Crystal Beads Murder Read online

  ANNIE HAYNES

  The Crystal Beads Murder

  “Early this morning a gruesome discovery was made by a gardener employed at Holford Hall in Loamshire...”

  Robert Saunderson’s murdered body is found in the summer house at Lord Medchester’s country mansion. Some crystal beads, broken off a necklace and found on the scene, form the primary clue. But where is the necklace, and whose could it be?

  Detective inspector Stoddart and his assistant Harbord have to unravel a mystery that cost two men their lives and destroyed the reputation of others.

  The Crystal Beads Murder, first published in 1930, was the last of the Inspector Stoddart mysteries, and Annie Haynes’ final book overall. She died, after a long illness, before completing it and it was finished by an unknown friend and fellow writer. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  “An uncommonly well-constructed tale... throughout the reader is kept continually on the ‘qui vive’” Western Australian

  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 had 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 Garden
s, 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 Crystal Beads Murder

  The Bodley Head published Annie Haynes’ detective novel The Crime at Tattenham Corner just three weeks before the author passed away, on 30 March 1929. Haynes’ death from heart failure at the age of 63 likely was not entirely unexpected to those who knew her, given her long illness. However, it presented the publishers with a dilemma. In addition to an eleventh mystery that Haynes had completed before her death (which, under the title Who Killed Charmian Karslake?, was published in the UK in the fall of 1929), there was an unfinished manuscript, which concerned a fatal shooting in a summer-house and a broken strand of crystal beads. Haynes at the time of her death having finished not quite fifteen manuscript chapters (about half the story), The Bodley Head was compelled, in order to have one last Annie Haynes mystery to put before her sizable reading public in 1930, to find a crime writer who could complete the book.

  Haynes’ surviving companion, Ada Heather-Bigg, wrote a moving foreword to The Crystal Beads Murder, in which she discussed not only Haynes’ struggles against physical adversity but also the matter of the authorship of her final novel. “One of Miss Haynes’ friends, also a popular writer of this type of fiction, offered to undertake the work of completion,” Heather-Bigg explained, “and it says much for her skill that she has independently arrived at Miss Haynes’s own solution of the mystery, which was known only to myself.” This author friend has never been formally identified. Prominent English women detective novelists at the time of the completion of The Crystal Beads Murder in 1929-30 included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson), A. Fielding (Dorothy Feilding), Molly Thynne and Margaret Cole. Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers seem unlikely candidates, given that had either woman done the deed it would likely be known by now. However, there are certain clues to the mystery woman’s identity.

  Stylistically, the use in the second half of the novel of the phrase “flotsam and jetsam” suggests to me that the author might be Lucy Beatrice Malleson (still at this time a relatively inexperienced crime writer), “flotsam and jetsam” being a term Malleson recurrently used in her fiction. After writing two non-series mysteries, published in 1925 and 1927 under the pseudonym J. Kilmeny Keith, Malleson launched her Anthony Gilbert pseudonym in 1927 with The Tragedy at Freyne. Remaining single all her life, Malleson wrote authoritatively about the lives of England’s so-called “superfluous women,” a subject that would have been of interest to Annie Haynes and Ada Heather-Bigg as well. My suggestion is conjectural, to be sure, yet whoever completed The Crystal Beads Murder, she made good work of her effort.

  The novel opens with the orphaned Anne Courtenay being pressured by a debauched swine, William Saunderson, into acceptance of an unwanted marriage proposal. Her brother Harold Courtenay is in deep financial debt to Saunderson, a familiar presence in horseracing circles, though “[n]obody knew exactly who he was or where he came from.” For their part, the Courtenays are impecunious but well-connected socially, being cousins of Lord Medchester. Anne in fact is engaged to Lord Medchester’s horse trainer, Michael Burford, “second son of old Sir William Burford and half-brother of the present baronet”; but Saunderson has no intention of letting that fact stand in his way.

