Late to the Fancy Dress Ball: The Orange Axe

The Orange Axe by Brian Flynn

published 1931

 

 

 

The fancy dresses and quaint costumes affected by the great majority of the guests were as striking and as original as London had perhaps ever seen. [The costumes included] Barbary Turk, Moor of Venice, Franciscan Friar and Knight of the White Cross… Spanish matador…

 

 

 

After the Bodies From the Library conference last weekend, Steve Barge (of the In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel blog) pointed me in the direction of this book. And indeed – missed opportunity – it would have been a great addition to my talk on fancy dress in Golden Age crime, absolutely on point.

So let’s see this as 

arriving late to the party to make an entrance….

And special thanks to Steve – the greatest living expert on Brian Flynn - and to the Dean St Press who are republishing his works with intros from Steve.

This is the line I have saved on my computer as I need it for so many posts:

And, shoutout as ever to the Dean St Press who have made it available to us and earn my gratitude every week, it seems.

If you try to look this book up on amazon, make sure you specify ‘book’, or you will get a most interesting selection of weapons – these were my two favourites, I can’t choose between them:

Moving on, you will reach a rather different image: this gorgeous cover

The book throws you into a dramatic setup – 1930s London, a group of chaps get together to make a plan to defend a lady’s honour (in this case an actual Lady). She is being blackmailed, so they come up with what is really an obvious plan: they will all attend a fancy dress party at her grand residence, and they will be unrecognizable even to each other [see: the major point of all similar crime novels of the era] and one of them – chosen by lot – will take further action. We don’t really know exactly what the plan is, but I think we can all agree that this is, naturally, the only possible way of dealing with this tricky situation. Wouldn’t this basic plan just drop into all our minds at once?

It struck me as being very Dennis Wheatley – a compliment in my eyes, I have an unlikely soft spot for the old gentleman, and he was a great one for poshos getting together to make sure justice is done and defending the honour of the ladies.

The book is nicely fast-moving, I strongly approve, and soon afterwards we are at this costume party. If you want a flavour of the style, try this:

André de Ravenac, in his guise of an Arab sheikh, crushed a piece of paper in the palm of his hand with a dramatic gesture and turned to leave the ballroom. Had anybody been close enough to him to look into his eyes beneath his mask, that intimate person would have been amazed at the dark fire that smouldered within them. Optimistic excitement held him in its thrall.

And soon enough, not a spoiler, the villainous blackmailer is dead. But it is obvious to the reader that this is not straightforward. It is not clear exactly what  happened (this is a mystery after all), but we can tell that it was not all according to the original plan.

We now have to bring in the Republic of San Jonquilo— the ball is being given in honour of the president, Sebastian Loredano, who is visiting London and being entertained by the former British Ambassador to his island. Loredano’s reaction to events, btw, is: ‘A man murdered? “Sweep up the body and on with the dance!”’ He is a splendid character: I particularly enjoyed his passing sideswipe at his chancellor: “Da Costa here and I have cudgelled our brains—my brains, I should say—to see if we can connect any particular person with these affairs.”

The Ambassador is Sir Beverley Pelham, and his wife Josephine is the victim of the blackmail scenario. She is glimpsed ‘dancing with a huge tawny-bearded Viking who handled her in the manner of a steam crane dealing with a frolicsome cork.’

Scotland Yard at once agree to call in Anthony Bathurst, series detective and the archetypal gentleman civilian sleuth, whom the police love to work with. He is, like all of these heroes, a right busybody, as well as an expert in many areas, and a smart thinker.

Clutched in the dead man’s hand is a scrap of black & orange material: these are ‘the colours of the republic’. Later another such scrap will turn up close to the next dead body, this time with a definite orange axe on it. Incidentally, I think the significance of the axe is that one character is dressed up as an executioner/”Headsman” and ‘on the black of the back of his doublet was patterned an orange axe’ - there is, I think I am right in saying, no real axe in the book.

[diversion here: and at the end there is a most unlikely discussion of the difference between applique and embroidery – I would expect Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver to be making this distinction, but can only wonder where Anthony Bathurst learned all he knows , as the Great British Sewing Bee was not available to him.]

There is also a vital clue relating to the size of men’s collars.

The book has many notable moments – from those that interest me particularly:

 

Her clothes were “chic” to the last degree and carried in all of them the hallmark of Paris. “French,” thought Anthony Bathurst to himself when he first regarded her.

To those that, even in this era, and this type of book, should have provoked class warfare, and surely bring out the socialist in all of us:

“we’re lucky to run up against a servant so observant. As a rule they’re thick and heavy. Since the lower classes took to running the country, they’ve lost most of the little intelligence that they had—or at least it seems so to me.”

There’s something that may be a reference to a book by another author:

the Chief’s been away all day to-day on that poisoned-chocolates case

(I did a whole post on chocolates in books  - poisoned and not-poisoned - here)

And proper GA tropes such as this one:

Pierpoint crushed the letter…between his two hands and tossed it with a smothered curse into the open grate.

(as Jerry Burton says in Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger, you can then either ‘watch it slowly burn, or slowly watch it burn’)

And also

“You!” she gasped. “Here?” They were the last words that she was destined to speak.

So all very good fun, an enjoyable book, and though you can guess some of what is happening, it still holds its surprises. Steve says he could have done with a map of the layout of the house where the murder happened, and I very much agree, but I gave up early on trying to follow the intricacies of the doors corridors and rooms.

There is another book by Brian Flynn on the blog: The Murders Near Mapleton -for which my major criticism was that the title was boring and I could think of several better ones.

The top fancy dress ball is from the previous century, but I liked the look – NYPL

Second fancy dress ball  Carlos Saenz de Tejada, Wikiart .

Smart gent, 1931, from NYPL

Parisian chic from NYPL.