Fact meets fiction
A Century of Crime, Part 5
I’m continuing my arbitrary challenge of reading one crime novel from each year of the 20th century, in order. You can read about my journey so far here. Today, I’ll be taking you as far as 1914, with two novels that turn fact into fiction and one novel by an author whose life was basically a work of fiction. None of these are particularly good books, although there is some interesting background that partly makes up for the literary mediocrity.
I was first introduced to Marie Belloc Lowndes five years ago when I read her most celebrated novel, The Lodger (1913), a tale of psychological suspense inspired by Jack the Ripper’s crimes. I enjoyed The Lodger a lot, but my subsequent attempts to read Lowndes have been increasingly unsuccessful. I tried The End of Her Honeymoon (1913), which was inspired by an urban legend about someone disappearing from a hotel during the Paris Exhibition and the owner denying all knowledge of their existence. It had some enjoyable elements, but was a disappointment overall. And then I had to abandon The Chianti Flask (1935), recently republished by the British Library, because not much happened. With The Chink in the Armour (1912), I think I’ve concluded that Marie Belloc Lowndes and I just don’t get on very well.
Lowndes was a prolific author who started publishing novels in her 30s and produced more than fifty of them over a forty-year career. As with The Lodger, she was often inspired by real-life crimes and mysteries. For The Chink in the Armour, she found inspiration in the 1907 murder of Emma Levin in Monte Carlo. Levin’s remains were discovered in a trunk at Marseilles railway station, and former tennis champion Vere St Leger Goold and his wife Marie were convicted of the crime.1 The novel’s title comes from a comment in The Spectator, discussing the 1910 trial of Countess Maria Tarnowska for the murder of Count Pavel Kamarovsky: “There is one chink in the chain-armour of civilised communities. Society is conducted on the assumption that murder will not be committed.”2
The Chink in the Armour starts promisingly. We meet young widow Sylvia Bailey, who discovers an advertising card on the sitting-room table of her Parisian hotel, promoting the services of the fortune teller Madame Cagliostra. Being of a “rather superstitious” disposition, she decides to visit this clairvoyant in the company of a newly-made friend, a Polish widow named Anna Wolsky. Madame Cagliostra warns them earnestly not to leave Paris in the near future, especially not together. If they do, their lives will be in danger. Inevitably, they fail to heed this advice, and both travel to the casino town of Lacville.
At this point, I was ready for Lowndes to capitalise on this potentially unnerving set-up and gradually increase the psychological tension. Instead, the plot unfolded at an unbearably slow pace and the hoped-for tension did not appear. Like The Chianti Flask, I decided it wasn’t worth continuing. Maybe there are more interesting developments later in the book, but life is short and my to-read list is long, so I guess I’ll never know.
Verdict: ⭐ (1/5)
The Grell Mystery is an early police procedural, revolving around the mystery of Robert Grell, “social idol, millionaire and diplomat, and winner of the greatest matrimonial prize in London.” We meet him the night before his marriage to Lady Eileen Meredith, conversing with his close friend Sir Ralph Fairfield at St Jermyn’s Club. He disappears on an errand, promising to be back in “half an hour”. He doesn’t return as promised, but instead is found murdered in his study. The case becomes more complicated when it emerges that the dead man is not in fact Grell, but a well-known criminal. Grell’s Russian valet Ivan has also vanished, which is a bit suspicious. Superintendent Heldon Foyle of the CID steps in to untangle the various threads.
The unique selling point of the book is that its author was himself a recently-retired CID Superintendent, arguably at the time “the most famous policeman in the world”.3 Frank Froest was a career policeman, joining the Metropolitan Police as a constable in 1879 and remaining in law enforcement until his retirement in 1912. His distinguished career (which included suggesting the use of wireless telegraphy to catch Dr Crippen) led to him being appointed a Member of the Royal Victorian Order (MVO) by King George V. In his retirement, he drew on his experiences to produce both fiction and non-fiction works, some in collaboration with journalist and novelist George Dilnot. In fact, Martin Edwards suggests that The Grell Mystery may have been ghost-written by Dilnot.4
Froest’s obituary in The Times described him as “a man of shrewdness and resource”, who “did not hesitate to take great personal risks whenever necessary.”5 His fictional counterpart Heldon Foyle would probably have received a similar commendation. Foyle is very happy to take risks, perform stunts and bend the rules, as long as it gets results in the end. At one point, we’re given a summary of his own professional code of ethics: “In his own mind he held that all things which were legal were permissible in facilitating the ends of justice.” This results in an interesting detective character in some ways, although also a somewhat arrogant and irritating one.
Looking at the book as a whole, Frank Froest may have been a first-rate crime solver, but he was a mediocre crime writer. The novel has a promising, intriguing and action-packed beginning, but Froest doesn’t manage to sustain this level of interest for long. I did enjoy some of the insights into contemporary police work, such as the explanation of an arithmetical approach to classifying fingerprints. If Froest had used his retirement to write a memoir instead, I’m sure that would have been fascinating!
Verdict: ⭐⭐ (2/5)
“I confess I’d like to know somethin’ more about him.” The “him” in question is the mysterious character of Hugesson Gastrell. But Michael Berrington’s attempts to find out more about Gastrell are not entirely without incident. In fact, there are so many incidents in William Le Queux’s The Four Faces that it’s difficult to summarise the plot any further. False identities, disguises, robberies, gambling, kidnap, murder, and much more. Arguably, far too much.
“Too much” was in many ways William Le Queux’s modus operandi. He produced a ridiculous number of novels: The Four Faces was just one of six novels he published in 1914, and that wasn’t a particularly unusual year. In the words of his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, he wrote “rapidly and carelessly”.6 He was also an expert in biographical embellishment with a love of self-publicity; the same dictionary entry bluntly summarises: “Le Queux's own accounts of his life are unreliable”.7 A pioneer of spy fiction, he repeatedly made the dubious claim hat he had worked as an unpaid spy.8
The book’s title page describes The Four Faces as a “mystery”, which isn’t entirely accurate either. It’s really a melodramatic adventure story about a gang of miscreants, which is difficult to take seriously. There are some entertaining scenes that made it just about worth reading to the end, but not enough to make it worth saving shelf space for.
Verdict: ⭐⭐ (2/5)
So, not an entirely successful set of books for this instalment of “A Century of Crime”. Join me some time soon for the 1915-1917 edition, where I’ll be discussing The Blue Lights by Frederic Arnold Kummer (1915), The Postmaster’s Daughter by Louis Tracy (1916) and The Final Days of Abbot Montrose by Sven Elvestad (1917).
Martin Edwards, The Life of Crime (Collins Crime Club, 2022), page 94.
This quote is printed on the title page. You can read the full article (“The Ultimate Temptation”, 28 May 1910) in the archives of The Spectator here.
The claim of Tony Medawar, in his introduction to the 2015 Collins Crime Club reprint.
In The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (British Library, 2017), page 164.
From The Times, 9 January 1930. Available in The Times Digital Archive here: link.gale.com/apps/doc/CS235479592/TTDA?u=nlw_ttda&sid=bookmark-TTDA&pg=14&xid=248e91da.
Entry by Roger T. Stearn (28 May 2015) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-37666
Entry by Roger T. Stearn (28 May 2015) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-37666
See Chris Patrick & Stephen Baister, William Le Queux Master of Mystery (2007), page 64: “Le Queux began to assume the persona of the secret agent that he had created in his novels.”