  When Saunderson is found murdered in the summer-house of Holford Hall, Scotland Yard’s Detective-Inspector William Stoddart and his redoubtable assistant Alfred Harbord are called into the case by the Loamshire constabulary. They confront a sizeable cast of suspects, including Lord Medchester’s wife, Minnie, said to have had “a distinct penchant for Saunderson.” But what of the three white crystal beads, linked by a thin, gold chain, that Harbord finds in Saunderson’s overcoat pocket? Lady Medchester scoffs at the idea that she might have owned such a cheap trinket, “though so many people wear this sort of thing nowadays”; and Anne Courtenay produces for police inspection her own crystal bead necklace, quite unbroken. Just what are Stoddart and Harbord to make of the cryptic crystal beads?

  Annie Haynes’ half of The Crystal Beads Murder is composed in the author’s best vein, with intriguing plot complications and interesting characters capturing the readers fancy. In Joseph Wilton, the “clean-looking, clean-shaven” Holford Hall gardener in “whole and tidy” working clothes who discovered Saunderson’s corpse in the summer-house, one glimpses sturdy Victorian-era Midlanders who worked for the author’s Scottish-born grandfather Montgomery Henderson, the highly-respected superintendent of the gardens at Coleorton Hall in Leicestershire. The novel’s summer-house crime setting also recalls England’s infamous Edwardian-era Luard murder case. Two decades previous to the composition of The Crystal Beads Murder, before her crippling rheumatoid arthritis made such activity unthinkable, Haynes had cycled some thirty miles from her home near Hyde Park in London to Ightham, Kent, to inspect “La Casa,” the summer-house where in 1908 Caroline Luard was found, like the fictional Robert Saunderson, slain by a single gunshot wound.

  Haynes lived long enough to introduce the colorfully vulgar variety performer Tottie Delauney to readers of The Crystal Beads Murder, and she nearly completed the inquest scene in chapter fifteen. In the last eleven chapters of the novel, however, the keen Haynes reader may detect certain differences in narrative style, such as a comparatively greater reliance on authorial voice rather than dialogue. Nevertheless, the new author accurately deduced Haynes’s intended murderer, as Ada Heather-Bigg noted in her foreword to the novel, and she finished her challenging task quite creditably. Haynes’ final mystery is, as one reviewer noted, “uncommonly well-constructed”; and it stands as a fitting tribute to the career of a Golden Age mystery writer who overcame tragic physical limitation to achieve true distinction in her chosen form of fictional endeavor. “She wrote in pain, and kept her head clear,” admiringly observed the British writer and critic Charles Williams of Annie Haynes after her death: “could any genius ask a nobler epitaph.”

  Curtis Evans
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  FOREWORD

  This, the last of twelve mystery stories written by the late Annie Haynes – who died last year – was left unfinished. One of Miss Haynes’s friends, also a popular writer of this type of fiction, offered to undertake the work of completion, and it says much for her skill that she has independently arrived at Miss Haynes’s own solution of the mystery, which was known only to myself.

  It is not generally known that for the last fifteen years of her life Miss Haynes was in constant pain and writing itself was a considerable effort. Her courage in facing her illness was remarkable, and the fact that she was handicapped not only by the pain but also by the helplessness of her malady greatly enhances the merit of her achievements. It was impossible for her to go out into the world for fresh material for her books, her only journeys being from her bedroom to her study. The enforced inaction was the harder to bear in her case, as before her illness she was extremely energetic. Her intense interest in crime and criminal psychology led her into the most varied activities, such as cycling miles to visit the scene of the Luard Murder, pushing her way into the cellar of 39 Hilldrop Crescent, where the remains of Belle Elmore were discovered, and attending the Crippen trial.

  It would be a dark and sombre picture if it were not mentioned how this struggle with cruel circumstances was materially lightened by the warmth of friendships existing between Miss Haynes and her fellow authors and by the sympathetic and friendly relations between her and her publishers.

  Ada Heather-Bigg, 1930

  CHAPTER 1

  “My hat! Nan, I tell you it is the chance of a lifetime. Battledore is a dead cert. Old Tim Ranger says he is the best colt he ever had in his stable. Masterman gave a thousand guineas for him as a yearling. He’d have won the Derby in a canter if he had been entered.”