He Shot to Kill Read online

  Peter Drax

  He Shot to Kill

  His arms were hanging down, but his face was turned upwards. For the first time Johnny saw a dead man.

  Colonel Meroy is a prosperous pillar of the landed gentry. But his neighbours would be shocked to learn he’d started out as a London pickpocket, and still earns his income from a career in smoothly organized robbery. Now he’s hit a perilous snag – his latest job means going up against the rival and ruthless Luvello gang for a fortune in gold bullion, and even risking the safety of his own son. When a river policeman is killed, Inspector Thompson of Scotland Yard is drawn into the case, and he always gets his man …

  He Shot to Kill was first published in 1936, and has remained out of print until this new edition. It includes an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  ‘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

  Death by Two Hands – Title Page

  Death by Two Hands – 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 crime 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

  I

  Colonel Meroy adjusted his tie with care. It matched his well-cut double-breasted suit, and he looked at his reflection in the glass with pride. He was a big man, a little over six feet, broad in proportion and, now that he had passed the fifty mark, inclined to put on weight. An upright carriage, which accorded well with his clipped moustache and grizzled hair, concealed the fact from all save his tailor and his valet. The latter handed him his watch, keys, wallet, and small change.

  “Going t
o be a real scorcher, sir. Seems a pity you’ve got to go up to London.”

  “It’s a damn’ shame. The garden’s looking all right, but why the devil will that gardener always put geraniums in that centre bed? He knows I hate ’em.” The valet refrained from taking sides on this controversial topic.

  “Will you be back for lunch, sir?”

  “I doubt it. Why?”

  “Mr. Lakin’s giving a tennis-party this afternoon, sir. Mr. John told me to remind you.”

  The Colonel frowned. If there was any man whom he ever bothered to hate it was Ben Lakin.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be back. But, anyway, you needn’t put out my flannels. I may drop in after tea, but that’ll be all.”

  The frown which had gathered on the Colonel’s face faded when he stepped out on to the lawn which ran down to the river. He even forgot the geraniums and turned his steps to the brick-paved rose garden, where he picked a young bud of Angèle Pernet and put it in his buttonhole.

  Colonel Meroy had chosen well when he had bought Grove House, and he surveyed its ivied front and mellowed bricks with satisfaction tinged with pride. There weren’t many men who could boast of achievements such as his. At ten years old he had been a penniless orphan. At eighteen he had become one of the finest exponents of the “dipper’s” art that London had ever seen. Watches—they were worn with chains in those days—seemed to find their way by magic into his hands.

  “It’s sweet to watch that kid work,” he had overheard a man say one day, and he had flushed with pride at the words. Not that he hadn’t had some near things; times when he thought he must be caught, but luck had been with him and he had never experienced that sinking, sick feeling in his stomach when a policeman says, “I want you.” They’d wanted him all right, but somehow their desire had never been fulfilled, and with the passing years the Colonel had learned that in the thieving game there was no safety in numbers. For years he had worked a lone hand, but advancing age had caused him to change his methods and make use of two or three picked men.

  A gong sounded in the house, and the Colonel entered the breakfast-room through french windows. As he did so the inner door opened and a young man came in.

  “’Morning, Dad.” ‘

  “’Morning, Johnny.”

  “Why the smart suit, Dad? Not going to Town, are you? Saturday morning and all. I thought you were going to have a clear week-end.”

  The Colonel ran through his letters and, selecting one, handed it over to his son.

  “Bank manager is getting restive. Overdraft of three hundred pounds, which means I’ve got to get busy. This place simply eats money.”

  Johnny helped himself to bacon and eggs, and after a few minutes said quietly:

  “I say, Dad, isn’t it about time you took me into your—er—business? I’ve finished with Cambridge and I’m getting bored stiff with everlasting tennis-parties and mucking about on the river.”

  The Colonel smiled.

  “I wondered when you’d say that, Johnny. I mean to give you a chance to pull off something big one of these days, but not this time. Bert Winnick has been working on this particular job for the last three months and he’s got it all fixed up. I couldn’t put someone else in his place now. He’d never forgive me.” Johnny handed back the bank chit.

  “It’s come at rather a good time, this job.”

  “Yes; as a matter of fact I had hopes I could have pulled it off a week ago, but better late than never. Are you going to the Lakins’ do this afternoon?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Will you be home in time?”

