He Dies and Makes no Sign: A Golden Age Mystery Read online

  Molly Thynne

  He Dies and Makes no Sign

  “He had his enemies, I suppose?”

  “Disputes, you mean? Over the merits of Puccini and Wagner, Strauss and Verdi! But people do not entice an old man from his home many years afterwards to avenge Wagner or Puccini!”

  It was a shock to the Duchess of Steynes when her son announced his engagement to the grand-daughter of an obscure violinist, Julius Anthony; but still more of a shock was the discovery of Anthony’s murdered body in the cinema at which he played.

  Dr. Constantine and Detective-Inspector Arkwright join forces in their third (and final) case together. Their only clue at the outset is the dead man’s mysterious assignation at the Trastevere restaurant, one of London’s most fashionable eateries, and located, as it happens, on the property of the Steyneses. The biggest challenge at first appears to find any kind of motive for the old man’s slaying – until their investigations lead in a fiendishly unexpected direction.

  He Dies and Makes no Sign was first published in 1933. This new edition, the first in many decades, includes an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  “He dies and makes no sign.”

  —King Henry VI, Part II.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Epigraph

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  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

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  About the Author

  Titles by Molly Thynne

  The Draycott Murder Mystery – Title Page

  The Draycott Murder Mystery – Chapter I

  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

  RAIN, blurring the white outline of the cliffs at Dover; rain, playing with needle-pointed fingers on the Customs House roof; rain, sweeping slantwise across the fair green fields of Kent; the dreary, monotonous patter of rain on the carriage windows, and then respite as the train drew in under the shelter of the echoing roof of Victoria Station.

  Dr. Constantine, watching the blank faces of the waiting porters as they slid, like the numbers on a tape-machine, across his vision, relapsed still further into despondency. He was returning from a chess tournament on the Continent and was in the grip of one of his rare moods of depression, engendered partly by a vile crossing and partly by the humiliating conviction that he, who prided himself on finding food for entertainment in the most unlikely places, had been hopelessly and utterly bored.

  That he had been defeated at the tournament annoyed rather than depressed him. What he did resent acutely was the cause of his downfall, a lady from the Balkans whose name he could neither pronounce or remember, who had been all that a woman should not be, pug-nosed, dough-faced, and monstrously fat. The only word she knew outside her own language appeared to be “sheck”, and she used it with a monotonous regularity that drove him to a frenzy of dislike and impatience and caused him to make an exhibition of himself, as a chess player, that even now he grew hot to think of. No, he had not enjoyed the Continent, and it seemed from the look of things as though he were going to enjoy England even less.

  London, he reflected savagely, as he picked out the imperturbable face of Manners and signed to it, would be empty and dreary to a degree, while the thought of a wet Easter in the country filled him with unutterable depression.

  “Has it been raining long, Manners?” he asked, as he alighted.

  “The best part of a week, sir. Very pessimistic, they are, on the wireless, I regret to say. I hope you have had a satisfactory time abroad, sir?”

  Constantine, who was perfectly well aware of the fact that Manners followed his progress assiduously in the chess columns of the daily Press, glowered at him, and then, for very shame, tried to shake off his black mood.

  “I came to an inglorious end and I deserved it,” he said with an attempt at cheerfulness. “Everything all right at the flat?”

  “Perfectly, sir. I engaged a taxi, thinking you would wish to go.”

  Constantine left Manners to deal with the luggage, and, as his cab slithered and splashed its way through the drowned streets gave his mind to the task of circumventing the Easter holiday. He had thrown his hat on the seat beside him, and, as he sat swaying with the motion of the taxi, he not only felt, but looked, his age. The dark eyes beneath the heavy lids were dull and lifeless. Only the magnificent crop of thick white hair that crowned the fine-drawn, olive-skinned face seemed to have retained its magnificent virility.

  He had arrived at no conclusion as to his plans when later, fortified by a hot bath and an excellent dinner, he gave his mind to the correspondence that had accumulated during his absence.

  “Three telephone messages from the Duchess of Steynes! Did you tell her when I was coming back?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Manners placed a last knob of coal on the fire, surveyed the result with the air of a connoisseur, and straightened himself.

  “If I may say so, sir,” he vouchsafed, “Her Grace seemed greatly annoyed to hear you were abroad. She desired to be informed immediately on your return.”

  Constantine looked up.

