The Floating Admiral

The Floating Admiral

By Certain Members of the Detection Club

G. K. Chesterton

Canon Victor L. Whitechurch

G. D. H. and M. Cole

Henry Wade

Agatha Christie

John Rhode

Milward Kennedy

Dorothy L. Sayers

Ronald A. Knox

Freeman Wills Crofts

Edgar Jepson

Clemence Dane

Anthony Berkley

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This 80th anniversary edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2011

First published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton 1931

THE FLOATING ADMIRAL. Copyright © The Detection Club 1931, 2011. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © MARCH 2011 ISBN: 9780007414451

Version: 2017-04-13

Contents

Copyright

Map

Foreword

By Simon Brett

Introduction

By Dorothy L. Sayers

Prologue

“The Three Pipe Dreams”

By G. K. Chesterton

Chapter I

Corpse Ahoy!

By Canon Victor L. Whitechurch

Chapter II

Breaking the News

By G. D. H. and M. Cole

Chapter III

Bright thoughts on Tides

By Henry Wade

Chapter IV

Mainly Conversation

By Agatha Christie

Chapter V

Inspector Rudge begins to form a Theory

By John Rhode

Chapter VI

Inspector Rudge Thinks Better of It

By Milward Kennedy

Chapter VII

Shocks for the Inspector

By Dorothy L. Sayers

Chapter VIII

Thirty-Nine Articles of Doubt

By Ronald A. Knox

Chapter IX

The Visitor in the Night

By Freeman Wills Crofts

Chapter X

The Bathroom Basin

By Edgar Jepson

Chapter XI

At the Vicarage

By Clemence Dane

Chapter XII

Clearing up the Mess

By Anthony Berkeley

Appendix I

Solutions

Appendix II

Notes on Mooring of Boat

Counsel’s Opinion On Fitzgerald’s Will

About the Publisher

Map

FOREWORD

By Simon Brett

PRESIDENT OF THE DETECTION CLUB 2001–

IT is appropriate that the origins of the Detection Club are shrouded in mystery. No official archives for the organisation have ever been kept and so its history has to be pieced together from the memoirs, correspondence, hints and recollections of its members. One reason for this incomplete record may be that the Club originally prided itself on being a kind of secret society, with rituals known only to its initiates. In the days of the internet, however, such a level of security is impossible. Indeed, an extract from the Detection Club’s most secret rite, the Initiation of New Members, is readily accessible on Wikipedia.

So the Club’s history is, at the best, conjectural. One authority declares that it was founded in 1932 with 26 members, but this assertion is somewhat weakened by the fact that a letter was published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1930 and signed by “members of the Detection Club”. And the serials The Scoop and Behind the Screen appeared in The Listener respectively in 1930 and 1931. They were written by multiple authors, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, E. C. Bentley and Anthony Berkeley, under the name of the Detection Club, as was this work, The Floating Admiral, whose copyright notice on the first edition reads: “The Detection Club 1931”.

So a more likely prehistory of the Club was that round about 1928 Anthony Berkeley Cox (who only used his first two names on his books) and other detective writers started to meet for informal dinners, which then became more established into the rituals of a Club. According to some sources, G. K. Chesterton was appointed the first President—though sometimes referred to as “Leader”—in 1930. Mind you, other authorities say that he didn’t take over the Presidential mantle until 1932. Even the Detection Club itself is inconsistent about the date. On its headed notepaper is stated that Chesterton’s reign began in 1932, whereas in the List of Members it says 1930. So you can really take your pick.

What is certain, however, is that, on 11 March 1932 the “Constitution and Rules of the Detection Club” were adopted. The opening section of this document reads: “The Detection Club is instituted for the association of writers of detective-novels and for promoting and continuing a mutual interest and fellowship between them.” Members had to fulfil “the following condition: That he or she has written at least two detective-novels of admitted merit or (in exceptional cases) one such novel; it being understood that the term ‘detective-novel’ does not include adventure-stories or ‘thrillers’ or stories in which the detection is not the main interest, and that it is a demerit in a detective-novel if the author does not ‘play fair by the reader’.”

In this 1932 Constitution, the Ordinary Meetings of the Club should be “not fewer than four in the year”, so things haven’t changed that much. In 2010—and for many years before that—the Detection Club met three times.

What has changed is the criterion of admissibility for potential candidates. With the great spread of crime fiction’s range, the qualification has been extended way beyond the traditional whodunit (which is just as well, because very few people nowadays write traditional whodunits). The current membership certainly includes writers of “adventure-stories or ‘thrillers’ or stories in which the detection is not the main interest”, as well as practitioners of the historical, legal, forensic, psychopathological and other developing subgenres. Crime fiction is a much broader church now than it was in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Detection Club reflects that.

