Tune to a Corpse Read online

  Peter Drax

  Tune to a Corpse

  He called out, ‘Abie!’ The word was swallowed up in the depths of the hall. It was like a morgue.

  Captain Eric Macrae is down on his luck, living in a cheap London boarding house and on his wits. When chance puts a string of valuable pearls his way, he can’t resist stealing them. But the pursuit of easy money is derailed first by Peggy, a neighbourhood girl who begins to suspect Macrae is up to no good. And then a well-known fence winds up dead … enter Chief Inspector Thompson of Scotland Yard.

  Tune to a Corpse was first published in 1938, and has remained out of print until this new edition. It includes an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  ‘London underworld life is described with colour and realism. The steps in the weakling killer’s descent to Avernus are thrillingly traced.” Saturday Review of Literature

  ‘I have the highest opinion of Peter Drax’s murder stories … The secret of Peter Drax’s success is his ability to make the circumstances as plausible as the characters are real’ Sunday Times

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  About the Author

  Titles by Peter Drax

  High Seas Murder – Title Page

  High Seas Murder – Chapter One

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Eric Elrington Addis, aka “Peter Drax,” one of the major between-the-wars exponents and practitioners of realism in the British crime novel, was born near the end of the Victorian era in Edinburgh, Scotland on 19 May 1899, the youngest child of David Foulis Addis, a retired Indian civil servant, and Emily Malcolm, daughter of an officer in the British Indian Army. Drax died during the Second World War on 31 August 1941, having been mortally wounded in a German air raid on the British Royal Navy base at Alexandria, Egypt, officially known as HMS Nile. During his brief life of 42 years, Drax between the short span from 1936 to 1939 published six crime novels: Murder by Chance (1936), He Shot to Kill (1936), Murder by Proxy (1937), Death by Two Hands (1937), Tune to a Corpse (1938) and High Seas Murder (1939). An additional crime novel, Sing a Song of Murder, having been left unfinished by Drax at his death in 1941 and completed by his novelist wife, was published in 1944. Together the Peter Drax novels constitute one of the most important bodies of realistic crime fiction published in the 1930s, part of the period commonly dubbed the “Golden Age of detective fiction.” Rather than the artificial and outsize master sleuths and super crooks found in so many classic mysteries from this era, Drax’s novels concern, as publicity material for the books put it, “police who are not endowed with supernatural powers and crooks who are also human.” In doing so they offered crime fiction fans from those years some of the period’s most compelling reading. The reissuing of these gripping tales of criminal mayhem and murder, unaccountably out-of-print for more than seven decades, by Dean Street Press marks a signal event in recent mystery publishing history.

  Peter Drax’s career background gave the future crime writer constant exposure to the often grim rigors of life, experience which he most effectively incorporated into his fiction. A graduate of Edinburgh Academy, the teenaged Drax served during the First World War as a Midshipman on HMS Dreadnought and Marlborough. (Two of his three brothers died in the war, the elder, David Malcolm Addis, at Ypres, where his body was never found.) After the signing of the armistice and his graduation from the Royal Naval College, Drax remained in the Navy for nearly a decade, retiring in 1929 with the rank of Lieutenant-Commander, in which capacity he supervised training with the New Zealand Navy, residing with his English wife, Hazel Iris (Wilson) Addis, daughter of an electrical engineer, in Auckland. In the 1930s he returned with Hazel to England and began practicing as a barrister, specializing, predictably enough, in the division of Admiralty, as well as that of Divorce. Recalled to the Navy upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Drax served as Commander (second-in-command) on HMS Warspite and was mentioned in dispatches at the Second Battle of Narvik, a naval affray which took place during the 1940 Norwegian campaign. At his death in Egypt in 1941 Drax left behind Hazel--herself an accomplished writer, under the pen name Hazel Adair, of so-called middlebrow “women’s fiction”--and two children, including Jeremy Cecil Addis, the late editor and founder of Books Ireland.

  Commuting to his London office daily in the 1930s on the 9.16, Drax’s hobby became, according to his own account, the “reading and dissecting of thrillers,” ubiquitous in station book stalls. Concluding that the vast majority of them were lamentably unlikely affairs, Drax set out over six months to spin his own tale, “inspired by the desire to tell a story that was credible.” (More prosaically the neophyte author also wanted to show his wife, who had recently published her first novel, Wanted a Son, that he too could publish a novel.) The result was Murder by Chance, the first of the author’s seven crime novels. In the United States during the late 1920s and early 1930s, recalled Raymond Chandler in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (originally published in 1944), the celebrated American crime writer Dashiell Hammett had given “murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.” Drax’s debut crime novel, which followed on the heels of Hammett’s books, made something of a similar impression in the United Kingdom, with mystery writer and founding Detection Club member Milward Kennedy in the Sunday Times pronouncing the novel a “thriller of great merit” that was “extremely convincing” and the influential Observer crime fiction critic Torquemada avowing, “I have not for a good many months enjoyed a thriller as much as I have enjoyed Murder by Chance.”

