Bodies from the Library 2. Группа авторов

Hostess’ (1939) and it led to her meeting her husband, a surgeon called Roland Lewis. The couple married in 1936 and, when the Second World War broke out, Roland Lewis joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and was posted overseas.

      On her own in London, Mary Lewis moved in and out of a variety of jobs, eventually taking on a role that was to change her life—she became a shop assistant. While she was not a great success in the job, the job led to a great success for her because she detested the manager of the shop so much that she decided to kill her … in a novel. The hate-fuelled result, Death in High Heels (1941), is set not in a shop but in a high-class Mayfair couturier, drawing on another of her many early jobs. There is a poisoning and the detective is the brash young Inspector Charlesworth.

      With the return of her husband to England, Mary Lewis settled down with the intention of writing for the rest of her life. Her second novel, Heads You Lose (1941), won the $1,000 Red Badge prize offered by publishers Dodd, Mead for the best mystery of the year, but it was her third book, Green for Danger (1944), that made her a household name, not least because of the film version, which was released in 1946 and starred Alastair Sim as her best known detective, Inspector Cockrill. That same year, she was elected to the Detection Club, and she continued to write books of various kinds under various names.

      By the late 1950s, Mary Lewis was recognised as a leading name in the crime and detective genre. Sadly, and for private reasons, she decided to give up writing mystery novels. However, she could not abandon writing altogether and, as well as a few newspaper serials and some short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, she wrote a series of ‘true life’ novellas for Woman and several short books for children featuring Nurse Matilda, a character based on her own nanny.

      And then, twenty years since his last case, Inspector Charlesworth returned, in The Rose in Darkness (1979), a strange, almost dreamlike book in which a reclusive actress and her small group of friends are caught up in what appears to be murder. The return was very warmly welcomed by critics and readers alike but Mary Lewis had been suffering from a painful illness for some years and she died in March 1988.

      At the time of her death, Mary Lewis was working on a new detective story featuring Inspector Cockrill and, while that was not finished, a collection of largely unpublished material is due in 2020 from an American publisher, Crippen and Landru.

      ‘NO FACE’ has not been published previously.

       BEFORE AND AFTER

       Peter Antony

      It was nine o’clock on a warm summer’s morning when Nurse Stephens discovered the body of her employer. Even in death Mrs Carmichael’s face still held the irritability of one forced to lean on others who were all too often engaged elsewhere. For fifteen years she had been paralysed from the waist down. Now a tiny hole, drilled neatly through her right temple, had made the top half of her body as immobile as the lower half.

      It was all most unfortunate, particularly for Nurse Stephens, who had a most unprofessional attitude to the sight of the little blood there was. She managed, however, to ’phone the doctor and the police.

      Inspector Swallow was nominally in charge of the party who arrived at Delver Park at ten o’clock—assorted ‘experts’, finger-print men, a photographer and the doctor. After a telephone conversation with Inspector Rambler of Scotland Yard, Swallow had been advised by that gentleman to bring with him on the case Mr Verity, who happened to be staying in the locality, and whenever Mr Verity ventured on a case, no one could possibly deny that he, not the police officer, was in charge of it.

      ‘You will certainly find him a little difficult to get on with,’ Rambler had said to Swallow over the ’phone, ‘but he is really a remarkable man. He always finds the truth. If he is in the area you can’t afford to neglect his services. In any case, I don’t suppose you will be able to. He has an infuriating habit of tendering them unasked.’

      Inspector Swallow had not waited for that event, but had picked Mr Verity up in the police car on his way to Delver Park, and he now stood regarding the lifeless features of Mrs Carmichael with faint distaste.

      Mr Verity was an immense man, tall and proportionately broad. His blue eyes shone brilliantly out of a pointed, bronzed face, which was completed by a well-tended, chestnut Vandyke. Despite the earliness of the hour, he was smoking a long, black Cuban cigar with the most curiously theatrical gestures.

      ‘She does make a particularly unlovely corpse,’ he said at length. ‘And I thought that death was meant to have a softening effect on the features.’

      Inspector Swallow interposed: ‘If you’ve finished your inspection, could we have a few details, doctor?’

      Doctor Hendrikson, neat, bird-like and laconic, straightened up.

      ‘She was killed with something like a very thin knitting-needle. It was driven with a considerable amount of force through her temple here. A quick-closing wound with very little blood. Time of death 10.30 to 11 o’clock last night. That’s about as accurate as I can get it.’

      ‘Clear enough. Munby, get finger-printing, and you, Brandt, do your stuff.’

      Brandt, a young recruit to the Force, took his camera and leant over Mrs Carmichael’s tightening face. He giggled nervously.

      ‘Watch the dickie bird,’ he said with bravado.

      Mr Verity scowled.

      ‘The contagion of Mr Raymond Chandler!’ he snorted.

      ‘Let’s go and see the family,’ said Swallow.

      Together the two detectives went downstairs to the library where the dead woman’s husband and the nurse were waiting for them.

      Robert Carmichael was a tall, austere man still in his late thirties, with a fine forehead, darting brown eyes, a rather sharp nose and an unexpectedly weak mouth and chin. Nurse Stephens was good-looking in a coarse, full-blown sort of way. Neither appeared distraught though they were essaying a reasonable facsimile.

      Swallow was good at this game, being at once urbane, sympathetic and slightly menacing.

      ‘Now, let’s start from tea-time yesterday.’

      Nurse Stephens was ready and willing.

      ‘Tea was at 4.30. Mrs Carmichael had her medicine at 4.45, and after that I wheeled her down to the garden. About five, Mr Carmichael took her photograph and went off to the village to develop it, whilst I sat with Mrs Carmichael for an hour or so before wheeling her off to bed. I remained on duty until seven o’clock, when relieved by the night nurse, Wimple.’

      ‘And everything was all right before you left?’

      ‘Certainly, Mrs Carmichael was asleep and everything in order.’

      ‘And later on that evening?’

      ‘At 7.30 we all went over to Colonel Longford’s house for dinner and bridge. We arrived back here at about one in the morning,’ Robert Carmichael put in.

      ‘All?’

      ‘Nurse Stephens, my brother-in-law Doctor Sanderson, Sandra my stepdaughter, and myself.’

      Mr Verity grunted reflectively.

      ‘There seems to be a pretty comprehensive interest in that curiously anti-social pastime, eh, Mr Carmichael?’

      ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

      ‘I refer to bridge.’

      ‘Yes, we all play.’

      ‘Tell me, Mr Carmichael, did your wife have any mortal enemies that you knew of?’

      ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there, Mr Verity. I am as