Death in Fancy Dress Read online

  Death in Fancy Dress copyright © Lucy Malleson, 1933

  “Horseshoes for Luck” copyright © Lucy Malleson, 1939

  “The Cockroach and the Tortoise” copyright © Lucy Malleson, 1939

  Introduction © 2020 Martin Edwards

  Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Sourcebooks

  Front cover image © The British Library Board

  Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in association with the British Library

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Death in Fancy Dress was originally published in 1933 by W. Collins & Co. Ltd, London. “Horseshoes for Luck” and “The Cockroach and the Tortoise” were each first published in Detection Medley, edited by John Rhode and published in 1939 by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Death in Fancy Dress

  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

  Horseshoes for Luck

  The Cockroach and the Tortoise

  Back Cover

  to

  Wooda Nicolas

  and

  Julia Carr

  Introduction

  Death in Fancy Dress is a classic whodunit which first appeared in 1933. Lucy Malleson (who hid her gender as well as her name by adopting the pseudonym Anthony Gilbert) was by then already well-established as a detective novelist. She’d begun with a couple of books under another pen name, J. Kilmeny (a pun on “kill many”) Keith, before adopting the Gilbert name for a series of mysteries featuring the Liberal MP Scott Egerton.

  Still in her early thirties, she determined to try something different. Two years earlier, she’d experimented with a non-series Gilbert novel, The Case against Andrew Fane, and now she decided to write another stand-alone. The result was a country house mystery that, despite its conventional setting, veered away from orthodoxy. The story is narrated by a young lawyer, Tony Keith, and he and his friend Jeremy Freyne become embroiled in a strange case which seems to centre on Feltham Abbey.

  “It’s bound to arouse suspicion in the official mind,” the two men are told, “when a wave of suicide sweeps over a country, as it has swept over this one during the past twelve months… men and women have been committing suicide with alarming frequency; and it’s noticeable that they are practically all people in what we term the superior walks of life. Either they’re people of rank and position, or they’re people with money.”

  The authorities have discovered a pattern to the deaths: “It appeared that in every case mysterious telephone calls had been received shortly before the death. The victim, even if in perfect health and activity up till that time, developed nervousness, irritability, an increased jumpiness whenever the telephone rang or the post arrived, and then came the final act of despair… In practically every case, money in quite large sums had been raised, sometimes to the man’s or woman’s ruination.”

  The conclusion to be drawn is clear: “Blackmail on a tremendous scale.” And so the central question is: who is the blackmailer? Before the mystery is solved, a fancy dress ball is held at Feltham Abbey, and someone is found dead in the grounds. The guests at the Abbey form a “closed circle” of suspects in the classic tradition of Golden Age detective stories, and the puzzle is eventually solved in pleasing fashion.

  The book met with critical acclaim. Dorothy L. Sayers, in an insightful review for the Sunday Times on 2 July 1933, said: “Death in Fancy Dress has at least one uncommon merit. It contrives to persuade us that something really serious and unpleasant is taking place at Feltham Abbey. So often in a detective story trivial irregularities like blackmail and murder seem scarcely to ruffle the placid current of domestic affairs… Here, the atmosphere of suspense and uneasiness really does pervade the household.” Sayers praised the “remarkably well-drawn and sympathetic cast of characters” and the clever way in which the reader’s attention was directed away from the truth.

  Unfortunately, in an era of economic misery, the novel did not earn its author commensurate financial success. As she said in her memoir Three-a-Penny: “By this time a thing called The Slump was beginning to set most of us by the ears. Books were affected, like everything else. Not only did our sales cease to increase according to expectations, but our American markets began to fail, until for a good many of us they no longer existed… I began to get panicky and cast round for some fresh way of bringing the necessary grist to the mill.”

  She must have found it galling that Death in Fancy Dress, like her two previous books featuring Scott Egerton, failed to find an American publisher. Her career was at a turning point, but she was determined to keep going. She toyed with the idea of writing romantic fiction or a thriller, before deciding on a more ambitious course: she experimented with a psychological crime novel under a new pen-name, Anne Meredith. The result was Portrait of a Murderer. This novel was again well received, and it was taken up in the USA, but once again it did not make her rich; ironically, the paperback reprint published in the British Library Crime Classics series in 2017, sold much better than the original edition.

  Gilbert didn’t give up, and continued to ring the changes with her writing. Scott Egerton was given another couple of cases, and she created a French police detective called Dupuy, who featured in three books. But her breakthrough did not come until she created the rascally solicitor Arthur Crook, who made his debut in Murder by Experts in 1936, and established himself as her principal protagonist. During the course of a career that continued until the 1970s, Crook became an increasingly likeable character, and carried a business card bearing the slogan: “Linen discreetly washed in private. Danger no object.”

