The Case of Sir Adam Braid: A Golden Age Mystery Read online

  Molly Thynne

  The Case of Sir Adam Braid

  “The blood’s coming from a cut at the back of his neck,” she said slowly. “He couldn’t have done that in falling. Some one must have—”

  Sir Adam Braid, the distinguished artist, was a cantankerous old man. Not well-liked by most of his family and associates, he was about to add one more enemy to the list by changing his will … but not before death paid a visit to his London flat, and Sir Adam was found stabbed through the neck.

  Chief-Inspector Fenn takes charge of the case and soon notices the butler seems more frightened than shocked – but what if anything, did the butler do? After all, there is a plethora of suspects, including mercenary relatives and some curious occupants of the neighbouring flats. Fenn must put the clues together, and bring a murderer to justice in this classic golden age mystery.

  The Case of Sir Adam Braid was first published in 1930. This new edition, the first in many decades, includes an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  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

  About the Author

  Titles by Molly Thynne

  The Crime at the ‘Noah’s Ark’ – Title Page

  The Crime at the ‘Noah’s Ark’ – Chapter One

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Although British Golden Age detective novels are known for their depictions of between-the-wars aristocratic life, few British mystery writers of the era could have claimed (had they been so inclined) aristocratic lineage. There is no doubt, however, about the gilded ancestry of Mary “Molly” Harriet Thynne (1881-1950), author of a half-dozen detective novels published between 1928 and 1933. Through her father Molly Thynne was descended from a panoply of titled ancestors, including Thomas Thynne, 2nd Marquess of Bath; William Bagot, 1st Baron Bagot; George Villiers, 4th Earl of Jersey; and William Bentinck, 2nd Duke of Portland. In 1923, five years before Molly Thynne published her first detective novel, the future crime writer’s lovely second cousin (once removed), Lady Mary Thynne, a daughter of the fifth Marquess of Bath and habitué of society pages in both the United Kingdom and the United States, served as one of the bridesmaids at the wedding of the Duke of York and his bride (the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth). Longleat, the grand ancestral estate of the marquesses of Bath, remains under the ownership of the Thynne family today, although the estate has long been open to the public, complete with its famed safari park, which likely was the inspiration for the setting of A Pride of Heroes (1969) (in the US, The Old English Peep-Show), an acclaimed, whimsical detective novel by the late British author Peter Dickinson.

  Molly Thynne’s matrilineal descent is of note as well, for through her mother, Anne “Annie” Harriet Haden, she possessed blood ties to the English etcher Sir Francis Seymour Haden (1818-1910), her maternal grandfather, and the American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), a great-uncle, who is still renowned today for his enduringly evocative Arrangement in Grey and Black no. 1 (aka “Whistler’s Mother”). As a child Annie Haden, fourteen years younger than her brilliant Uncle James, was the subject of some of the artist’s earliest etchings. Whistler’s relationship with the Hadens later ruptured when his brother-in-law Seymour Haden became critical of what he deemed the younger artist’s dissolute lifestyle. (Among other things Whistler had taken an artists’ model as his mistress.) The conflict between the two men culminated in Whistler knocking Haden through a plate glass window during an altercation in Paris, after which the two men never spoke to one another again.

  Molly Thynne grew up in privileged circumstances in Kensington, London, where her father, Charles Edward Thynne, a grandson of the second Marquess of Bath, held the position of Assistant Solicitor to His Majesty’s Customs. According to the 1901 English census the needs of the Thynne family of four--consisting of Molly, her parents and her younger brother, Roger--were attended to by a staff of five domestics: a cook, parlourmaid, housemaid, under-housemaid and lady’s maid. As an adolescent Molly spent much of her time visiting her Grandfather Haden’s workroom, where she met a menagerie of artistic and literary lions, including authors Rudyard Kipling and Henry James.

  Molly Thynne--the current Marquess has dropped the “e” from the surname to emphasize that it is pronounced “thin”--exhibited literary leanings of her own, publishing journal articles in her twenties and a novel, The Uncertain Glory (1914), when she was 33. Glory, described in one notice as concerning the “vicissitudes and love affairs of a young artist” in London and Munich, clearly must have drawn on Molly’s family background, though one reviewer reassured potentially censorious middle-class readers that the author had “not over-accentuated Bohemian atmosphere” and in fact had “very cleverly diverted” sympathy away from “the brilliant-hued coquette who holds the stage at the commencement” of the novel toward “the plain-featured girl of noble character.”

  Despite good reviews for The Uncertain Glory, Molly Thynne appears not to have published another novel until she commenced her brief crime fiction career fourteen years later in 1928. Then for a short time she followed in the footsteps of such earlier heralded British women crime writers as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margaret Cole, Annie Haynes (also reprinted by Dean Street Press), Anthony Gilbert and A. Fielding. Between 1928 and 1933 there appeared from Thynne’s hand six detective novels: The Red Dwarf (1928: in the US, The Draycott Murder Mystery), The Murder on the “Enriqueta” (1929: in the US, The Strangler), The Case of Sir Adam Braid (1930), The Crime at the “Noah’s Ark” (1931), Murder in the Dentist’s Chair (1932: in the US, Murder in the Dentist Chair) and He Dies and Makes No Sign (1933).

