"An Author Bites the Dust" - читать интересную книгу автора (Upfield Arthur W.)

Chapter Ten

The Debunker

IT was seldom that Bony felt the need of advice, for he was master in the vast pastoral lands and the semi-deserts of inland Australia. But he was experiencing the need when lounging on Miss Pinkney’s front veranda on the morning following his visit to the Rialto Hotel, for now he was moving in a world in which he was not master, a world of human sophistication in a settled community.

It is often extremely difficult to bring to a successful conclusion an investigation of a plain case of homicide. Nevertheless, in every such case there is the body of the victim to announce the cause of death, be it by bullet or blunt instrument, by knife or poison. In effect, Superintendent Bolt had said, “A man named Mervyn Blake died suddenly one night. The medical men cannot tell us what killed him, only that he appears to have died from natural causes, as most of us die. Still, I’ve got a hunch that someone put the skids under him. My men have done their stuff, and they can’t produce any likely motive for murder.”

Bolt’s men had tackled the circumstances surrounding Blake’s death with the relentless efficiency of modern scientific detection. They placed under their microscopes much more than the dead man’s viscera and under microscopes of a different kind they had placed the dead man’s widow and his guests and his household staff in their search for a motive for murder.

There must be a motive for homicide unless the killer is an utter idiot. There was no evidence that Blake had committed suicide; in fact, the evidence of his death was opposed to the theory of suicide. And for all their probing, the Victorian C.I.B. under the redoubtable Inspector Snook had not been able to unearth one fact that would lift the finger of suspicion against any person.

Inspector Snook had written the summary, and it revealed that Inspector Snook had reached the opinion that there was no proof whatsoever that Mervyn Blake had died illegally, and that being so, he did not believe Blake had been murdered. Superintendent Bolt, on the other hand, thought he smelled homicide. He was not satisfied to pigeonhole that material gathered and, perforce, placed it in cold storage, and so in a spirit of friendship, he offered to take the case out of cold storage and give it to Bony to smell. And Bony smelled blood.

It is one thing to smell blood and another thing to find it. The only way to locate it in this Blake case was to discover a motive for killing Mervyn Blake.

Bony felt rather than knew that there was a something deep below the surface that Snook had not troubled to search for because he did not know it existed. To understand the stage, one must go behind the scenes and study the mechanism of the theatre, and Bony felt that to understand the profession of authorship and those who practised it, it would be necessary to delve and burrow into the lives of living writers and critics of literature to ascertain how they ticked.

Coming against this Blake case, he came to a world with which he was absolutely unfamiliar. How to gain entry into the world of literature inhabited by theBlakes and their friends was becoming a problem to Bony-until he remembered Clarence B. Bagshott.

Clarence B. Bagshott lived on a mountain top, and Bony had once accompanied him on aswordfishing trip to Bermagui, since when they had exchanged letters at long intervals. It had not been Bagshott’s mystery tales but his feet that had gained Bony’s interest in the man. His feet were exceptionally large, and the boots on them became professionally important in a case known as “The Devil’s Steps”. Inclined to call a typewriter a blood-drenched stone-crusher Bagshott had no guile, very little culture, and the vice of exaggeration.

Tall, lean and hard, middle-aged and active, Bagshott welcomed Bony in the manner of the prodigal’s father. Bony’s left arm was gripped and he was propelled forward into thehouse, and into the writer’s study where he was forced down into an easy chair beside the desk. A little breathless, he was left alone for five minutes, a period he occupied by making a number of his distinguished cigarettes, and then was presented with tea and cake, and urged to “relax, Bony, relax”.

Bagshott grabbed a chair, dragged it into position, and added, “You’re the very last bloke I expected to see, and yet-the pleasure’s all my very own. How’s things up your street?”

“Quite well. And you?”

“Oh, just so-so. I’ve got another five weeks, three days and-let me see-yes, and nine hours to go before starting off for Bermagui and theswordies. But I’m holding out with astonishing fortitude. Mylaunchman learnt a new tip from an American angler. Remember how we used to let the bait and the flanking teasers troll about forty feet astern of the boat? The new dodge is to increase that distance to a hundred feet astern.”

Bony sighed loudly, resignedly.

“Wish I were going with you,” he said.

“What’s going to stop you?” demanded Bagshott.

“Work, my Chief Commissioner, and all the circumstances that keep my nose to the grindstone, my dear Bagshott. I am even now using my annual leave to work for Superintendent Bolt.”

“Referring to?”

“The late Mervyn Blake.”

Bagshott grinned, his hazel eyes suddenly hard.

“I’ve had the thought that the passing of the great Mervyn Blake might attract you,” he said. “Can I do anything?”

