The Mystery of the Skeleton Key. Bernard Capes
jobs. A promised Army commission failed to materialise; he spent an unhappy time in a tea-broker’s office; he studied art at the Slade School but, despite a lifelong enjoyment of painting and illustrating, it did not result in a career.
Things picked up for him in 1888 when he went to work for the publishers Eglington and Co., where he succeeded Clement Scott as editor of the magazine The Theatre.
At this point in his career, he made his first attempts at novel writing, publishing two under the pseudonym ‘Bevis Cane’: The Haunted Tower (1888) and The Missing Man (1889), the latter published by Eglington. They did not do well enough for him to use the ‘Bevis Cane’ name again.
Eglington and Co. went out of business in 1892 and Capes was up against it. Among his various ventures was a failed attempt at, of all things, breeding rabbits.
At last, aged 43, Capes found his true vocation. In 1897 he entered a competition for new authors organised by the Chicago Record. Capes came second with his novel The Mill of Silence, published in Chicago the same year.
He entered the competition again in 1898 when the Chicago Record repeated it. Capes hit the jackpot. His entry, The Lake of Wine—a long, macabre historical thriller about a fabulous ruby bearing the name of the book’s title—won the competition. It was published that year and Capes was a full-time writer from then on.
And write he did. Out flooded short stories, articles, newspaper editorials, reviews and novels, including two more in 1898.
Bernard Capes married Rosalie Amos and they moved to Winchester, where he spent the rest of his life. They had three children. His son Renalt became a writer late in life, and his grandson Ian Burns carries on the Capes writing tradition as the author of the children’s book Scratcher.
With nearly 40 books already to his name from a variety publishers, Capes’ historical adventure, Where England Sets Her Feet, was published by William Collins Sons & Co. in April 1918, with a second book, The Skeleton Key, already under contract. The significance of this new ‘criminal romance’ to the 100-year-old publishing house was yet to be realised. Modestly publicised as ‘a story dealing with crime committed in the grounds of a country house, and the subsequent efforts of a clever young detective to discover its perpetrator’, it coincided with a burgeoning post-war fashion for detective fiction. Within a few months of its publication in the spring of 1919, a flood of unsolicited crime-story manuscripts poured into the Scottish publishers’ Pall Mall office, and Collins acted quickly to capitalise on this new-found demand for detective stories.
Sadly, Capes himself never knew of The Skeleton Key’s success, for he was struck down by the influenza epidemic that swept Europe at the end of World War I. A short illness was followed by heart failure and he died in Winchester on 1 November 1918. He was 64 and had enjoyed only 20 years of writing.
His widow organised a plaque for him in Winchester Cathedral, among the likes of Izaak Walton and Jane Austen. It can still be seen, next to the entrance to the crypt.
Capes wrote historical adventures and romances, mystery novels, crime stories and many fine short stories, a lot of them dark and sinister tales (he was quite fond of werewolves). As a great fan of Wagner, he wrote a novel, The Romance of Lohengrin, published in 1905. At his memorial service in the cathedral in 1919, the organist played Wagner in his honour.
Published shortly after Capes’ death, complete with a hastily commissioned introduction by G. K. Chesterton that added to its notoriety, The Skeleton Key had already been reissued six times when, ten years later, Sir Godfrey Collins launched the company’s first dedicated crime imprint, The Detective Story Club—‘for detective connoisseurs’—a mixture of genre classics and cheap reprints. It was only natural that Capes’ book should be one of the launch titles for the new list, and so in July 1929 it appeared in its eighth edition alongside five other titles, priced only sixpence, with a dramatic jacket painting and an extended title intended to increase further the book’s popularity: The Mystery of the Skeleton Key.
By 1930, the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction was well underway, and Bernard Capes’ novel began to disappear as more and more inventive detective stories appeared on the market. In his 1972 book, Bloody Murder, Julian Symons called The Skeleton Key ‘a neglected tour de force’, but it’s only now, more than 40 years later, that Capes’ landmark novel has found its way back into print.
The story introduces the detective Baron Le Sage, who unravels a rather complicated murder. Le Sage is in the line of Robert Barr’s detective Eugene Valmont (who had appeared in 1906), and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot (who was yet to be created), with a touch of Dr Fell, and is one of Capes’ most interesting creations. As one character remarks, ‘Chess is the Baron’s business.’ He might have appeared again if Capes had survived longer. It’s good to see him, and Bernard Capes, back at work again.
HUGH LAMB
February 2015
MRS BERNARD CAPES wishes to express her gratitude to Mr Chesterton for his appreciative introduction to her husband’s last work, and to Mr A. K. Cook for his invaluable assistance in preparing it for the press.
Winchester
To introduce the last book by the late Bernard Capes is a sad sort of honour in more ways than one; for not only was his death untimely and unexpected, but he had a mind of that fertile type which must always leave behind it, with the finished life, a sense of unfinished labour. From the first his prose had a strong element of poetry, which an appreciative reader could feel even more, perhaps, when it refined a frankly modern and even melodramatic theme, like that of this mystery story, than when it gave dignity, as in Our Lady of Darkness, to more tragic or more historic things. It may seem a paradox to say that he was insufficiently appreciated because he did popular things well. But it is true to say that he always gave a touch of distinction to a detective story or a tale of adventure; and so gave it where it was not valued, because it was not expected. In a sense, in this department of his work at least, he carried on the tradition of the artistic conscience of Stevenson; the technical liberality of writing a penny-dreadful so as to make it worth a pound. In his short stories, as in his historical studies, he did indeed permit himself to be poetic in a more direct and serious fashion; but in his touch upon such tales as this the same truth may be traced. It is a good general rule that a poet can be known not only in his poems, but in the very titles of his poems. In the case of many works of Bernard Capes, The Lake of Wine, for instance, the title is itself a poem. And that case would alone illustrate what I mean about a certain transforming individual magic, with which he touched the mere melodrama of mere modernity. Numberless novels of crime have been concerned with a lost or stolen jewel; and The Lake of Wine was merely the name of a ruby. Yet even the name is original, exactly in the detail that is hardly ever original. Hundreds of such precious stones have been scattered through sensational fiction; and hundreds of them have been called ‘The Sun of the Sultan’ or ‘The Eye of Vishnu’ or ‘The Star of Bengal’. But even in such a trifle as the choice of the title, an indescribable and individual fancy is felt; a sub-conscious dream of some sea like a sunset, red as blood and intoxicant as wine. This is but a small example; but the same element clings, as if unconsciously, to the course of the same story. Many another eighteenth century hero has ridden on a long road to a lonely house; but Bernard Capes, by something fine and personal in the treatment, does succeed in suggesting that at least along that particular road, to that particular house, no man had ever ridden before. We might put this truth flippantly, and therefore falsely, by saying he put superior work into inferior works. I should not admit the distinction; for I deny that there is necessarily anything inferior in sensationalism, when it can really awaken sensations. But the truer way of stating it would perhaps