  Three of Thynne’s half-dozen mystery novels were published in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom, but none of them were reprinted in paperback in either country and the books rapidly fell out of public memory after Thynne ceased writing detective fiction in 1933, despite the fact that a 1930 notice speculated that “[Molly Thynne] is perhaps the best woman-writer of detective stories we know.” The highly discerning author and crime fiction reviewer Charles Williams, a friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and editor of Oxford University Press, also held Thynne in high regard, opining that Dr. Constantine, the “chess-playing amateur detective” in the author’s Murder in the Dentist’s Chair, “deserves to be known with the Frenches and the Fortunes” (this a reference to the series detectives of two of the then most highly-esteemed British mystery writers, Freeman Wills Crofts and H.C. Bailey). For its part the magazine Punch drolly cast its praise for Thynne’s The Murder on the “Enriqueta” in poetic form.

  The Murder on the “Enriqueta” is a recent thriller by Miss Molly Thynne,

  A book I don’t advise you, if you’re busy, to begin.

  It opens very nicely with a strangling on a liner

  Of a shady sort of passenger, an out-boun
d Argentiner.

  And, unless I’m much mistaken, you will find yourself unwilling

  To lay aside a yarn so crammed with situations thrilling.

  (To say nothing of a villain with a gruesome taste in killing.)

  There are seven more lines, but readers will get the amusing gist of the piece from the quoted excerpt. More prosaic yet no less praiseful was a review of Enriqueta in The Outlook, an American journal, which promised “excitement for the reader in this very well written detective story … with an unusual twist to the plot which adds to the thrills.”

  Despite such praise, the independently wealthy Molly Thynne in 1933 published her last known detective novel (the third of three consecutive novels concerning the cases of Dr. Constantine) and appears thereupon to have retired from authorship. Having proudly dubbed herself a “spinster” in print as early as 1905, when she was but 24, Thynne never married. When not traveling in Europe (she seems to have particularly enjoyed Rome, where her brother for two decades after the First World War served as Secretary of His Majesty’s Legation to the Holy See), Thynne resided at Crewys House, located in the small Devon town of Bovey Tracey, the so-called “Gateway to the Moor.” She passed away in 1950 at the age of 68 and was laid to rest after services at Bovey Tracey’s Catholic Church of the Holy Spirit. Now, over sixty-five years later, Molly Thynne’s literary legacy happily can be enjoyed by a new generation of vintage mystery fans.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  Sir Adam Braid rose stiffly from his comfortable seat by the fire and hobbled across the room to the massive bureau which stood against the opposite wall, well outside the radius of the heat from the glowing, heaped-up coals. And, on his way, he gave vent to his opinion of the weather, importunate relatives, his man Johnson, and life in general with the venomous gusto of an ill-tempered old gentleman who has just discovered a new, and perfectly legitimate, grievance.

  As he let himself down carefully into his swivel chair and picked up the letter which had served to disturb both his physical and mental serenity, he noted, with a certain bitter satisfaction, that the draught that played on the nape of his neck was even more piercing than he had expected—a sure sign that Johnson, as usual, had omitted to shut the door into the kitchen.

  He drew the letter from its envelope and glanced through it, in a mood that augured ill for the innocent writer, who was, even then, waiting in suspense for an answer. And as he read, his eyes gleaming maliciously under the heavy grey eyebrows and the ill-tempered lines at the corners of his thin lips cutting deeper and deeper into the thick, sallow skin, he was already, at the back of his mind, composing the letter to his solicitor which should put an end, irrevocably, to the hopes of the one relative he possessed who did not actively dislike him.

  “Damned impertinence!” he muttered, framing his thoughts aloud, after the manner of the old and self-centred. “Thinks I’m made of money, eh? Might have known it. You give an inch and they take an ell! All alike, the whole lock, stock, and barrel of them. Well, she had her chance and she’s lost it! ‘Advance the money you are leaving me,’ eh? And what if there is no money, miss?”

  He drew a sheet of paper towards him and began to write, the venom in his eyes deepening as he saw the words take form in his small, neat script, the writing of a man to whom a pen or pencil is the most natural form of expression. He had reached the bottom of the page and was about to turn it when the draught from the door smote him cruelly on that part of his scalp where the hair grew thinnest.

  He raised his head and bellowed, a surprisingly robust sound to come from so old and shrunken a figure.

  His voice had barely died away before he heard the soft click of a latch, followed by a discreet tap at the study door.

  “Come in, confound you!” roared the old man.

  The door opened and Johnson appeared.

  “Did you call, sir?”

  His voice was smooth and his manner perfectly respectful, but beneath the surface lurked a veiled insolence that suggested that he both disliked and despised his master.