Bony nodded and lit another cigarette. He inhaled deeply, drank half a cup of tea and then exhaled before saying, “An extraordinary case because of its lack of clues and the absence of any likely motive either for suicide or homicide. I am finding it delightfully absorbing. Bolt and his fellows got nowhere, and so far I’m not getting anywhere, either. Actually I’ve come to talk about personalities. Did Mervyn Blake ever criticize yourbooks?”

“Mine! Lord, no! I don’t produce literature.”

“Then what do you produce?”

“Commercial fiction.”

“There is a distinction?”

“Terrific.”

“Will you define it, please. ”

“I’ll try to,” Bagshott said slowly. “In this country literature is a piece of writing executed in schoolmasterly fashion and yet so lacking in entertainment values that the general public won’t buy it. Commercial fiction-and this is a term employed by the highbrows-is imaginative writing that easily satisfies publishers and editor because the public will buy it.”

“Go on,” urged Bony.

“Don’t know that I can,” Bagshott said, doubtfully. “Let’s get back to the starting point. You began it by asking if Blake ever criticized my work, and I said no.”

“And then you added that Blake did not criticize your work because you wrote commercial fiction,” Bony pressed on. “On several occasions I have felt an immovable object. I am feeling it now. Also I am feeling the current of hostility in you towards Blake and his associates. Do you think it reasonable to assume that that hostility in another would be strong enough to produce the act of homicide?”

“No,” was Bagshott’s answer. “I’ll tell you why I say no to that. The Blake-Smythe coterie in number is very small. It’s influence a few years ago was powerful, but it’s rapidly on the wane now. My hostility to it isn’t engendered by what it is doing to the growth of Australian literature but rather by what it’s done in the past.”

“Did you ever meet Mervyn Blake?”

“Never. And I’ve never met Wilcannia-Smythe, either.”

“Read any of his work?”

“Yes. The fellow’s a master of words. His similes are striking, and he knows how to employ paradox. But he can’t tell a story. Let me enlarge on that by comparing his work with mine. He has the mastery of words but not the gift of story-telling. I have the gift of story-telling but not the mastery of words. The great novelists have both gifts.”

“I take it that Wilcannia-Smythe’s work and that of Blake is judged to be literature.”

“Without doubt.”

“Judged by whom?”

“By the members of their societies and by those who have come to rely upon their judgment. But not by the general public.”

Bony became pensive. He lounged farther down into his chair and gazed upward at an enlarged photograph of a marlin suspended from a triangle. Chalked on the body of the fish was the name Bagshott, and beneath it the weight in hundreds of pounds. Beside it stood the angler, an insignificant dwarf.

“Ah, me!” he exclaimed and, rising to his feet, he whipped out his breast handkerchief and draped it over the picture. Sitting down again, he said, “Damn the swordfish, Bagshott.”

“Yes, damn everything. Another cup of tea?”

“Thank you. Just tell me what you know, and what you feel about the late Mervyn Blake and all this literature business. I might then see the obstacle I spoke of. I want to get inside these associates of Mervyn Blake, deeper than the police seemed able to do. If there are currents running strong and deep below the surface, tell me about them.”

“All right, I’ll blow the gaff and the baloney,” Bagshott assented. “Let’s remember that our civilization in Australia is young and still has many of the silly attributes of youth. The nation came to maturity during the First World War, and during the early twenties evinced a marked interest in the work of its authors.

“In 1918 or ’19, Mervyn Blake came to Australia from England to join the staff of the local university, and his first novel was published in the early twenties. He and a few friends founded yet another literary society in Melbourne, and they became affiliated with a similar crowd in Sydney, of which Wilcannia-Smythe was the leader.

“They barged into the few magazines and the city dailies as literary critics, and they boosted each other’s novels no end. They caught the public interest in Australian stories at the crest, and the public bought heavily on their say-so. Alas, the public found itself with second-rate novels and, quite indignantly, said, in effect, that if this was literature, it would have nothing to do with it.

“It wouldn’t, either. Immediately a bookseller or librarian offered an Australian novel, he was almost rudely told to keep it. For years public hostility to Australian fiction remained steady. TheBlakes and the Wilcannia-Smythespersisted. They went on and up in the critical field. In the production field they have gone down and down despite all the mutual backslapping.

“In the early thirties, several men and three women forged ahead as novelists. They cut right away from the gum-tree and rabbit-oh era and presented Australia as she is. They-and the Australian public-were extremely fortunate that in every capital city there were some independent critics who were not novelists with an axe to grind and who were not at all respectful of theBlakes and the Wilcannia-Smythes.

“Today, the Blake-Smythe faction is still influential,” Bagshott went on. “It’s fascist or communist in its close preserve. You are either a member and wear the halo of genius, or you are an outsider, to be ignored or condemned to writing commercial fiction. However, quite a considerable number of Australian authors are doing very well and gaining recognition in England and America.

