Who Killed Charmian Karslake? Read online

  ANNIE HAYNES

  Who Killed Charmian Karslake?

  “Owing to the sudden death of Miss Charmian Karslake this theatre is closed until further notice. Money for tickets already booked will be refunded.”

  Who killed Charmian Karslake, the famous American actress, on the night of the ball at Hepton Abbey? Who was the mysterious Peter Hailsham who had been present at the ball and had since vanished into thin air? What was his connection, if any, with the respectable County family of Penn-Moreton at whose house the murder had taken place?

  How Inspector Stoddart and his assistant Harbord solve these questions, and the surprising discoveries they make in the course of their investigations, form the basis for one of their most devilish mysteries.

  Who Killed Charmian Karslake? is the third of Annie Haynes’ Inspector Stoddart Mysteries. First published in 1929, it was out of print for over 80 years until this new edition, which also features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  “A model detective story... a good mental exercise for the distracted reader who has just received his Super-Tax Demand. (The publishers) have again produced a good book.” London Mercury

  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 wit
h 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!

  Who Killed Charmian Karslake?

  Stately country houses have long been the settings most associated in the minds of mystery fiction readers with Golden Age British detective novels. “How strongly the typical mysteries of interwar years linger in memory, invariably set in large country house...” recalled the late British crime writer P.D. James in Talking about Detective Fiction (2009), her short history of British mystery writing. Although the notion that in the 1920s and 1930s fictional British murders occurred mostly during weekend house parties at the country estates of the landed gentry is an exaggerated one, beguilingly influenced by an affectionate and perhaps in some cases slightly condescending nostalgia, at the height of the Golden Age the detective novelist Annie Haynes set down her own version of the classic country house party mystery in Who Killed Charmian Karslake? (1929), an entertaining novel praised in its day as “an uncommonly well-told murder tale, contrived and worked out with considerable craftsmanship.”

  The country house murder setting in Who Killed Charmian Karslake? is Hepton Abbey, a long-defunct Midlands monastery that for centuries has served as the seat of the Penn-Moreton family. Currently residing at the imposing mansion are Sir Arthur Penn-Moreton, his wife Lady Viva and the couple’s infant son, as well as Sir Arthur’s affably idle half-brother, Dicky Penn-Moreton, and Dicky’s new bride Sadie, daughter of American canned soup magnate Silas P. Juggs. On the fatal night of the Penn-Moreton house party, there naturally are servants in the offing as well, most notably a coquettish French ladies maid, Celestine Dubois, and the Penn-Moreton butler, Brook, who is, Dicky Penn-Moreton jokes, “like Homocea, always on the spot.” (Homocea Touches the Spot and Sooths the Aching Part was the once ubiquitous advertiser’s slogan for this popular Victorian patent medicine.) Additionally there are guests remaining at Hepton Abbey after the dance: prominent barrister John Larpent; his fiancée, Paula Galbraith; and the American stage actress Charmian Karslake, on tour for the first time in England. Most shockingly, the next day the celebrated actress is found murdered in her room at Hepton Abbey and the bedazzling sapphire ball “mascot” she always wore around her neck has vanished. (The ill-omened sapphire was previously owned by “the hapless Princess de Lamballe and the murdered Queen Draga of Serbia, to name just a few of the unfortunate possessors.”)

  Discovering who killed Charmian Karslake is a task that falls to Scotland Yard’s Inspector Stoddart, who once again in his criminal investigation is assisted by his “fidus Achates” from the force, young Alfred Harbord. Stoddart is met with scorn when Silas P. Juggs, a fervently patriotic American dismissive of British gumption, arrives at Hepton Abbey, Juggs bluntly telling the inspector, “I guess you aren’t quite a Sherlock Holmes yet, or you would have laid Charmian Karslake’s murderer by the heels before now.” Yet Stoddart soon unearths suspicious characters not only within the mighty walls of Hepton Abbey, but on the humble streets of Hepton, “the quaintest of old-fashioned villages….nestled under the shadow of the Abbey….” It becomes apparent to Stoddart and Harbord that Charmian Karslake may not have been quite as unacquainted with the locality as she had led people at the house party to believe. Did Miss Karslake have personal connections to Hepton, or even to Hepton Abbey itself? Who was the man at Hepton Abbey whom she was heard to taunt with the query, “Well, Mr. Peter Hailsham, we meet again, do we?”