  “I hope not. I can’t stand that man, and I rather wish you’d keep out of it, Johnny.”

  Johnny looked rueful.

  “You’re forgetting Mary, Dad. I promised her I’d go.” The Colonel rose and walked over to the french windows. He was clearly upset and worried.

  “There’s nothing in that, is there?” he asked after a short pause. “I mean, you’re not engaged or anything?”

  Johnny blushed.

  “There never can be,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask her unless . . .”

  “Unless you decided to go straight?”

  There was more than a hint of bitterness in the Colonel’s tone.

  “Well, why don’t you? I won’t stop you. You’ve had a good education, and if I’m lucky I may be able to give you some sort of an allowance.”

  “Oh, I’ve been over all that in my own mind a hundred times, Dad. Sometimes I thought I could manage to settle down to a straight job, but I was only kidding myself. I’ve given up the idea, and the sooner you give me a chance the better. Mary’s a hell of a lot too good for me.”

  “That’s so much poppycock, Johnny. Why, that father of hers is . . . Well, I suppose I shouldn’t say anything against him, but I assure you he’s not such a white-souled angel as he tries to make out.”

  The Colonel carried his last cup of coffee out on to the loggia and lit a cigar. This business of Johnny and Mary seemed to be coming to a head, and it was troubling him. Johnny could say what he liked, but he, the Colonel, would bet a fiver that there would be an engagement within a month if something wasn’t done about it.

  He rang a bell, and a few minutes later his valet appeared.

  “Oh, Sims, get the Chrysler out and warm her up. I’ll drive myself.”

  By the time the cigar was half smoked the Colonel had recovered his customary complacency. Sims brought his hat and stick.

  “The car is ready, sir.” ·

  The Colonel slumped into the driving-seat and let in the clutch. It was a curious side of his character that, while in the village of Weyfleet, where he posed as a respectable householder, he viewed the local police with benevolent appreciation. In London it was different, and a constable of the Metropolitan force always occasioned him a feeling of vague uneasiness. For London was his battleground and the police his antagonists. Today as he drove down the Victoria Embankment he shivered as he passed New Scotland Yard. For years he had been so successful in the battle of wits that it would not have been surprising if he had shown a certain scorn for the C.I.D. But he was much too wise a bird to underestimate the forces arrayed against him. “Safety first” was his motto, and he never took a chance if it could be avoided, nor did he allow one of his men to do so.

  The Colonel’s chief assistant was one Bert Winnick, a true cockney. He was the only man he knew, so the Colonel swore, who could be relied upon to carry out his orders accurately and intelligently. The two had met by chance five years before. Bert was a van-boy then and the Colonel had noticed him sitting on the tailboard of his van munching a sandwich. It was instinct, the Colonel said, which had impelled him to stop and talk to the boy; and almost before he knew what he was saying he had asked Bert if he wanted a job at twenty-five shillings a week.

  The amount of the proposed wage caused the sandwich to be lowered.

  “Not ’arf I don’t,” Bert managed to utter through a mouthful of bread and jam.

  “All right. Start tomorrow.”

  The Colonel scribbled a line on a scrap of paper.

  “And come to this address.”

  “Have to give notice first,” Bert replied. “Can’t manage it afore the end of the week.”

  “I’ll give you five bob if you come tomorrow.” The Colonel tempted, but Bert was obdurate, and with that the Colonel had had to be content. It was this queer streak of loyalty which, in the course of time, had so endeared Bert to his new employer. Of other principles he had none, and the only crime he had not committed, apart from murder, was that of being found out.

  The Colonel drove his car up Farringdon Road and garaged it in a builder’s yard. Then he unlocked a door in a high brick wall and came out on a paved walk before one of the few houses in the City of London which had escaped destruction in the Great Fire. Beyond the walk was a plot of grass, green and well tended, surrounding a pink chestnut tree which quite overshadowed the little half-timbered house with the lattice-paned casement windows and the red-tiled roof. The Colonel let himself in at the front door and went into the living-room. Blackened oak beams ran the length of the room on the white plastered ceiling. At the far end was a wide brick fire-place with inglenooks and high-backed settles. Uncertain footsteps sounded on the wooden staircase, and a door by the fire-place opened to reveal a little old woman bent almost double and clad in a tight-fitting black dress. She bobbed a curtsey, and her wrinkled old face lit up with a smile.