  What so impressed these and other critics about Murder by Chance and Drax’s successive novels was their simultaneous plausibility and readability, a combination seen as a tough feat to pull off in an era of colorful though not always entirely credible crime writers like S. S. Van Dine, Edgar Wallace and John Dickson Carr. Certainly in the 1930s the crime novelists Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Anthony Berkeley, among others (including Milward Kennedy himself), had elevated the presence of psychological realism in the crime novel; yet the criminal milieus that these authors presented to readers were mostly resolutely occupied by the respectable middle and upper classes. Drax offered British readers what was then an especially bracing change of atmosphere (one wherein mean streets replaced country mansions and quips were exchanged for coshes, if you will)—as indicated in this resoundingly positive Milward Kennedy review of Drax’s fifth crime novel, Tune to a Corpse (1938):

  I have the highest opinion of Peter Drax’s murder stories….Mainly his picture is of low life in London, where crime and poverty meet and merge. He draws characters who shift uneasily from shabby to disreputable associations….and he can win our sudden liking, almost our respect, for creatures in whom little virtue is to be found. To show how a drab cri
me was committed and then to show the slow detection of the truth, and to keep the reader absorbed all the time—this is a real achievement. The secret of Peter Drax’s success is his ability to make the circumstances as plausible as the characters are real….

  Two of Peter Drax’s crime novels, the superb Death by Two Hands and Tune to a Corpse, were published in the United States, under the titles, respectively, Crime within Crime and Crime to Music, to very strong notices. The Saturday Review of Literature, for example, pronounced of Crime within Crime that “as a straightforward eventful yarn of little people in [the] grip of tragic destiny it’s brilliantly done” and of Crime to Music that “London underworld life is described with color and realism. The steps in the weakling killer’s descent to Avernus [see Virgil] are thrillingly traced.” That the country which gave the world Dashiell Hammett could be so impressed with the crime fiction of Peter Drax surely is strong recommendation indeed. Today seedily realistic urban British crime fiction of the 1930s is perhaps most strongly associated with two authors who dabbled in crime fiction: Graham Greene (Brighton Rock, 1938, and others) and Gerald Kersh (Night and the City, 1938). If not belonging on quite that exalted level, the novels of Peter Drax nevertheless grace this gritty roster, one that forever changed the face of British crime fiction.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER ONE

  In a bed-sitting-room on the first floor of No. 5 Bury Square, in the Borough of Southwark, Captain Eric Macrae lay on his back on a divan bed. The room had started life, in the days of the hop merchant who had built the house in 1820, as a drawing-room; a very grand drawing-room with a deep pile crimson carpet, gilt chairs with brocade seats and backs, a dozen occasional tables, and a cosy corner of white-painted wood.

  This morning, by the light of a July sun filtering through a holland blind, it appeared singularly unattractive, for there was oilcloth on the floor, a rag mat in front of the marble fireplace, and a white pine dressing-table in the bow-window. There was a wicker chair with its cover torn, and grey padding showing.

  Macrae woke slowly; slowly stretched his arms above his head and yawned. Then he turned on his side and looked at the watch on his wrist. It was five minutes past eleven, and he was lunching with Mrs. Keene at her flat at one o’clock. There was plenty of time. He put out a hand to the trousers on the back of a chair, groped deeply in a pocket, and brought out six coppers and a box of matches.

  He laughed. Sixpence! Well, he’d been broke before and had found a way out. Mrs. Keene would give him lunch, and she owed him a couple of quid. He wouldn’t worry if it wasn’t for that damn’ bill at the club. Forty pounds! . . . And he hadn’t a notion how to raise it.

  He kicked back the bedclothes and swung his feet to the floor, walked unsteadily to a corner of the room, and took a dressing-gown off a peg. Then he went to the fireplace and turned on a tap. There was a hiss of escaping gas. That was a bit of luck, for he hadn’t got a shilling for the meter. He filled a kettle and put it on the ring.

  While the water was heating he opened a drawer in the dressing-table and took out a clean shirt. It was the last one. The right cuff was frayed, and as he shaved off the threads he thought, “I must get Mrs. Finch to do something about this.” The front was all right, and the collar he had worn yesterday would have to do.

  When the water in the kettle was hot he propped a six-inch square of looking-glass on the mantelpiece and shaved; when he had finished and had wiped off the outlying fringes of soap he rubbed cold cream into his skin. As he did so he drew down his lower jaw until the skin was stretched tightly and the wrinkles round his mouth disappeared. They returned as the muscles relaxed.

  Then he wiped his hands on a towel, put the lid back on the pot of cold cream, and dipped a rag into a saucer half-filled with an oily black liquid. He squeezed the rag half-dry and dabbed it on the grey hairs at the sides just above the ears and on the temples.

  Some damn’ fool had said that a man at forty was in his prime. He felt old at thirty-nine.

  He had barely completed one side when he put down the rag and turned his head, listening to the sound of footsteps on the bare wooden treads of the staircase. There was a shuffling on the landing outside. The door opened and a very small but very penetrating voice said:

  “’Morning, Captain. Sorry I’m late.”