  One of the interesting aspects of Who Killed Charmian Karslake? lies in the brief discussions that take place between Stoddart and Harbord concerning notorious real life murder cases and the convicted murderers Edith Thompson, Hawley Harvey Crippen, Jack Alfred Field and William Thomas Gray. (The latter pair were found guilty of one of the Twenties “Crumbles murders,” both of which took place on a shingle beach between Eastbourne and Pevensey Bay.) “Some of the worst criminals I have known have been the best looking,” remarks Stoddart at one point. “Look at Mrs. Thompson—face like a flower, some ass said. But it was a flower that did not stick at murder when an unfortunate husband stood in the way.” Annie Haynes’ companion, Ada Heather-Bigg, recalled after the author’s death that Haynes had been intensely interested in “crime and criminal psychology” and that this interest “led her into the most varied activities,” including attending Dr. Crippen’s 1910 murder trial and even boldly “pushing her way into the cellar of 39 Hilldrop Crescent, where the remains of Belle Elmore [Crippen’s wife] were discovered….” A transatlantic ocean voyage made by several of the characters in Who Killed Charmian Karslake? may recall, in a minor degree, the Crippen case to readers’ minds.

  Despite references to grim real life murders, Who Killed Charmian Karslake? mostly remains within the cozy confines of the country house and village world associated so strongly with the Golden Age British detective novel, a world that Haynes herself had once known well. “[T]o the true Heptonian the Penn-Moretons represented the ruling class, all that they knew of rank, or wealth, or culture,” observes the author, who grew up in a gardener’s cottage on the grounds of a Midlands great house, Leiscestershire’s Coleorton Hall, over which the Beaumont baronets had presided in splendor for over three centuries. Yet Haynes allows a few disgruntled characters, having long since departed Hepton (like she herself had long ago left Coleorton village for London), to voice discordant sentiments.

  “Many’s the errand I’ve done for ’em and had a copper chucked to me like as I was a dog,” grumbles an émigré Heptonian of the Penn-Moretons, while another former resident of Hepton grows eloquent as she grouses to Stoddart about the lords of the Midlands village:

  “I suppose you knew them very well, personally, I mean?” the inspector went on.

  “Then there you make a great mistake… The Penn-Moretons were just the little tin gods of the town. I am s
ure people went to church more to see what Lady Penn-Moreton had on and how Sir Arthur was looking than to worship God. In return the Penn-Moretons were very good to us. They gave soup and other delicacies to the inhabitants. I remember when my mother was ill they sent grapes and pheasants. But as for calling upon us or knowing us, why, dear me, they would have thought us mad to expect such a thing. They would bow to us when they met us, but only as a king and queen bow to their subjects. Oh, I have no use for such a place as Hepton with its petty class restrictions.”

  Mrs. Walker was getting breathless and her cheeks were hot as she stopped. Evidently Hepton society and its restrictions were subjects that moved her deeply.

  Did Charmian Karslake’s unnatural death at Hepton Abbey have it roots in old Hepton enmities that were hoped to have been long forgotten? Readers can rest assured that whatever the cause of the killing of Charmian Karslake, the steadfast Inspector Stoddart will find it.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER 1

  “Beastly mess the place seems to be in,” grumbled Sir Arthur Penn-Moreton, looking round the room with a disgusted air.

  “Well, if you will give balls you have to put up with the aftermath,” said Dicky, his younger brother, screwing his monocle in his left eye as he spoke.

  Dicky was already seated at the table devouring kidneys and bacon with apparent relish.

  Sir Arthur glanced at him as he sat down opposite. “You don’t look up to much this morning, Dicky!”

  “How can a chap look up to much when he has sat up to the small hours of the night before, dancing round with a lot of screaming young women, and eating all sorts of indigestible food?” Dicky questioned, taking another helping of kidney. “You don’t look any great shakes yourself for that matter. We are neither of us in our first youth, Arthur, you must remember. Years will tell, you know.”