The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits (Mammoth Books) Read online

  The Mammoth Book of

  ROARING

  TWENTIES

  WHODUNNITS

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  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2004

  Collection and editorial material copyright © Mike Ashley 2004

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 1-84119-751-3

  eISBN 978-1-78033-360-1

  Printed and bound in the EU

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Contents

  Copyright and Acknowledgments

  Foreword: The Crazy Age, Mike Ashley

  Timor Mortis, Annette Meyers

  Brave New Murder, H.R.F. Keating

  So Beautiful, So Dead, Robert J. Randisi

  “There would have been murder”, Ian Morson

  Someone, Michael Collins

  Kiss the Razor’s Edge, Mike Stotter

  Thoroughly Modern Millinery, Marilyn Todd

  The Day of Two Cars, Gillian Linscott

  The Hope of the World, Mat Coward

  Bullets, Peter Lovesey

  He Couldn’t Fly, Michael Kurland

  Putting Crime Over, Hulbert Footner

  Valentino’s Valediction, Amy Myers

  Skip, Edward Marston

  The Broadcast Murder, Grenville Robbins

  For the Benefit of Mr Means, Christine Matthews

  Without Fire, Tom Holt

  The Austin Murder Case, Jon L. Breen

  The Man Who Scared the Bank, Archibald Pechey

  A Pebble for Papa, Max Allan Collins & Matthew V. Clemens

  Beyond the Call of Beauty, Will Murray

  The Problem of the Tin Goose, Edward D. Hoch

  I’ll Never Play Detective Again, Cornell Woolrich

  Copyright and Acknowledgments

  All of the stories are copyright in the name of the individual authors or their estates as follows. Every effort has been made to trace holders of copyright. In the event of any inadvertent transgression of copyright please contact the editor via the publisher.

  “The Austin Murder Case” © 1967 by Jon L. Breen. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1967. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Pebble for Papa” © 2004 by Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens. Original to this anthology. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

  “Someone” © 2004 by Michael Collins. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Hope of the World” © 2004 by Mat Coward. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Putting Crime Over” by Hulbert Footner © 1926 by the Frank A. Munsey, Co. First published in Argosy All-Story Weekly, 20 November 1926. Reprinted by permission of Argosy Communications Inc.

  “The Problem of the Tin Goose” © 1982 by Edward D. Hoch. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1982. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Without Fire” © 2004 by Tom Holt. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Brave New Murder” © 2004 by H.R.F. Keating. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Peters, Fraser & Dunlop.

  “He Couldn’t Fly” © 2004 by Michael Kurland. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Day of Two Cars” © 2004 by Gillian Linscott. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Bullets” © 2004 by Peter Lovesey. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Vanessa Holt.

  “Skip” © 2004 by Edward Marston. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

  “For the Benefit of Mr Means” © 2004 by Christine Matthews. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Timor Mortis” © 2004 by Annette Meyers. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

  “ ‘There would have been murder’ ” © 2004 by Ian Morson. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Dorian Literary Agency.

  “Beyond the Call of Beauty” © 2004 by Will Murray. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Valentino’s Valediction” © 2004 by Amy Myers. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March/April 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Dorian Literary Agency.

  “The Man Who Scared the Bank” © 1928 by Archibald Pechey. First published in Pearson’s Magazine, December 1928. Reprinted by permission of the Trustees of the estate.

  “So Beautiful, So Dead” © 2004 by Robert J. Randisi. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

  “
The Broadcast Murder” © 1928 by Grenville Robbins. First published in Pearson’s Magazine, July 1928. Unable to trace the author’s estate.

  “Kiss the Razor’s Edge” © 2004 by Mike Stotter. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Thoroughly Modern Millinery” © 2004 by Marilyn Todd. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

  “I’ll Never Play Detective Again” © 1937 by Cornell Woolrich. First published in The Black Mask, May 1937. Reprinted by permission of the Trustees under the will of Cornell Woolrich.

  My thanks to Robert Adey and Francis M. Nevins, Jr. for providing ideas and suggestions for the collection.

