The Lyttleton Case Read online

  ‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’

  Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929

  Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.

  Copyright

  COLLINS CRIME CLUB

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by

  W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1922

  Published by The Detective Story Club Ltd 1930

  Introduction © Douglas A. Anderson 2017

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008216245

  Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008216252

  Version: 2017-03-29

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Editor’s Preface

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  The Detective Story Club

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  FOR a first novel by an unknown author, The Lyttleton Case by R.A.V. Morris fared pretty well. Published by W. Collins Sons of London in April 1922, it was reprinted a month afterwards, with third and fourth impressions in 1923, and a fifth in 1926. A cheap two shilling edition appeared in April 1927. And the Detective Club published a new popular edition at 6d in February 1930. But Morris published no follow-up books, and thereafter The Lyttleton Case lapsed into obscurity. It was recalled by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor in their Catalogue of Crime (1971; revised 1989) as ‘an early specimen of the well-written, slow, carefully plotted puzzle … this is an acceptable tale of murder, impersonation, and abduction, with entertaining asides about the contemporary scene’.

  The author’s full name was Ronald Arthur Vennor Morris. He was one of seven children (three of whom died in infancy) of Alfred Arthur Vennor Morris (1849–1884), one of a family of chemical manufacturers in Carmarthenshire, Wales, and Rosa Leach (1845–1883), who came from a very large family that lived in Devizes Castle in Wiltshire. Ronald was the oldest surviving child—he was born at Wernoleu, one of three family houses on the slopes of Bettws Mountain near Ammanford, on 19 September 1877. His sole younger brother was Kenneth Morris (1879–1937), whose writings are seminal in the field of fantasy. These include two works expanding upon the Welsh Mabinogion, The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed (1914) and its sequel Book of the Three Dragons (1930; expanded to include its unpublished ending in 2005); The Secret Mountain and Other Tales (1926); the posthumous fantasy of the Toltecs of ancient Mexico, The Chalchuihite Dragon (1992); and The Dragon Path: Collected Tales of Kenneth Morris (1995), edited by Douglas A. Anderson.

  Rosa Morris died on 7 September 1883, seemingly as a result of a difficult pregnancy, which resulted also in the death of one of twin girls born about ten days earlier. Alfred died on 1 August 1884, and the four surviving Morris children were thus orphaned. New laws regulating trade had also caused a failure of the family business. Ronald, Kenneth and their two younger sisters were sent first to their mother’s family at Devizes Castle, and then on to London, where the boys were sent to school at Christ’s Hospital, then located in the centre of London. Christ’s Hospital was a traditional English school, and because the boys there wore long blue coats (with yellow stockings) it was known as the Bluecoat School. Ronald left the school in 1893 at the age-limit of sixteen; Kenneth left in 1895.

  Ronald apparently went into business, working in London, after leaving Christ’s Hospital. Both he and Kenneth joined Theosophical Societies, but they joined different sects. Ronald joined that run by Annie Besant out of Adyar, India, while Kenneth joined the Katherine Tingley branch, and later moved to its headquarters in southern California for twenty-two years (1908–1930). In 1898 Ronald married Eliza Augusta Jevons (1858–1945), the daughter of a solicitor who was nineteen years his senior. They had one daughter, Eileen Mary Vennor Morris (1900–1972). Both Ronald and Eliza Morris were active in the Theosophical Society and in the Order of the Golden Dawn occult society. Ronald seems to have worked for a while as a merchant and later at a bank. He and his family lived in London through at least the 1910s, but by 1930 they had settled in Hove. When Kenneth returned to England in 1930, he spent some time with his brother before settling in Wales.

  Ronald contributed occasional articles and poems to theosophical publications, but The Lyttleton Case is apparently his only work of fiction. The competitive nature of the relationship between the brothers suggests that Ronald might have attempted fiction because Kenneth had done so.

  The Lyttleton Case begins with the disappearance of James Lyttleton. His daughter Doris and her fiancé, Basil Dawson, a newspaperman on the staff of the Daily Gazette, come to study the mystery, and in the meantime Chief Inspector James Candlish engages upon an unrelated investigation. Gradually the threads of each story come together to meet in resolution.

  Morris’s familiarity with the detective fiction genre is exemplified in the jovial thoughts of Police Constable Higginson in Chapter XII, who ‘was a diligent reader of detective fiction, and sometimes, over his last pipe before going to bed, he allowed his mind to form alluring pictures of the day when the name of Higginson would be as famous as that of Lecocq [sic] himself. In the meantime, when on night duty, he compared himself with C. Auguste Dupin.’ Dupin was the invention of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), and it was with his first appearance in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) that the detective fiction story was inaugurated. Monsieur Lecoq was the detective in a series of books by the French writer Émile Gaboriau (1832–1873), whose works were very popular in English translations in the 1870s, and Lecoq was a major influence on Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes, who became the world’s most popular fictional detective.