  “What did she say exactly?” he demanded with interest.

  “‘Bother the man,’ were her exact words, sir,” Manners informed him, his manner slightly more pontifical than usual. “She also alluded to your absence as ‘abominably inconvenient’.”

  “In fact, ‘“Hell,” said the Duchess’,” murmured Constantine, pulling himself wearily to his feet.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “I was quoting an author who might almost have been a personal friend of the Duchess of Steynes,” answered his master as he made his way to the telephone.

  The Duchess was dining out. Would she ring him up immediately on her return?

  He returned to his letters, his mind straying whimsically at intervals to the Duchess and her desire to see him. In spite of his genuine affection for that lady, and, indeed, for her whole family, he was ruefully aware of her shortcomings. One of these, which was apt to react forcibly on Constantine himself, was her delusion that the Duke—the simplest, sanest and most reasonable of men—was one of those people who had to be managed. Coupled with this otherwise harmless mania was a conviction that the collusion of Constantine, one of her husband’s oldest friends, was indispensable to the process.

  The three-cornered comedy that was apt to ensue, the Duchess painstakingly leading her husband to the water which he had had every intention from the beginning of drinking, the Duke, with a mildly satirical eye on his wife’s unwilling confederate, jibbing just enough to lend zest to the leading, was one which, though it exasperated Constantine, never failed to amuse him. Here, at any rate, should be entertainment enough to tide him over Easter.

  Tired with his journey, he had begun to undress when the Duchess rang him up. Her opening was characteristic.

  “Thank heavens you’re back! I’ve been out of my mind with worry. You’ve heard about Marlowe, of course?”

  “I’ve heard nothing. You must remember I’m only just back and haven’t seen an English paper for two days.”

  “Oh, it’s not in the papers yet. Not that that makes much difference, considering that people are Talking already.”

  Even over the telephone the capital letters were apparent. Constantine realized that the Duchess must have real cause for perturbation.

  “I’m so sorry. I hope it’s nothing serious.”

  “We may save the situation yet if we get together at once. I rely on you. Utterly. Bertie’s taking the most absurd attitude. You must talk to him. You’re my one hope!”

  “But, Duchess, what am I to talk to him about?”

  “I can’t tell you now. Goodness knows who may be listening. Luncheon to-morrow. Please! Come at half past twelve and we can make a plan.”

  “Of course. Delighted. Anything I can do . . .” murmured Constantine vaguely.

  He rang off, feeling distinctly ruffled. That something serious had happened was obvious, for the Duchess did not as a rule deal in superlatives, and it was irritating to feel that he had been jockeyed into blindly taking sides against the mos
t level-headed member of the family before he had even discovered what the argument was about. He felt sorely tempted to sound Manners, whom he knew to be far more au fait than himself with the gossip appertaining to the best society, but he conquered the impulse and went to the bed that night his curiosity still unassuaged.

  The Duchess was waiting for him next morning in her own special sanctum, a room Constantine loathed. The door had hardly closed behind the butler when she launched her bombshell.

  “Marlowe has involved himself with a girl,” she announced tragically.

  Constantine could only stare at her, for once bereft of speech.

  Marlowe, the Duke’s only son, and, as regards birth, the best parti in England, who had reached his thirty-fifth year still unscathed, owing, apparently, to a total inability to distinguish one girl from another, had been the despair of half the mothers in the country, not excluding his own. “He must realize that he has got to marry some day,” she had wailed to Constantine not so very long ago.

  “You’re not pleased?” he asked fatuously.

  “Pleased!” She was a fine woman, though she had just missed being a beautiful one, and was magnificently built for moments like these. “Considering his extraordinary propensity for picking out the plainest and least eligible girl in the room to dance with, do you imagine he has shown any sense in this? Pleased!”

  Constantine wilted.

  “Who is she?” he asked feebly.

  “An actress of sorts. She has been playing very small parts at one of the London theatres. Marlowe met her at one of these clubs that give Sunday performances.”

  “Any family?”

  “A grandfather, I believe. Nobody has seen him,” answered the Duchess, dismissing him with a magnificent, if careless, gesture.

  “How far has it gone?”

  “What are Marlowe’s intentions, you mean? My dear Doctor Constantine, being Marlowe, of course, they are strictly honourable. That’s why the whole thing is so serious. Do sit down and we can settle what’s to be done about it.”