The Hanging Captain by Henry Wade

 

The Hanging Captain by Henry Wade

 

published 1933

 

….Mrs. Sterron, however, was not in bed; she lay upon a Madame Recamier sofa; nor was she alone. On a low stool beside her sat a priest, dressed in a cassock….

 

Henry Wade has a high reputation – he is very popular with discerning Golden Age readers, those who like to revive forgotten authors. And frankly his biography and portrait need to be examined with joy – he totally seems like someone who was invented to be a character in a GA murder story: real name Major Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, 6th Baronet KStJ CVO DSO. See Wikipedia here.

It was The Bodies from the Library conference in London at the weekend – which was as joyous as ever, and always a fantastic opportunity to catch up with old friends and make some new ones. This is a link to an entry on last year’s event, and there are many other reports all over my blog and others. Henry Wade wasn’t one of the featured authors, but came up in discussions in the bar, so I picked this one out to read on the train home.

The Hanging Captain is a traditional country house mystery. The miserable owner of the house – an unhappy man with money and relationship troubles – is found hanged in his locked study, and this is nearly put down as suicide. But there are enough busybodies around to cast doubt on this, and the local police investigate, with the help of a chap down from the Yard.

It’s a very entertaining story, with some great setpieces. The inquest is a hoot, introducing a mysterious complaint the dead man suffered from – it is felt best to write this down and pass it round:

He handed the piece of paper to the Coroner’s officer, who gave it to the Coroner, who glanced at it and passed it on to the jury…

And there's an awkward juror who keeps asking difficult questions: 

“D’you mean to tell us,” he asked, “that that’s enough to make a man hang himself?” 

And there is a tour de force where the Scotland Yard man takes out two showgirls to check an alibi – they are Utility Dancers, a new phrase to me, but the good baronet seems to know his stuff about the economics of local theatre troupes.

Checking the alibis is a big deal, as is the time of death, and some of those parts are less than compelling, but overall this was a fun read. 

The sorrowing widow takes her black clothes seriously, after wearing a nice tennis dress earlier. She is lovingly drawn:

Griselda Sterron, tall, well made, graceful as a professional dancer, her short chestnut hair curling back from a high forehead to cling lovingly round the slender nape of a neck now delicately flushed, brown eyes flashing with joy of the game, red lips slightly parted over even white teeth, arms, bare to the shoulder, dazzlingly lovely against the apple-green of her tennis frock, was a picture fair enough to hold the eye of any man.

One character early on says he lives in Hindhead, ‘next door to L.G. nearly’ – I am hoping someone might be able to parse this for me, as I can’t tell what he means.

[Added later: OF COURSE  my readers were able to solve this mystery - see the comments below, and this webpage for more details Notable Inhabitants of Churt | Churt Parish Council]

A character wears a billycock hat – in a recent entry I discovered what exactly this is.

I had one problem with the book: [very slight spoiler, though only if you were in the middle of reading the book] 

half-way through, a piece of info is revealed and as a result one suspect is eliminated because a conceivable motive is completely ruled out ‘impossible – [no-one] in their senses…. The idea is unthinkable.’

Everyone accepts this. But in the denouement, this non-existent motive is seen as quite enough to justify a murder, without any change or new information. I can put up with most things in a murder story, I consider myself quite easy-going, but this – when something is stated so firmly early on, then later on someone just says ‘oh no, not that’ I find extremely annoying.

But that didn’t stop me enjoying the book very much overall.

Womanon the sofa by Arthur Keller, who did quite splendidly dramatic pics for short stories in periodicals. This one is from the Ladies Home Journal of 1920, so rather early, but it was such a great picture, and so very much in keeping with the book, that I had to use it. From the Library of Congress.

Tennis dress from a fashion illo of the era.