Answer in the Negative by Henrietta Hamilton

 

Answer in the Negative  by Henrietta Hamilton

published 1959

 

searching for secrets in the files....

The publishers Penguin Michael Joseph are producing a new series called the Mermaid Collection: neglected works by 20^th Century women authors, each introduced by a present-day writer. Excellent! What a great idea. Several of the books have featured on the blog in the past – Margaret Kennedy’s Lucy Carmichael, Helen McCloy’s Through a Glass Darkly, Clemence Dane’s A Regiment of Women. (you can use search box to find the posts)

This one looked interesting – a husband-and-wife sleuth team solving a murder in Fleet St in the 1950s. Sally and John Heldar run a bookshop, and live in a nice flat in Bloomsbury, with their child and Nanny. They are called in to help out in a picture agency: an organization providing photographs for newspapers, magazines and authors. There has been an outbreak of poison pen letters and childish tricks at the office. The trouble is directed at one particular man, Morningside, and the Heldars are set up to (initially) be embedded in the office without saying why – they are just customers looking for pictures. They watch out to see who goes into the relevant office (everybody, is the answer) and to discuss all the workers in excruciating detail. 

office staff, 1957 

As ever with poison pen, the paper used is ‘obtainable at almost any stationers’. Side note about the success of marketing: when I was much younger,  there was a very proper brand of stationery called Basildon Bond. What a superb name choice! It sounds so reliable, so upmarket, so classy. We thought it was as good as it gets. But it wasn’t really, it would be seen as quite cheap by the kind of people making judgements in this book. There was a layer below (block of unnamed paper from Woolworth’s) but any likely poison pen writer would have used it – Basildon Bond would be untraceable. I had no idea of that as a young teenager first reading detective fiction...

It is very important who went to public school and who didn’t, which we might have hoped was not current in 1959, but far from it.

I had issues with the snobbery, and Sally’s complete subjection to any male, but there was a much worse moment in the book, one I may never get over. This picture agency has been recently formed and has taken over various archives, which they are trying to combine, properly filed and searchable: these are negatives, as in the title, generally called ‘negs’. But then we are told there is a problem with one of the employees who can’t be trusted with the sorting out:

She'd never have rejected anything, and we haven’t room for anything like all of them. Most of them are so much lumber, anyway – the local grammar school hockey team in 1924, and so on.

I nearly fainted when I read this.

In a post in recent weeks:

Back from the brink, and choosing a career....

I used a picture of a High School hockey team from 1938. I was forced to choose among several pictures of hockey teams, freely available to me, creative commons licence on Flickr, difficult to choose the best. Where would I be if there had been too much of this destructive tendency? Tut.

Anyway. Soon there is some much less serious crime: a few murders. A lot of going on about the shift patterns of the staff, and who came in and out and when and why. I have a favourite crime story trope, which I call ‘How many people were in the graveyard at the time of the murder?’  In part of this case, everyone left the building to go home at the end of the working day. Then they all came back, slipping in and out, self-operating the lift, avoiding the nightwatchman. It’s hard quite to believe in it all.

The book is very much of its time: there is a story of a man working in a school who has ‘a passionate and ill-timed affair with the matron, a very young and half-trained girl’. A colleague finds out and reports this: but in the book’s terms he (the one who does the reporting) is very much in the wrong. ‘He hadn’t been to a public school, poor chap, and he was by nature a prig and a talebearer.’  I don’t think it’s only modern views that make this jaw-dropping and quite horrible.

But on the other hand, being in with the IRA is youthful high spirits, not to be taken seriously – which is indeed how things were in the 50s. Rather like having an affair with a very young girl you work with.

Sally is going undercover:

Sally removed her wedding ring, put on an old tweed coat, flat-heeled shoes, and no hat, and tried to look like a graduate type. Then she borrowed a blue notebook in which Peter [her son] had been drawing pictures, caught a bus to Fleet Street, and walked down the busy pavement to the enormous Echo building.

There is also a teddy boy, who as well as his long coat and lurid tie is wearing drainpipe trousers of pepper-and-salt tweed.

A little bit hard to imagine, but here are some to choose from:

The book was enjoyable enough, and well done to Penguin for giving it another chance. Apparently Hamilton wrote several books about Johnny and Sally, and I probably wouldn’t bother with another one, but I’m glad to have read this one.

 

Graduate School Office Staff, 1957 | Joan Richards, Mary Han… | Flickr

Student pictured during fieldwork for a social survey in S… | Flickr

Collecting books for readers in the reserve stacks, 1964 | Flickr