they glided by it. “We will lunch there on the way back, Harbord.”

  He put on speed as they got on the Brixton Road and, passing Kennington Church, tore along through Streatham and Sydenham, and across country until they could feel the fresh air of the Downs in their faces. Then the inspector slackened speed and for the first time looked at his companion.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “What can I make of it?” Harbord fenced. “Except that you would not be going down unless there was more in the summons than meets the eye.”

  Stoddart nodded.

  “The body was found face downwards in the stagnant water of a ditch, but the cause of death was a bullet wound in the head. The man had been thrown into the ditch almost immediately after death. In the pocket have been found a card and a couple of envelopes bearing the name of a man high in the financial world. The markings on the linen, etc., correspond. I know this man fairly well by sight. Therefore I am going down to see whether I can identify the remains. See those Downs –”