  Lucy Beatrice Malleson was a Londoner, born on Ash Wednesday in 1899. At the age of sixteen, she trained as a secretary, and over the years her employers included the Coal Association and the Red Cross. But writing was her first love. In Three-a-Penny, published as by Anne Meredith, she said: “When I am not writing I am not more than half-alive. I am miserable, hopeful, and dejected by turns.” Her credo was: “It is people and not the things that happen to them who are interesting.” She enjoyed writing short stories, and two which she contributed to the Detection Club’s anthology Detection Medley, “Horseshoes for Luck” and “The Cockroach and the Tortoise,” are included in this book.

  She was a modest and likeable woman, as was noted by her friend and Detection Club colleague Michael Gilbert in a letter to The Times following her
death in 1973. She was aware of the limits of her talent, but she made the best use of it. As she said in her memoir, “I don’t feel guilty that my books don’t sell ten thousand copies, although I should love them to do so… When I was young, I confidently thought they would; when they didn’t I was astounded, but it never occurred to me, when my average sales were 1,250 copies, to abandon writing and do something more lucrative… That’s one reason why writing is such fun—it’s so chancy.” I like to think that she would be amused as well as delighted to know that this long-forgotten detective novel is enjoying a fresh life in the twenty-first century.

  Martin Edwards

  Death in Fancy Dress

  Chapter I

  1

  You might say the affair began when Percy Feltham put a bullet through his head in 1917; or when Jeremy Freyne and I turned up on that foggy night at the Abbey to find half the household had turned out on to the moors; or even to the scene of the second violent death on the premises a few days later. But I think for my purpose it will be best to begin with the day I cannoned against Jeremy in the bazaar at M——in India. I had just completed a fascinating but intricate piece of personal inquiry work on behalf of a rich and fanatical client of my legal firm, Hutchinson, Keith and Murray. It had involved a great deal of examination, patience, travelling, time, money and the most minute inquiries, all to establish the falsity of a slander that scarcely seemed worth so much effort. I said as much to my senior partner, but Hutchinson is versed in humanity and possesses, in addition, a peculiar ripe wisdom of his own.

  “Tell Desmond that,” he said, “and he’ll make the obvious retort of the almost fabulously wealthy man who has had to earn his living. He’s kept his hands clean all these years, worked colossally hard, achieved most of his aims, and his good name is worth a great deal to him. He can’t buy a new one, as he can replace most things. To him this is vital, and he hasn’t the advantages of birth that would enable him to shrug the lie aside for the stupid insult that it is.”

  I had no objection to Mr. Desmond’s regard for his good name, since it gave me the opportunity of visiting a country that has always possessed a charm for me even in prospect. Moreover, after chasing from pillar to post, I ran down my slanderer, proved his bribes to certain locals and poor whites beyond a doubt, and was coming back with a fistful of evidence when I collided with Jeremy Freyne.

  I had known Jeremy ever since we were small boys together at our first prep school. He had been a thin, intelligent, good-looking little boy, who had only to nod his head to gain adherents to the maddest scheme; at fourteen, at Eton, he had been coltish, with an appearance of wearing someone else’s clothes, but his personal magnetism was greater than ever. At seventeen he came nearer to being expelled, without actually pulling it off, than anyone I have ever met. Three of us held our thumbs for him for an hour while his persuasive tongue tackled its first serious task at diplomacy; and after that he was the rowdiest undergraduate on record to escape being sent down.

  Wherever Jeremy was there was bound to be something going on; some madcap had only got to say, “What a lark to do so-and-so,” and Jeremy would be up and calling, “Come on!” before anyone could protest. The trouble was that his challenges were always irresistible. And he seldom lost his bet. Whenever I see “The Mikado,” I am reminded of Jeremy when Ko-Ko says pleadingly, “When your Majesty orders a thing, it is as good as done; to all intents and purposes that thing is done.” I remember during his second year at Oxford he got involved in a scrape that made a certain popular hostess remark that she wasn’t going to have that dissolute young man at her house again, a distinct miss for Jeremy, who was accustomed to having a pretty good time there. Three days later, there came to call on Mrs. D——a plumpish, beshawled, button-booted lady, in black, giving a general appearance of feathers and brooches and carrying a large brocade bag. She had come, she explained earnestly, to apologise for the ill-behaviour of her son.

  “He is wild,” she acknowledged, “but he has a heart of gold.”

  Mrs. D——was so won over by the old lady’s skittish and witty conversation, once the question of Jeremy was shelved, that she readily agreed to rescind her decision, and the visitor retired to a neighbouring garage to deal with stays, petticoats, suspenders, hairpins and a lace fichu.

  The affair leaked out, though it never travelled so far as Mrs. D——. When Jeremy’s mother heard of it, she sent for him. She was a round dimpled dormouse of a woman with a deceptive air of gentleness.

  “Don’t you be taken in, Tony, old son,” Jeremy said, feelingly, to me. “I give you my word that school lickings were nothing to my mother when she’d got her monkey up.”