“There is, for example, I. R. Watts. The Blake-Smythe crowd have always been blatantly hard on Watts, but his books are selling very well overseas. If you want substantiation of what I’ve said, you dig him up.”

“Met him?” asked Bony.

“Never. Don’t even know where he lives. His publishers will have his address, of course. You ask him this question-is there any possibility of internecine warfare within the Blake-Smythe combination? I don’t regard that as improbable.”

“I. R. Watts,” Bony repeated. “Could you let me have one of his books to read?”

“Yes, I can. I have also a copy of Blake’s last book. Take that, too. When you have read the first six pages of Blake’s book you’ll understand why the Australian public is hostile to Australian novels.”

“But your books sell well in Australia, don’t they?”

Bagshott grinned again, his eyes vacant of humour.

“Not as well as they would if the Australian readers hadn’t been led up the garden path by the back-slapping critic authors,” he countered.

Bagshott’s hostility towards the Blake-SmythesBony found to be an interesting facet. He accepted it with caution born of the knowledge that Bagshott was given to over-statement.

He said, “What do you know of Mrs Blake?”

“I saw her once and then didn’t speak to her,” Bagshott replied. “I think she’s more ambitious than her husband was. Her art is the short story. She writes very well and the praise of her work by the Blake-Smythesis merited. Mrs Blake does a fair amount of public speaking, and she contributes a lot to literary periodicals in which she never fails to mention her husband’s books.”

“Thanks. What of Martin Lubers, the wireless man?”

“Heard of him, of course, but I know nothing about him.”

“Twyford Arundal?”

“A poet. Limited outlook, but a good versifier.”

“Mrs Ella Montrose?”

“Wrote a couple of good novels about twenty years ago. She’s as full of repressions as a general is of bile. Husband died years ago. Nobody blamed him. She’s this and that in a dozen literary societies. Does the book reviews for theMelbournian.”

“A woman of many parts, evidently. Tell me about Marshall Ellis.”

“Marshall Ellis! Read the classics less and the newspapers more. You shouldn’t need to be informed about Marshall Ellis,” chided Bagshott. “Marshall Ellis rose to fame by crudely insulting all and sundry, in print and out. Clever bird. Uses vitriol for his ink, and carbolic acid for a gargle. Tries to apeG.K. C. Came to Australia to study growth of our national literature, and even before he left England he was captured by the Blake-Smythe combination. During his visit here, he was never allowed to wander from the fold and, without doubt, he was thoroughly stuffed by his hosts. You can wipe him off. He was just a sucker who ate the pap fed to him.”

“H’m!” Bony smiled. Clarence B. Bagshott hadn’t changed a scrap since that memorable holiday at Bermagui. “Well, then, what of Miss Nancy Chesterfield?”

“Ha-a-a!”Bagshott got to his big feet and gently closed the door. Then he exclaimed softly, “What a woman! What a-a-woman! The very thought of her makes me frantic to cast off thirty years. A glorious creature, Bony, but tough. If you could persuade her to talk heart to heart you’d get something worth while. She knows all the self-crowned highbrows in all the arts, all the members of solid society, all the racketeers, and the black marketeers, all the gambling kings and sport barons. She even knows me!”

Bony’s brows rose.

“I’m delighted to hear that,” he said. “She is, I understand, a journalist.”

“Edits the social pages of theRecorder. Writes personality pars on people who are tops,” Bagshott went on.“One weakness only. She a valuable ally of the Blake-Smythes!”

“Could you obtain an introduction for me?”

“I could, Bony, old boy. But you hesitate. Be your age.”

“I think she’d be interested in me,” boasted Bony.

“No doubt of it. That’s why I’m trembling for you. She is catastrophic to anyone having your sentimentality of heart. They talk about atomic blondes-Nancy is a cosmic blonde. She’s got all the doings ten times each way, and why Hollywood hasn’t snapped her up at a million dollarsper diem beats me.”

“I saw her the other day.”

“You did!” exclaimed Bagshott.

“Yesterday, in fact. I’ll need to remember my advanced age. Honestly, she would like to meet me. You see, I’m a South African journalist, a special writer on the staff of theJohannesburg Age. I’m visiting Australia to study the people and to gather material for a novel or two.”

“You don’t say!” Bagshott leaned back in his chair and laughed without restraint. Then, “I’ll write the letter of introduction,” he agreed. “But we must be careful. Nancy will be sure to check up on you by cabling theJohannesburg Age. You’d be sunk then.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Bony calmly said. “Twenty-four hours before I presented your letter of introduction, I should myself prepare the editor of that journal with a message of enlightenment.”