  It was Mrs. Finch. Macrae pushed the saucer of hair-dye out of sight behind a photograph frame.

  “That’s all right,” he said, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his dressing-gown.

  Mrs. Finch, who stood five foot nothing in her broken-down boots, looked up at Macrae. The top of her head was on a level with his shoulder.

  “I’ve brought your trousis and I’ve sponged them and pressed them. They don’t look so bad, do they?”

  Macrae took the pair of dove-grey trousers from her arm and turned them over. There was a white ring in the place where they had been stained.

  “That’s fine.” He held them up, folded them, and laid them across the arm of the wicker chair.

  Mrs. Finch put her bag on the bed. It was rumpled and the top blankets and sheet were hanging to the floor. An ash-tray on the floor was full of cigarette-ends and grey ash. She walked to the kitchenette, built out from the back window. There was a plate on the window-sill containing two sardines lying in a pool of green oil.

  “What did you have for breakfast?” she asked in a voice which could have been heard in the street if the window had been open.

  “I wasn’t hungry,” Macrae replied evasively.

  “You ought to have something hot like I told you. Herrings is cheap enough, and so is bloaters.”

  “I never care for much breakfast.”

  Mrs. Finch looked at him and opened her mouth as though to speak. But she changed her mind after a moment’s thought. “When things get this way, it’s better to keep your trap shut,” she thought, and carried a dirty cup to the basin in a corner of the room.

  When she had washed and dried it she hung it on a hook and then set to work to make the bed.

  Macrae picked up a cuff-link and put it into the clean shirt. It was a gold link, one side torpedo-shaped, the other flat. On the flat side there was a date engraved: 15.11.17. He had been eighteen when he had found these links at his place on the breakfast-table of Grove Hall, the year he went to Sandhurst. He had almost forgotten those days.

  Mrs. Finch was sweeping the floor now, with little strength or purpose. A handful of dust was the result of her labour. She put down the pan by the door.

  “I’ll come back and finish off when you’re dressed. I’ve got a bit of shopping to do.”

  Macrae turned as she opened the door. “Oh, wait a minute. There’s something I want to ask you.”

  Mrs. Finch stopped with one hand on the door-knob. “Yes, sir?”

  “I was walking through Bulmer Court last night and I saw rather a pretty girl. She wasn’t wearing a hat and her hair was black and curly.”

  “That must have been Peggy. She works at Mr. Crick’s, just opposite my place.”

  “She’s a good-looker.”

  “She’s not so bad, but she’d look a lot better if she was to take more pride in herself. Got her hair done proper and wore a dress that suited her.”

  “Her name’s Peggy, is it?”

  “That’s what I said. Peggy Nichol.”

  “I’d like to meet her.”

  “You meet Peggy Nichol!” A cracked laugh followed the words. “She’s not your sort, Captain.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  Mrs. Finch looked doubtful. “I don’t know what she’d say—I don’t really. She’s a funny girl some ways. Independent. And besides that she’s walking out with my son Bert, and when a girl’s got a steady man she don’t want to start going out with some one else. Bert would have a lot to say if she did, I can tell you that.”

  “Bert needn’t worry. I only want her as a dancing partner. She’s got just the right figure.”

  “Well, I’ll
see what I can do about it.” Mrs. Finch took her hand from the knob and put it under her chin. “She finishes with Mr. Crick along about six o’clock most nights, and if you was to come to my place afore that, say half-past five, I could ask her to look in on her way home.”

  Macrae took a packet from the mantelpiece and lit a cigarette. “Then that’s settled,” he said through a cloud of smoke.

  “Of course, I can’t promise nothing, and if she won’t come, she won’t come, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “Yes, I understand that. And now I’ll have to be getting dressed.”

  Mrs. Finch still stood in the doorway.

  “Mr. Crick, him that she works for, is a decent old stick. Clever, too.”

  Macrae hummed a tune and picked up a day-old paper.

  “He had a murder case once and got the bloke off, what was more than any one round here thought he’d do. But for all the good it did he might have saved himself the trouble. The bloke killed himself the week after.”

  Macrae nodded, untied the cord of his dressing-gown, and took the newly pressed pair of trousers off the chair. The hint was broad enough even for Mrs. Finch.

  Macrae dressed slowly and with care, for his clothes were his stock-in-trade, his sole capital. He would sooner have gone hungry than appear badly dressed. He was hungry now. He consoled himself with the thought of a free lunch to be provided by Mrs. Keene and counted out the coppers which would take him to it. Sixpence! He smiled, and his thin mean lips spread in a hard line beneath his black moustache. Life was a game—the life he led. Sometimes rich, but more often poor. It had been fun for a time, but now that he was nearing the forty mark it wasn’t quite so amusing.

  He looked into the glass and took up the rag again and started on the left side. Damn these grey hairs! When he had finished he put on a double-breasted coat which still fitted without a wrinkle, though it was more than four years old. The slim gold cigarette-case which he slipped into the breast pocket did not show. Book matches in a waistcoat pocket; a silk handkerchief in his cuff; the six pennies in a trouser pocket, and he was ready for the road.