The Crime at the ‘Noah’s Ark’: A Golden Age Mystery Read online

  Molly Thynne

  The Crime at the ‘Noah’s Ark’

  “There’ll be blue murder here before Christmas!”

  A number of parties heading for a luxurious holiday spot, are forced by severe winter weather to put up at the ‘Noah’s Ark’, a hostelry they will share with Dr. Constantine, a shrewd chess master and keen observer of all around him. Other guests include bestselling novelist Angus Stuart, the aristocratic Romsey family, a pair of old spinster sisters, and a galloping major whose horseplay gets him into hot water – and then gets him murdered.

  Who is the masked intruder who causes such a commotion on the first night? Who has stolen Mrs van Dolen’s emeralds, and who has slashed everyone’s (almost everyone’s) car tyres? And are the murderer and thief one and the same, or are the guests faced with two desperate criminals hiding in plain sight in the snowbound inn? Dr. Constantine, aided by two of the younger guests, is compelled to investigate this sparkling Christmas mystery before anyone else ends up singing in the heavenly choir …

  The Crime at the ‘Noah’s Ark’ was first published in 1931. 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

  About the Author

  Titles by Molly Thynne

  Death in the Dentist’s Chair – Title Page

  Death in the Dentist’s Chair – Chapter I

  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-bound 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

  The snow had begun in the second week of December. It was hailed with joy by the entire infant population of the country; by the Press, which had already exhausted such time-worn copy as is to be culled from November fogs, and was at a loss to fill the hiatus that lies between “Collisions in the Channel” and “Christmas Shopping,” and by those inveterate sentimentalists who care not how bitter the weather may be, provided it is “seasonable.”

  A white Christmas was predicted. Winter-sport enthusiasts routed their skis out from the attics where they had lain hidden for a twelvemonth, and less fortunate people, who had never set eyes on a Swiss mountain, spent happy hours fitting runners on to soap boxes, pessimistically aware that at any moment the snow might turn to sleet, and the fair, untrodden fields of virgin white to black slush. But for once it seemed that they were to be pleasantly disappointed. Day after day they woke to see the snow-flakes drifting slowly past the windows; and day after day the drifts rose higher and higher in the country lanes, until even the children grew tired of snowballing and turned to the contemplation of their chilblains, and the adult population of the country began to look upon “seasonable weather” as a rather grim joke.

  And then it got beyond a joke. Conditions reached a point at which they ceased to be funny and became merely irksome and annoying. Posts were late; the milk did not arrive in the morning; gutters and drains got stopped up in the evening, when it was too dark to see to clear them; and even the most confirmed among the sentimentalists began to grumble.

  And still the snow went on. And, inevitably, the slow-moving but irrepressible sense of humour of the English reasserted itself, the absurdity of the situation caught their fancy, and the whole business became a joke once more. Within five days of Christmas the roads showed signs of becoming so blocked that it was doubtful whether the holiday-makers would reach their destinations, while the holly and turkeys destined for the delectation of those who had wisely elected to stay at home seemed unlikely to reach London at all. In spite of which, transport, though difficult, had not yet become impossible, and “going away for Christmas” had merely taken on the proportions of a gigantic game, in which the would-be holiday-maker pitted himself gleefully enough against Nature, and usually managed to win out in the end.

  It was in this spirit that Angus Stuart set out to spend Christmas at Redsands. Indeed, it would have taken more than a snowfall to abash him, for he had only lately achieved a condition of serene content that would probably never again be his in this life. Love might come to him and possibly fame, but once only can a man taste success in the full tide of his youth and vigour; once only, after a period of sordid poverty, can he watch his bank balance swell in a few months to proportions he had never dared dream of; once only, and, when one is twenty-three this is perhaps the greatest bliss of all, can he prove himself right in the face of his disapproving elders.