Some would argue that contemporary mysteries are much more varied and frequently better written than the offerings of that so-called “Golden Age”. They are certainly more psychologically credible than many of the works produced at that time. They are also more serious, sometimes even to the point of taking themselves too seriously. In crime fiction, noir is the new black.

Most of these differences could be seen as improvements, but the one thing that has been lost with the passage of time is the sense of fun that used to be associated with crime fiction. In her introduction to The Floating Admiral, Dorothy L. Sayers’ description of the collaborative exercise is: “the detection game as played out on paper by certain members of the Detection Club among themselves.” And later she writes: “Whether the game thus played for our own amusement will succeed in amusing other people also is for the reader to judge.” The fact that the book is being reissued yet again suggests that there are still plenty of readers out there willing to be amused by the game.

A lot of Golden Age crime novels were games. A murder mystery was an intellectual challenge rather on the same level as a crossword—and it’s interesting that the two forms of entertainment both developed around the same time. In the days before television, in the days of country house parties, such games were very popular. Collections of crime puzzles—like F. Tennyson Jesse’s The Baffle Book, A Parlour Game of Mystery and Detection—sold in large numbers. It was indeed the age of the parlour game … which hardly exists nowadays. People don’t have parlour games. Very few of them even have parlours.

But it is in the spirit of a parlour game that The Floating Admiral should be approached. The idea of a serious (should I use that awful word “literary”?) novel written by a relay of authors is incongruous. For a light-hearted work of crime fiction, though, the concept is fun, and I think it’s clear that the writers involved in The Floating Admiral enjoyed the intellectual challenge that faced them.

I have been involved in a couple of collaborative ventures of this kind and I very quickly discovered that the best job to get is that of the person who starts the story. In the first chapter you can sprinkle clues and inconsistencies with reckless abandon, secure in the knowledge that it won’t be you who has to tie up all the loose ends later. As a logical consequence of this, the worst job is writing the final chapter, pulling together all the threads of the story to produce a credible solution to the mystery. The temptation to begin that final chapter with the words “But it was all a dream …” is strong.

In The Floating Admiral this particular short straw was drawn by Anthony Berkeley, which was probably just as well. The author of The Poisoned Chocolate Case, who also, under the pseudonym of Francis Iles, produced the classic thriller Malice Aforethought, was equipped both as whodunit plotter and as someone who understood the psychology of the criminal mind. If he couldn’t make sense of the ending, nobody could, and I think it’s significant that his final chapter is entitled Clearing Up the Mess.

Berkeley is one of the contributors to The Floating Admiral whose name is still reasonably well known, at least to crime fiction buffs. The same could be said of Monsignor Ronald A. Knox, Freeman Wills Croft and Clemence Dane. Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, of course, are big hitters, seemingly destined to endure forever, and G. K. Chesterton is still a well-known literary figure (though the Prologue he wrote to this volume seems to bear no relation to anything in the ensuing novel).

Some of the other contributors’ names have dropped off the radar almost completely—except in the consciousness of dedicated collectors—but I was interested to know a little about them, to help me visualise the composition of the Detection Club in its early years. So here are my findings:

Canon Victor L. Whitechurch was, as his title suggests, a clergyman, whose fictional creation Thorpe Hazell was a vegetarian railway detective, intended to be as different as possible from Sherlock Holmes. Whitechurch was one of the first crime writers to submit his manuscripts to Scotland Yard to check he’d got his police procedural details right (an effort that many contemporary practitioners of the genre still don’t bother to make).

G. D. H. (George Howard Douglas) and M. (Margaret) Cole were a husband and wife team of crime writers. Both left-wing intellectuals, in 1931 G. D. H. formed the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda, later to be renamed the Socialist League. Amongst the undergraduates he taught at Oxford was the future Prime Minister, Harold Wilson.

Henry Wade was the pseudonym of Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, 6th Baronet, who was awarded both the D.S.O. and the Croix de Guerre for his bravery in the First World War. As well as writing twenty crime novels, he was High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire.

John Rhode was one of the pseudonyms of Cecil John Charles Street. Also writing as Miles Burton and Cecil Waye, in his lifetime he published over 140 books.

Milward Kennedy was the pseudonym of Milward Rodon Kennedy Burge, an Oxford-educated career civil servant, who specialised in police procedurals. He also wrote books under the androgynous name Evelyn Elder.