  Sir Adam swung his chair round and faced him. If Johnson had had imagination he might have compared him to an old, ill-conditioned, shaggy terrier, his few remaining teeth bared to bite; but Johnson’s mind was intent on ending the interview as soon as possible and getting out of sight and sound of his master into the congenial atmosphere of the bar of “The Nag’s Head.”

  “Of course I called! What did you think I was doing? Shut that kitchen door! This room’s like an ice-house!”

  “It is shut, Sir Adam,” answered the man blandly.

  “Exactly. I heard you shut it a second ago. God knows how long it’s been open. See that it stays shut.”

  “Yes, Sir Adam.”

  Johnson waited, his long-suffering gaze fixed on the pattern of the wall-paper over the bureau.

  “Hum. Make up the fire and give me the Times. The Times, you fool, not the Mail.”

  The old man literally snatched the paper from him and ran his eye down the page. It was his boast that he could still read without spectacles.

  “I thought so,” he muttered. “Switch on the wireless and bring me the earphones.”

  He heaved himself on to his feet, limped back to his big armchair by the fire, and settled himself comfortably.

  Johnson turned on the valves of the wireless and brought the earphones across the room. Sir Adam adjusted them carefully and sat listening, his face, for the first time, exhibiting an expression of comparative tranquillity.

  Johnson bent once more over the fire, then straightened himself and stood waiting.

  With a look of intense annoyance, Sir Adam removed the earphones.

  “What is it?” he snapped.

  “Any letters for post, Sir Adam?” asked the man imperturbably.

  Sir Adam glanced uncertainly at the bureau on which lay his half-finished letter. For a second he hesitated, then the faint sound of music came from the earphones he had dropped across the arm of his chair. He readjusted them hastily over his ears.

  “No,” he mumbled. “Finish it later. And see that you leave the kitchen door shut when you go out.”

  Johnson departed, and stretching out his feet to the warm blaze of the fire, Sir Adam gave himself up to the enjoyment of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony.

  A few minutes later a far more human Johnson, clad in a heavy overcoat, and unlighted cigarette between his lips and exasperation plainly written on his face, emerged from his bedroom. He went into the kitchen, picked up a beer jug from the dresser, and came out again, shutting the door audibly behind him. Then he made his way out of the flat, pausing for a moment on the landing to light his cigarette, and ran down the stone staircase and out into the dank November night.

  As he passed through the main door of Romney Chambers the clock of the church that stood at the end of the street chimed the half-hour. Six-thirty. He glanced involuntarily up at the windows of the flat he had just left. It was in darkness save for a knife-edge of light where the heavy curtains in the study did not quite meet. For a moment he pictured the old man sitting there, alone with his music, in the otherwise empty flat, and, for the first time since he had entered Sir Adam’s service three years before, felt an inclination to turn back and forgo the pleasantest half-hour of his working day. The impulse passed, and he hurried on in the direction of “The Nag’s Head,” stopping for a moment to buy an evening paper at the little shop at the corner of the road.

  Mr. Ling, the proprietor, glanced up with a friendly nod, as he picked up his paper and threw a penny on the counter.

  “Easy to see where he’s goin’ to,” he remarked facetiously to his only other customer, a labouring man who, both elbows on the counter, was spelling out the winners in the stop-press news with the aid of a grimy forefinger.

  The man grinned.

  “I’ll lay ’e’ll ’ave a couple afore gettin’ ’is little jug filled,” he said; “and then a pint with ’is supper after ’e gets
’ome. Some people don’t ’alf ’ave luck. You wait till you’ve got a wife and ’alf a dozen kids, my son!”

  Johnson’s mouth twitched, then closed stubbornly, as if he had had a mind to answer and had then thought better of it.

  With a nod to the proprietor he left the shop, and less than ten minutes later was deep in the discussion of that most absorbing and unfruitful of all topics, racing, with the barman of “The Nag’s Head.”

  He had hardly disappeared round the corner when a woman who had been standing in the doorway of a block of flats opposite to that which he had just left, emerged on to the pavement. Carefully avoiding the circle of light thrown by the street lamp, she stood in the shadow, scanning the windows of the flats above that of Sir Adam Braid. They were both in darkness, and with a little sigh of exasperation she turned to re-enter the friendly shelter of the doorway. As she did so, her attention was caught by the movements of a man, who, like herself, had been lurking in the shadows between the lamps. She had noticed him more than once during her vigil, and now she watched him, with the casual interest generated by boredom, as he slipped furtively across the road and into the doorway of Romney Chambers. Driven out of her shelter by the return of the porter in whose doorway she had been standing, she moved farther up the street, still idly watching Romney Chambers, in the upper windows of which she seemed to take so keen an interest. Thus it was that though she saw a second man enter the flats and actually noted the fact that the two men had gone in within five minutes of each other, she was not standing close enough to distinguish either their faces or the clothes they were wearing. Neither could she tell which of the two men it was that came out some two minutes later and almost ran down the street and round the corner. After that nearly ten minutes elapsed before the other man appeared, and mechanically her brain registered the fact that his gait was less hurried, suggesting that of a man who has been about a more legitimate business.