  Foreword: The Crazy Age

  MIKE ASHLEY

  We do love to apply nicknames to things, even decades. The Swinging Sixties, the Gay Nineties (or was it the Naughty Nineties?) and, of course, the Roaring Twenties. And aren’t those two words evocative. You need scarcely utter them than our mind’s eye conjures up visions of the jazz age, the charleston, country-house parties, the first talkies and, of course, those “bright young things”. A decade of excitement, energy, eccentricity, fun and freedom – a complete release after the horrors of the Great War, and total gay abandon for the terrors yet to come.

  Because, as we know, it wasn’t all fun. The 1920s was a time of great hardship in Britain – the Jarrow March, the General Strike, the fear of communism and revolution. In America there was prohibition and the rise of gangsterism.

  It was a decade of extremes, and it’s out of extremes that the stories emerge. The 1920s saw the start of the Golden Age of the detective story. In Britain it was during this decade that Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple first appeared and, even more typical of the period, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. In America that role was taken by S.S. van Dine with his detective Philo Vance, but the 1920s also saw the rise of pulp fiction and the hard-boiled school led by Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett. The one was a rebellion against the other, showing that even in crime fiction, there were extremes.

  In this anthology I wanted to encapsulate those extremes. I wanted a selection of stories that not only showed the fun, the froth and the frolics of the 1920s but also the hard, violent and vicious underbelly. Above all I wanted the stories to reflect that unreality of the decade: a period when, rather like the “swinging sixties”, people threw caution to the wind and lived life to the full, regardless of what was round the corner.

  I also wanted the stories to show the exciting “newness” of things in the twenties. The movies were all the rage, with film stars the new celebrities, and by the end of the 1920s you could hear them as well. There was the radio and the first communication revolution with the growth of the telephone. And there was a travel boom, with the growth in the motor car and commercial airlines. With the 1920s we entered the era of the gadget, with mass production and a booming economy.

  That’s what you’ll find here. From Annette Meyers’s Greenwich Village partygoers to Robert Randisi’s beauty pageant, from Marilyn Todd’s murder in the artworld to Gillian Linscott’s death in Britain’s first telephone booth, from Hulbert Footner’s “Bright Young Things” in the world of crime to Mat Coward’s murder before the Communist revolution, these stories cover every facet of life in that mad decade.

  So, let’s party . . .

  – Mike Ashley

  Timor Mortis

  ANNETTE MEYERS

  Annette Meyers is probably best known for her series about corporate headhunters Xenia Smith and Leslie Wetzon, set amongst the wheeling and dealing of Wall Street and Broadway. Annette is well qualified to talk of the theatrical world as she worked with Hal Prince on the Broadway Productions of Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret and A Little Night Music. With her husband Martin, writing under the joint alias of Maan Meyers, she has produced a historical mystery series chronicling the Tonneman family down the generations in New York, starting with The Dutchman (1992). Annette introduced her poet-detective Olivia Brown in her 1999 novel Free Love, set amongst the arty set in Greenwich Village in the 1920s. The follow-up novel was Murder Me Now (2001). Here’s the latest adventure.

  Greenwich Village is our enclave, our village, and we rarely venture east of Washington Square Park, unless of course it is for one of our fancy dress balls, which we hold at Webster Hall on Eleventh Street near Third Avenue.

  The costume balls were inaugurated before the Great War by The Masses, an irreverent magazine to which everyone in the Village contributed short stories, poetry, drawings, essays and humor. The purpose of the balls was to pay off the magazine’s persistent debts with the admission charged. The focus of The Masses was anti-war, and the government, in the midst of the Great War, had shut it down. Although The Masses has not survived, costume balls continue for the benefit of one or another of our Village institutions.

  It was said that when our own Floyd Dell, one of the editors of The Masses, first approached the proprietor of Webster Hall about the cost for rental of the space, the proprietor asked, “Is yours a drinking crowd?”

  To which our Floyd replied, “Hell, yes.”

  And the proprietor said, “You can have it for nothing.”

  You might very well ask, “What of Prohibition?”