  Small wonder that Stuart was a little fey that morning when, in defiance of the ominous list of blocked roads which had issued from his (brand-new) loud speaker the night before, he climbed into the car that had been his for barely a month and set out for the most expensive pleasure resort on the map of England. Whether he succeeded in reaching it or not was, on the whole, immaterial to him. Less than a year ago he would have had his expenses scheduled to the last farthing, and any hitch on his journey, if it entailed the added cost of a night’s lodging, would have curtailed his Christmas holiday proportionately. Now, for the first time, he was realizing the power of money. He would put up anywhere he chose, no matter how expensive the hotel, and even should he wreck the car on the road, the disaster would be one he would be able to face financially. For, with a suddenness that even now took his breath away, he had become that most fortunate of mortals—the author of a best seller.

  Three years before, in the face of the strident disapproval of an apoplectically-inclined father, a mother whose capacity for tears had been a weapon that until then had never failed her, two aunts, the one gloomy, the other acid, and an abominably level-headed and capable elder brother, he had thrown up a job which would in all probability have ended in a partnership. When, as an excuse for this act of wanton folly and ingratitude, he had explained that his first novel was already in the hands of a publisher, and that he proposed to become a writer of books, there had ensued a scene which he was still trying in vain to forget.

  Six hours later he was in London with only twenty pounds and the problematical royalties of an as yet unpublished novel between him and starvation. For two years he had scratched a living out of the bare husk which, in his innocence, he had once glorified by the name of Art; but in the meagre hours snatched jealously from the hack work he did not dare refuse, he had managed to produce two more novels, and with the second his luck had turned. As in a dream he had watched the editions multiply; had sold the film rights for what had seemed to him then an incredible sum; had dealt graciously with editors who but a few months before had been known to him only by the slight variations in the wording of their printed rejection slips; and, at last, still dazed with the magnitude of his own success, had found himself blinking inanely across the footlights at an enthusiastic audience on the first night of the dramatization of his book.

  And now he was on his way to Redsands, an expedition which, as he quite realized, was only another manifestation of that slight inebriation from which he had been suffering of late. He had never broken with his people, though during the lean years he had avoided seeing them, and when his mother had written, taking it for granted that he would accept his father’s belated suggestion that he should spend Christmas at home, he could not quite stifle a feeling of resentment. Conceit had never been one of his failings, but he was human enough to feel that the invitation had followed a little too closely on the heels of his success. It was no doubt some unconscious reaction that had made him choose Redsands—the latest, most exclusive and expensive of coast resorts—as an alternative to the fatted calf at home. In his present state of elation he took no account of the fact that he was by nature shy, and inclined to be awkward in the presence of strangers. And among strangers he would certainly find himself, for not only had he no acquaintances there, but he had never at any period of his life mixed with the kind of people who go to such places as a matter of course.

  It was not until his thoughts had begun to turn towards lunch that it dawned on him that he had taken close on thre
e hours to travel less than fifty miles. Also, it was snowing more heavily than when he had started, and the roads were becoming noticeably worse. For some time driving had been not only difficult, but actually dangerous, and twice he had narrowly escaped ditching the car. The strain and the cold were beginning to tell on him, and he realized that, unless the snow stopped soon, the roads would become almost impassable.

  He had already made up his mind to put up at the first decent inn he came to, when he arrived at the hill that was destined during the next few days to prove the undoing of many a better car than his.

  His attention was first drawn to its possibilities the forlorn little group which had parked itself at the bottom. Three of the cars had obviously shirked the ascent. A lorry, now firmly lodged in the snow-filled ditch, had had a shot at it, and a big Rolls, slued half way across the road, had evidently only escaped a similar fate by backing into the lorry. A very aged person, with a sack round his shoulders, was observing the wreckage with a certain dour satisfaction.

  “You’d better bide where you be, sir,” he piped planting himself in the path of Stuart’s car, “or she’ll be on top of ’ee. Oy, there she come!”

  His voice rose to an exultant squeak, and Stuart became aware of a large touring car majestically pursuing its inexorable way backwards down the hill towards them. It was gathering momentum with every yard, and Stuart, with a hasty glance behind him prepared to back out of harm’s way. But the wearer of the sack seemed quite prepared to deal with the situation. Planted in the middle of the road, he addressed the chauffeur, whose anxious face could just be seen peering from the driver’s seat. He was doing his best to keep the car straight, but, with the wheels locked and the car gathering speed each moment as it skidded down the steep incline, he was finding it a difficult business.