  Of course, at twenty-two she couldn’t deal so simply with him, but her subtlety made even her victim her admirer.

  “Dear me, Jeremy,” she said in her charming voice and assuming her most delightful manner, “what a positive godsend you are! Here am I harried to death trying to find a good reason for refusing to attend the local bazaar in August.”

  “Can I suggest anything?” asked Jeremy, looking puzzled.

  “No, dear boy, I shan’t have to refuse now. What a pity you didn’t reveal your gifts last year. There were several functions I know I should have enjoyed. Fortunately, this is also going to be a busy summer.”

  Jeremy looked appalled. “But why don’t you go yourself?” he demanded. “They’re—they’re your pigeon.”

  Mrs. Freyne shook her head. “Oh, no,” she replied placidly, “I don’t run darning-needles into my fingers for fun, or swallow ground glass, so why should I be expected to catch germs in a number of local halls? Have you a diary, dear? There are so many engagements I’m afraid you might forget some of them.”

  “My God!” said Jeremy in awe-struck tones at the end of the summer vacation, “never pit yourself against a woman, Tony. You won’t have an earthly.” But to his mother he said, “Dearest, how can I ever thank you enough? You’ve given me the most amazing warning. After seeing the lengths to which female brutality will go, and realising the manner in which respectable married women employ their leisure, I have resolved never to place my head in the noose.”

  “How comforting!” said Judia Freyne. “I was so much afraid you were going to marry that red-headed Australian cat you’ve been trailing about everywhere this year. What about continuing the experiment at Christmas? There’ll be lots more parties then.”

  We both got into the tail of the war, and I ran upon Jeremy at the beginning of 1918. Mrs. Freyne had died the previous year and he took it very hard. Otherwise he didn’t seem a scrap changed by his war experiences. He came through without a scratch, while I took a bullet in the hip that has left me a little lame ever since.

  When I came back I was taken in by old Hutchinson, who had always promised to give me a stool in his office when I came down from Oxford. He had lost his son in the war, and in 1926 he took me into partnership. I liked the work amazingly, and Hutchinson was a charming man to deal with. There was another young partner, Murray, who came in two years after I did.

  I had a little money of my own, besides what I earned, and no dependants, and I felt I deserved a little comfort, so I engaged chambers in town and advertised for a valet. I saw a good many, ex-servicemen to an applicant, but half of them had never dressed anything but themselves, except one enterprising man who said he was an expert at dressing windows, and I was beginning to despair and wax impatient when a tall slender young fellow, with a brief moustache and gold-rimmed glasses, put in an appearance. I have a habit of going by a man’s hands when I’m dealing with him, in practically every capacity. It’s a trick lawyers learn very early; people can disguise their voices, control their expressions, remain as unmoved as if they were something out of Madame Tussaud’s, but again and again they’re betrayed by their hands. This fellow had noticeably good hands, with flexible wrists, and he knew what to do with them. The only thing I didn’t like a
bout him was the moustache, and I wondered if he’d agree to shave it off. I asked him, tentatively, and he replied without a shadow of hesitation, “Certainly, my dear fellow. It was a damned nuisance, anyhow,” and peeling it off, he dropped it in his pocket.

  I felt a little annoyed. No man likes being fooled.

  “What on earth’s your little game now?” I demanded.

  “The moustache?” he asked. “To tell you the truth, I’m temporarily interested in a lady who considers it effeminate not to sport a healthy growth on the upper lip.”

  “And you can’t manage the real thing? Bad luck.”

  “There are several reasons against making the attempt. One, by the time it’s achieved adolescence my interest in Clarice and hers in me will undoubtedly have waned. Two, various other of my lady friends consider a moustache a positive nuisance. Three, it stamps me immediately as an ex-officer, and I’m beginning to discover that we aren’t exactly a popular lot. Worthy, my dear fellow, deserving, well-meaning, but—for the most part without the haziest notion of business methods, and so liable to grab a bayonet when we want to enforce an argument. Three—no, four—it limits my capacities. After all, one can always add a moustache when desirable, but one can’t so easily detach it if it’s permanently embedded in the individual. No, I do very well with Charlie.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t be so easy to pass yourself off as the new Parish Visitor with that kind of excrescence clinging to you,” I agreed. “I get you.”

  “I hope you’re going to keep me,” said Jeremy promptly. “You’ll find me industrious, willing and trustworthy. And my taste is impeccable. Also, I’m damned hard up, I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed—and I know you do yourself devilish well.”

  But I didn’t—take him, I mean. Instead I took a fair young man with the manners of a shop-walker, and Jeremy disappeared into the blue. He didn’t, after all, embrace any profession. He said he had had one darned good try and luck was against him. He knocked about, gathering experience and having the time of his life, so that presently, when you heard of some white man with the reputation of a lunatic, doing anything particularly futile in some obscure British protectorate, you could bet your boots Jeremy wasn’t far off.