The Mystery at Stowe. Vernon Loder

       INTRODUCTION

      THE Golden Age of detective fiction is enjoying a renaissance in popularity, demonstrated by the success of various publishing ventures. The British Library Classic Crime series has reissued works by obscure Golden Age authors, such as John Bude, J. Jefferson Farjeon and Alan Melville, with Farjeon’s Mystery in White the surprise best-selling paperback of Christmas 2014. HarperCollins’ major non-fiction study The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards (May 2015) sold out its first printing within a few months, and their new editions of titles from the Detective Story Club, which first flourished back in 1929, are reintroducing a range of once hugely popular crime authors. Along with a number of small independent publishers, notably Black Heath, Coachwhip, Dean Street, Faber, Ostara and The Murder Room, coupled with the rapid growth in modestly priced e-books, these initiatives have led to the emergence of a new and appreciative modern audience for little-known and neglected Golden Age authors who have long been out of print.

      The period between the two World Wars, which Robert Graves called ‘the long week-end’, loosely delineates the boundaries of the Golden Age. From 1919 to 1939, detective novels were published in an ever-increasing tide to keep up with a growing public demand for ‘whodunits’. They were a reflection of the atmosphere and culture prevailing during that period. There was a strong desire to sublimate the horrors and devastating impact of the First World War, which had been followed by the Spanish flu pandemic, economic hardship (including the Great Depression), and later by an increasing international turbulence and prospect of yet further conflict. In response, people turned more and more to entertainment and escapism, and the new form of detective novel fitted the bill. Human activity, including murder, was described and analysed as a form of play or game—an artificial entertainment existing in a cosy, stylised world, removed from normal routine life. This literary game devised its own distinctive rules and conventions aimed at ensuring fair play between writer and reader. The focus was predominantly on producing stimulating intellectual puzzles and plots: clues and evidence were presented to the reader, with a challenge to solve the mystery before the denouement and the detective’s masterful unveiling of the guilty party. It offered a welcome form of inward escape.

      Typically, the atmosphere of these novels was brisk and business-like, the method of murder often bizarre. Characterisation was subordinate to the plot. Readers were not required to think too deeply or moralise, and psychology was largely absent. The actual commission of murder, with its violence and revulsion, was usually excluded from the narration. But this was not reality, rather an intellectual recreation. Margery Allingham commented on the form: ‘a Killing, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an element of satisfaction in it.’ It was claimed these novels, with their rationalistic plots and cleverly crafted puzzles, helped to ‘improve the mind’. A surprisingly high proportion of professional people and academics were among the readers, including British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Detective fiction of this era attained a high degree of respectability amongst the reading public on both sides of the Atlantic, and by 1939 detective novels accounted for 25 per cent of all new fiction published in English.

      The distractions and pressures of today’s world, with extreme violence and hardship forming commonplace daily images in both mainstream and social media, along with the persistent noir psychological themes and human depravity depicted in modern crime novels, have perhaps helped to rekindle the public’s affection and enthusiasm for the Golden Age fictional world of intellectual plots and puzzles. Now, as then, at heart they offer light entertainment—an enduring appeal of solidity blended with facetious frivolity.

      Vernon Loder was among the early wave of Golden Age writers. A popular and prolific author, he wrote 22 titles during the decade immediately preceding the Second World War. The Mystery at Stowe was Loder’s first work, initially published in 1928 by Collins as a full-priced novel, and reissued the following year in their popular and eye-catching new sixpenny crime list, The Detective Story Club.

      In the original Preface to this reissue of The Mystery at Stowe, the Club’s editor, F. T. (Fred) Smith described Vernon Loder as ‘one of the most promising recruits to the ranks of detective story writers’. While Loder was a firm believer that the task of the detective fiction writer was not only to mystify but to entertain, he realised that the key essential for success was brilliant detective work and made this the chief feature of the story. The setting is a traditional country house party, favoured by Golden Age writers and one to which Loder returned in several later novels. The action features a diverse group of party guests, and takes place mostly within Stowe House and its grounds. One of the guests is found dead in her bedroom at dawn, lying beside an open window. She had been killed by a small poisoned dart, found lodged in her upper back. Amateur sleuth Jim Carton is in the mould of the new breed of ‘hero’ detectives, arguably first modelled by E. C. Bentley’s creation Philip Trent—intelligent and engaging, yet modest, sensitive and fallible. He brings the added expertise of having once been an Assistant Commissioner in West Africa, where he had investigated numerous criminal cases, and gained knowledge of the natives’ subtle use of little-known poisons in committing murder using a blow-pipe and poisoned darts.

      Whereas Loder’s murder method had also featured a couple of years earlier in Edgar Wallace’s The Three Just Men (1926), his mystery is intriguingly plotted and seemingly impenetrable, and red herrings and blind alleys abound. With twists and turns throughout, excitement and tension steadily mount, with a denouement true to Golden Age conventions. The finale is truly surprising and revelatory. One reviewer has described the solution as ‘borderline genius yet utterly insane’ (John F. Norris—Pretty Sinister blogspot, April 2013).

      Stowe is a well-written and skilfully constructed story, which blends action, detection, human interest and romance to form a varied and effective first mystery novel. It also contains some witty dialogue and observations, with Loder’s use of names and places which nod to other Golden Age writers and novels of the same period an amusing feature for genre enthusiasts.

      Vernon Loder was one of several pseudonyms used by the hugely versatile and fecund Anglo-Irish author Jack Vahey (John George Hazlette Vahey), 1881–1938. In addition to the canon of Loder titles between 1928 and 1938, Vahey wrote initially as John Haslette from 1909 to 1916, resuming writing in the late 1920s as Anthony Lang, George Varney, John Mowbray, Walter Proudfoot and Henrietta Clandon. Born in Belfast, Jack Vahey was educated in Ulster and for a while in Hanover, Germany. He began his working life as an architect’s pupil, but after four years switched careers and sat professional examinations with a view to becoming a chartered accountant. However, this too was abandoned, when Vahey took up writing fiction. He married Gertrude Crewe, and settled in the English south coast town of Bournemouth. His writing career was cut short by his death at the relatively young age of 57.

      All of the Loder novels were published by Collins in the UK. From 1930 onwards, his works were published under their famous Crime Club imprint. Several of his early novels (between 1929 and 1931) were also published in the US by Morrow, sometimes under different titles. Loder had several series detectives—Inspector Brews, Chief Inspector Chase and later Donald Cairn—but Jim Carton makes his sole appearance in Stowe. The publisher’s biographical note on Loder which appears in Two Dead (1934) mentions that his initial attempt at writing a novel (apparently never published) was during a period of convalescence in bed. Various colourful claims are made of Loder: he once wrote a novel on a boarding-house table in twenty days, which was serialised in both England and the US under different names, and published in book form in both countries; he worked very quickly, and thought two hours in the morning quite enough for anyone; also, he composed directly on a typewriter, and did not ever re-write.

      Loder’s entertaining and skilful novels are written in the simple, direct, smooth-flowing and occasionally jocular style favoured by Golden Age authors. His hallmark distinctives include complex and ingenious plots, full of creativity and invention, leading up to a major surprise and twist in the closing pages. A recurring theme often found in his works is that of the victim who falls prey to his own scheming. Despite his early popularity, Loder