  Police Constable Higginson also makes inevitable references to Sherlock Holmes, and mentions a book
more contemporary to the time of writing, The Cask (1920), the first detective novel by Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957).

  The Times Literary Supplement called The Lyttleton Case ‘a complicated detective story, which might have contained more exciting incidents’ (20 April 1922). The Sheffield Daily Independent called it a ‘cleverly constructed crime story, with the dramatic situations well sustained’ (12 April 1922), while the Aberdeen Daily Journal found fault with its ‘somewhat heavy-handed jocularity’ and felt that ‘the action of the tale is impeded by an excess of padding’ (6 April 1922).

  R.A.V. Morris died of prostate cancer, at the age of 66, at a nursing home in Brighton, on 30 November 1943. According to his death certificate he was a ‘retired Company Director’. It is a pity that he published no further cases of Chief Inspector James Candlish. The Lyttleton Case certainly feels that it should be part of a series of novels, but we are left to accept it as a promising one-off by one of the few detective story writers to come from Wales.

  DOUGLAS A. ANDERSON

  December 2016

  EDITOR’S PREFACE

  WHAT do you think of a detective story that runs you down to the banks of a little stream in Surrey to Liverpool and New York and back again; introduces you to a charming heroine; a hero who is a journalist and a poet; a detective who is a naturalist as well as a policeman; a variety of thrills and much not too subtle humour before it makes you begin to believe that you have a sort of idea who really committed the murder? Personally, we think it the sort of tale to make one long for the weekend and pray for the type of weather that makes stopping indoors compulsory.

  Mr R. A. V. Morris is certainly to be congratulated on the skill with which he has handled an extremely difficult theme. The situations are novel and they are worked out with rare patience and realism. Mr Morris, moreover, has created three splendid characters in Dawson, a young journalist, Doris Lyttleton, and Inspector Candlish. The last-named is engaged on the Lyttleton case and the author’s expert knowledge of the methods of Scotland Yard are emphasised in the inspector’s activities. It is a change to have a detective who is not a posing amateur but a prosaic and quite likeable professional from Scotland Yard, and this concession to common sense certainly increases our sense of obligation to Mr Morris.

  Above all, the secret is well kept and the reader is left guessing almost to the last page.

  THE EDITOR

  FROM THE ORIGINAL DETECTIVE STORY CLUB EDITION

  February 1930

  CHAPTER I

  ‘Every step we take is an adventure into the unknown from which there may be no returning.’

  LAMOND’S Aphorisms

  ON the morning of the 1st of July, 19—, Mr James Lyttleton was breakfasting with his daughter Doris in the pleasant, old-fashioned morning-room of his Hampstead residence. Long Vistas was one of those charming late eighteenth century houses of time-darkened red brick, which, half hidden by high garden walls and the foliage of planes and chestnuts, are so characteristic of the roads bordering on the Heath.

  Mr Lyttleton was a widower with one child, a daughter, who kept house for him. He was the senior partner in a large firm of financiers. With his keen gray eyes, his expression, shrewd and alert, yet not unkindly, his well-cut, somewhat aggressive clean-shaven jaw and tight fitting lips, his graying hair and his comfortable figure clothed in the choicest products of Savile Row tailoring, he was a specimen of the best type of those prosperous middle-class Englishmen for whose special delectation this world appears to have been made: the land to produce raw materials for their trade and manufacture; the sea to carry their ships; and the mass of men and women to produce wealth beyond the dreams of a mere Midas or Crœsus. His daughter Doris was less typical and more individualised: she had intellectual and artistic tastes; read Wells and Shaw; was a member of the Fabian Society and the Arts League of Service; with all these eccentricities, however, she could not be regarded as a crank, for she fully appreciated the motor-car, servants, generous dress allowance, and other good things that resulted from her father’s activities in the City, however much she might in theory criticise the Stock Exchange and all its works as parasitical on the economic life of the community. For the rest she was distinctly pretty and intelligent looking; her fair hair, which had been ‘bobbed’ during the war, was now growing again, and her dress suggested an expensive compromise between the rigidly orthodox opinions of her Bond Street dressmaker and the more heterodox taste which rules at the Four Arts’ Club, of which she was an active member.

  It was Mr Lyttleton’s usual custom to spend the half-hour following breakfast over a cigarette and The Times; but this morning, after reading with a frown one of the letters in his post, he looked up at his daughter and said, ‘I am sorry to say, Doris, that I must be at the office early to attend to some rather tiresome business.’

