Bodies from the Library 3. Группа авторов
news, Colonel,’ he said. ‘The kid’s got through the night. They say he’ll pull through now. I won’t forget this. It’ll be a big thing for me.’
‘Good,’ smiled Gore. ‘But don’t forget the little things. You never know …’
Whatever it proved for Inspector Clutsam, the Yard maintained a modest silence concerning the affair. But Lady Isaacson was quite frank about it in a little chat which she had with Gore next day. In their anxiety to identify her male companion in the night of the smash (they suspected that he had been the driver of the car), Ruddell and Clutsam had undoubtedly overdone their repeated examinations of the lady, who had determined to ‘get some of her own back’. Thornton, a well-known flying man and, as Gore suspected, the hero of the ‘smash up’, arranged the plan and enlisted the necessary aides, three reckless airmen. An imitation necklace was procured and a vacant office opposite Thornton’s taken; a bogus robbery of the real necklace was actually carried out, leaving careful clues as bait for the police. The next step was to enlist Messrs Gore and Tolley as stool pigeons, and get Ruddell to their offices at a known hour. At three o’clock on the Monday afternoon the lift had been put out of action, Ruddell was in Gore’s office, and everything was ready.
As he went down the stairs, Ruddell had been met on the third floor by a young man who, under the pretence of having some information to give him, had persuaded him to enter ‘Welder’s’ offices. There, in an inner room, the fake necklace had been produced and had completely deceived the Chief Inspector. While he was examining it, Thornton and his fellow conspirators had entered the outer room. As Ruddell came out, they caught him neatly with a noosed rope, gagged him, and handcuffed him—not without a severe struggle, despite the odds—and, when the building was quiet, had lowered him in a sack to the Yard, and quite simply carted him off to Bath. There he had been transferred to a big passenger plane and carried off a little before midnight to the lonely old farm on Salisbury Plain which had been rented for the ‘stunt’.
The mysterious windfalls were simply accounted for. Above the Plain Thornton had had the pleasant idea of slinging the unfortunate Chief Inspector over the side of the plane by his waist and legs. In due course Ruddell’s pockets had emptied themselves of their heavier contents, while the rope holding one leg had slipped and had pulled off one of his boots.
It had not been intended to carry the torture of the dripping drop to any serious point. The prisoner had been visited twice a day and was to have been released on the Friday. Lady Isaacson, who had made a personal inspection of her victim, was quite satisfied that she had got more than her own back in return for her ruffled self-respect.
‘I’ll say this for the brute,’ she laughed, ‘he never squealed from start to finish. Look here, what put you on to us?’
Gore rose, smiling, to finish the interview.
‘Oh, one or two little things,’ he said.
‘Lynn Brock’ was one of several pseudonyms used by the Irish writer, Alister McAlister (1877–1943). Born in Dublin, McAlister was educated at Clongowes College, a Jesuit school in County Kildare once attended by James Joyce. After school he gained a scholarship to the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin and on graduating in 1899 with a First in Ancient Classics, he set about becoming a playwright while working as a clerk at his alma mater. Although McAlister had some success with short stories, his first three playscripts were rejected—one by W. B. Yeats—but perseverance paid off and his first play was presented—as by ‘Henry Alexander’—on 12 May 1905 by Edward Compton’s Comedy Company. A one act comedy, The Desperate Lover is set in a bookshop in the eighteenth century, and its original cast included Compton’s son Montague, later to become rather better known as the novelist Compton Mackenzie.
McAlister was nothing if not bold. After seeing the actor-manager Lena Ashwell perform in London, he sent her The Desperate Lover suggesting she might like to present it. Ashwell was impressed and commissioned a second play from him—the result, a three-act melodrama called Irene Wycherley, opened in 1907 at the Kingsway Theatre in London with Ashwell in the title role. The ‘horribly grim but splendidly acted’ play, credited to ‘Anthony P. Wharton’, was a huge success, even more so when it toured the following year with the celebrated actress Mrs Patrick Campbell in the lead, and the Irish Independent hailed Wharton as ‘a brilliant fellow, a person of intellect, a writer of promise’.
McAlister’s next play was A Nocturne, staged in 1908 as one of a quartet of one-act plays, and it was followed in 1912 by a ‘most delightful comedy’, At the Barn, starring the celebrated singer Marie Tempest. At the Barn was also a success and in 1921 a cinema adaptation appeared under the title Two Weeks. However, his next play—Sylvia Greer—was a flop, which McAlister appears to have anticipated because he did not allow his name to appear in any advertisements or even outside the theatre. In 1913 there was a brief run of a one-act thriller, 13 Simon Street, and in 1915 A Guardian Angel and Benvenuto Cellini.
By this time McAlister was serving in France with the Motor Machine Gun Service of the British Army. He was wounded twice and in 1916, while he was lying in a Dublin hospital, his next play, inspired by the Maybrick case, was staged; the script of The Riddle was co-credited to another writer, Morley Roberts, although he had done little more than edit McAlister’s original script. The production had a strong cast—including the playwright Dion Boucicault as a Machiavellian barrister and, as a woman once accused of murder, the great Irene Vanbrugh. The notices were good but McAlister was unhappy with Roberts’ changes and, around a year later, the play was re-staged in Dublin in its original form, this time credited solely to ‘Anthony P. Wharton’ and with the original title, The Ledbetter Case. McAlister must have been very disappointed that this—the original version of his play—was less well received than The Riddle.
Although Irene Wycherley and other plays continued to be staged, McAlister’s reputation as a playwright was beginning to fade. He therefore began writing fiction again, with short stories appearing in Pearson’s Magazine and the Empire Review. His first novel, Joan of Overbarrow (1921) was a comedic romance—‘If I had to choose between marrying you and dying in a pigsty, I should prefer to die in a pigsty’. Later books were more serious. The Man on the Hill (1923) anticipates the General Strike of 1926 while Be Good, Sweet Maid (1924) is a viciously misogynistic study of a woman novelist. In a lighter vein, Evil Communications (1926) is a series of sketches providing ‘a rollicking study of village life’, and The Two of Diamonds (1926) is a historical romance set in Second Empire France.
In the 1920s, crime fiction was very much considered a lesser branch of literature and for his first mystery, McAlister—then working as a publican in Surrey—adopted a new pseudonym, ‘Lynn Brock’. His first Brock novel, The Deductions of Colonel Gore (1924), introduced Wickham Gore, a retired soldier turned explorer who returns from Africa to discover blackmail and murder among his friends. In an overcrowded market, Colonel Gore was an immediate success. His first case was followed up by a golfing mystery, Colonel Gore’s Second Case (1925), and the extraordinary Colonel Gore’s Third Case: The Kink (1925). Over the next twenty years, McAlister produced four more Colonel Gore books including The Mendip Mystery (1929), its sequel QED (1930) and the multiple murder mystery The Stoat (1940). The Lynn Brock name also appeared on some standalone novels, perhaps the best known being the revenge thriller Nightmare (1932).
At heart McAlister was always a playwright, and he wrote two final plays, presented as by Lynn Brock: in 1929 a farce called Needles and Pins, which received poor reviews; and in 1931, an adaptation of The Mendip Mystery.
One of only two uncollected short stories to feature Colonel Gore, ‘Some Little Things’ was first published in the Radio Times on 21 December 1928. I am grateful to the bookseller and archivist Jamie Sturgeon for drawing it to my attention.