  The truth is, things are hardly different now, even with Prohibition. The bar at the costume balls is as crowded as before, perhaps even more so. The costume balls are our playground, and play we do, dancing and drinking till we greet a new day in Washington Square Park.

  There may be hundreds of ways to die, and certainly, I’ve seen more than a few in my curious life, but to come to a costume ball riding naked on a white horse and have one’s breast pierced by a feathered arrow is more than anyone’s imagination – even mine – could ever contemplate.

  But let me not get ahead of my story.

  If you were a stranger in Greenwich Village and chose to begin your acquaintance in front of my sliver of a house on Bedford Street, whether you turn to the right, or left, you would soon be lost among our crooked, winding streets, streets that cross one another and take new names, or just stop never to resume, or resume as if nothing has happened several blocks away.

  In the hour just before dawn, when the sky begins to surrender darkness to threads of pink, my Village appears the painted set of a play about to begin. Innocent and pure. And all of us who make our home here are, for the moment, innocent and pure. In thought, if not in deed.

  Corruptible? Well, of course. This is life, not a play. Perhaps we’re naive to think we can live in art. And then again, what exactly does corruptible mean?

  It began on one of those wicked March days when a person is seduced by the surprising silky air at midday, only to be viciously betrayed by afternoon. I was on my way home to Bedford Street wrapped in disagreeable thoughts, my head down against the wind, otherwise I might have seen her.

  I’d come from a very unsatisfactory meeting with Mr Harper about my first book of poems, Embracing the Thorns, during which he, for all his promises, presented me with the most penurious of contracts. And he was, in fact, talking in terms of a year from now as, he said, they would prefer more from me than a slim volume of verses. Indeed. Indeed!

  So I was hardly in fine fettle when, with some persistence, my friend Edward Hall eventually managed to get my attention. The taxi he was riding in pulled up beside me and he called, “Oliver!”

  My determined stride suspended, out of the corner of my eye, I caught an odd flurry of color, blues on the wing, a human butterfly, before the apparition faded into the entrance of a shop.

  “I’ve been trying to get your attention for two blocks,” Edward continued. “You look like a dark cloud.”

  “Dark cloud? My dear Edward, I’ll have you know I’m a thunderstorm, a tornado cloaked in a hurricane, a –”

  “Enough, Cyrana!” He opened the door and pulled me into the cab, and with some aplomb, planted a tender kiss on my lips. “Come along and you can tell us all
about it.”

  My artful abductor, I saw at once, was not alone in the taxi. On his other side sat a small, finely dressed gentleman, his exophthalmic eyes as bright and curious as a chimp’s. His exquisite hands rested on the silver head of his walking stick.

  “Oliver, may I present Michael Walling?”

  I reached across Edward to shake hands with Michael Walling, whose name I’d recognized, Walling House being a well respected press. Edward is currently at Vogue, and when editors meet with publishers not their own, there’s no telling what their meeting is about.

  “Charmed,” Michael Walling said, brushing my fingers with his little mustache.

  “We’re off to the Lafayette,” Edward said. “Why don’t you join us?”

  “I wouldn’t want to intrude,” I said, modestly, but bestowing on publisher Walling my most brilliant smile.

  “I should be delighted if you would join us, Miss Brown. I am a great admirer of your work.”

  The Hotel Lafayette and the Brevoort Hotel are the two best hotels in the Village, each insinuating its own continental flavor. They are situated almost back to back; the former, on University Place and Ninth Street, is where Gene O’Neill stays when he comes down from Provincetown. The Brevoort stands at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street. In its basement is an informal café, the perfect place for merrymaking. Both locations are patronized only when we are in the money, which sad to say, isn’t often. So I was not going to turn down an invitation to one or the other.

  I’ve known Edward Hall longer than anyone else in the Village. At Ainslee’s, he was the first editor to buy my poems. And for a short time we were lovers. When Ainslee’s, like The Masses, went the way of other small magazines and journals, Edward moved on to Vogue, where – lucky me – he’s continued to buy my poems. And although I knew that he’d like his early place back in my affections, for my part romantic passion is fleeting. My passion is for my work. But our friendship remains, and I treasure it.