  ‘That’s hard luck, dad,’ said she; ‘shall I order the car for you?’

  ‘Yes, please, my dear; tell Harrison to be at the front door at a quarter to nine.’

  Doris gave the necessary instructions, and when he had finished breakfast her father set off for the City: he said nothing whatever to lead her to expect that he would not return in the evening at his usual time, which was about half-past five. She was therefore somewhat surprised when she got home about half-past six o’clock in the evening, after attending a matinee performance of Candida, to find awaiting her a telegram which had been handed in at Euston Station at 5.30 p.m.

  ‘To Liverpool on urgent business, hope return tomorrow.—DAD.’

  ‘He might have ’phoned through before he went, and told me a little more,’ thought Doris. ‘I am sure he had no idea of going to Liverpool when he left home this morning.’

  With this reflection Doris left the subject; and the following morning did no more than wonder in passing, what time her father would get back home. She had made an engagement to meet her fiancé in town for lunch and a visit to the Cubist Exhibition. Just as she was about to leave the house she heard the double rat-tat of a telegraph boy. A telegram was brought in, and to her surprise she read:

  ‘Compelled to go to New York, will wire from there.—DAD.’

  She noticed that the message had been handed in at Lime Street Station, Liverpool, at 10.45 a.m.

  Now Doris knew that her father had large business interests in the United States, and that he had in the past paid several flying visits to New York; she therefore took the news of his sudden departure almost as a matter of course, although he had never before set off quite as suddenly on so long a journey.

  It was his custom, she knew, to keep a kit bag at the office, packed with all the necessaries for a short stay away from home; and he would have no difficulty in buying in Liverpool whatever else he needed for the voyage. She therefore did no more than to ring up Cook’s at Ludgate Circus, from whom she ascertained that the Ruritania was leaving Liverpool for New York that day, and was due to arrive in the capital of American commerce about midday on the 7th.

  Basil Dawson, Doris Lyttleton’s fiancé, was a young man of twenty-eight, on the staff of that very enterprising newspaper, the Daily Gazette. He was not only a smart journalist, but had begun to win distinction in other and less ephemeral branches of literature. He was one of the few English poets of the younger generation who still believed that poetry is something more than prose cut up arbitrarily into lines of irregular length; and it was whispered with horror among the ‘Vers librists’ that he had actually been guilty of writing sonnets. He was tall, dark, wore pince-nez, was a moderate athlete, and avoided, as the devil avoids holy water, all affectations in speech, manner, and appearance. He had not only the imagination of a poet, but he could, unless his feelings were too much stirred, think and act quickly and decisively in practical matters as well—a very strong combination.

  Basil and Doris had met each other at a tennis club of which they were both members; and their acquaintance had, under the stimulus of common tastes and interests, rapidly ripened into love.
Their engagement had been announced only a few weeks before the opening of this narrative.

  So it was that on the 2nd of July, 19— Doris took the Tube from Hampstead Station and found Basil waiting for her in the booking office at Leicester Square. He had been commissioned by his editor to write up the summer exhibition of cubist paintings at the Dover Street Gallery, and he wished not only to enjoy the pleasure of having Doris with him, but he knew that her criticisms of the pictures would be worth listening to, and would be of real help to him in writing his article.

  In this world, unfortunately, the requirements of the body must take precedence of those of the mind. Even a Shakespeare must eat before he can write: so it was that for Doris and Basil, lunch had to come before art. Basil suggested the grill room at the Criterion, but Doris said that she wanted a change from what she was accustomed to at home, where the food was invariably well cooked and of the finest quality. When out, she liked something more adventurous, and on the present occasion insisted on taking Basil to the X.Y.Z. café in Piccadilly, where, as she told him, every dish was an experiment, often a surprise. Where half the contents of a cup of coffee was invariably slopped into the saucer; where veal and ham pie was often made of pork; where eggs, ordered poached, arrived at table boiled; where, in fact, one never knew what was coming next, what it was made of, or what one would have to pay for it.

  Basil, who had not been brought up in the orderly luxury of Long Vistas, had other ideas of romance, but in those early days of their engagement invariably gave in to Doris. So to the X.Y.Z. café they went; and from there to Dover Street.

  By the aid of the catalogue they were able to identify a number of the pictures, and they spent a delightful afternoon, marred only by an argument, which did not quite develop into a quarrel, about one undoubted masterpiece which the catalogue described as ‘No. 423—Portrait of a Lady’; both admired it, but Doris maintained that it was hung upside down, while Basil was certain that it had been wrongly ticketed, and was in reality No. 422—‘Ruins at Ypres.’ However, they made it up afterwards over a cup of tea at Gunter’s, and agreed that, at any rate, the colour effects were very fine.