Edgar Jepson had an enormously varied literary career. As well as crime novels and popular romances, he wrote children’s stories and is probably best remembered now for his fantasy fiction. His son and daughter were both published authors and his granddaughter is the writer Fay Weldon.

So just a few snapshots of the 1931 Detection Club members who collaborated on The Floating Admiral. I find it intriguing to imagine the dinners they must have shared when they cooked up the ideas for this relay novel. Also the conversations … I’m sure, like contemporary members of the Detection Club, though they talked a bit about the craft of crime writing, it was when they got on to other topics that they became more energised. I can visualise religious discussions between the Catholic convert Ronald Knox, the Anglican canon Victor Whiteside and the Christian humanist Dorothy L. Sayers. I wonder how the idealistic Socialism of G. D. H. and M. Cole went down with the aristocratic Henry Wade. And, writing all those books, John Rhode must have had difficulty finding time to attend the dinners.

But enough nostalgia. One thing I am sure of, though … The dinners of the embryonic organisation, during which the plot of The Floating Admiral was hatched, would have been conducted in just the same spirit of good humour and congeniality which, I am glad to say, still characterises to-day’s Detection Club.

What can be wrong, after all, with an exclusive organisation of some sixty members which exists, in the words of Dorothy L. Sayers, “chiefly for the purpose of eating dinners together at suitable intervals and of talking illimitable shop”?

INTRODUCTION

By Dorothy L. Sayers

THE FLOATING ADMIRAL

WHEN members of the official police force are invited to express an opinion about the great detectives of fiction, they usually say with a kindly smile: “Well, of course, it’s not the same for them as it is for us. The author knows beforehand who did the job, and the great detective has only to pick up the clues that are laid down for him. It’s wonderful,” they indulgently add, “the clever ideas these authors hit upon, but we don’t think they would work very well in real life.”

There is probably much truth in these observations, and they are, in any case, difficult to confute. If Mr. John Rhode, for example, could be induced to commit a real murder by one of the ingeniously simple methods he so easily invents in fiction, and if Mr. Freeman Wills Crofts, say, would undertake to pursue him, Bradshaw in hand, from Stranraer to Saint Juan-les-Pins, then, indeed, we might put the matter to the test. But writers of detective fiction are, as a rule, not bloodthirsty people. They avoid physical violence, for two reasons: first, because their murderous feelings are so efficiently blown-off in print as to have little energy left for boiling up in action, and secondly, because they are so accustomed to the idea that murders are made to be detected that they feel a wholesome reluctance to put their criminal theories into practice. While, as for doing real detecting, the fact is that few of them have the time for it, being engaged in earning their bread and butter like reasonable citizens, unblessed with the ample leisure of a Wimsey or a Father Brown.

But the next best thing to a genuine contest is a good game, and The Floating Admiral is the detection game as played out on paper by certain members of the Detection Club among themselves. And here it may be asked: What is the Detection Club?

It is a private association of writers of detective fiction in Great Britain, existing chiefly for the purpose of eating dinners together at suitable intervals and of talking illimitable shop. It owes no allegiance to any publisher, nor, though willing to turn an honest penny by offering the present venture to the public, is it primarily concerned with making money. It is not a committee of judges for recommending its own or other people’s books, and indeed has no object but to amuse itself. Its membership is confined to those who have written genuine detective stories (not adventure tales or “thrillers”) and election is secured by a vote of the club on recommendation by two or more members, and involves the undertaking of an oath.

While wild horses would not drag from me any revelation of the solemn ritual of the Detection Club, a word as to the nature of the oath is, perhaps, permissible. Put briefly, it amounts to this: that the author pledges himself to play the game with the public and with his fellow-authors. His detectives must detect by their wits, without the help of accident or coincidence; he must not invent impossible death-rays and poisons to produce solutions which no living person could expect; he must write as good English as he can. He must preserve inviolable secrecy concerning his fellow-members’ forthcoming plots and titles, and he must give any assistance in his power to members who need advice on technical points. If there is any serious aim behind the avowedly frivolous organisation of the Detection Club, it is to keep the detective story up to the highest standard that its nature permits, and to free it from the bad legacy of sensationalism, clap-trap and jargon with which it was unhappily burdened in the past.

Now, a word about the conditions under which The Floating Admiral was written. Here, the problem was made to approach as closely as possible to a problem of real detection. Except in the case of Mr. Chesterton’s picturesque Prologue, which was written last, each contributor tackled the mystery presented to him in the preceding chapters without having the slightest idea what solution or solutions the previous authors had in mind. Two rules only were imposed. Each writer must construct his instalment with a definite solution in view—that is, he must not introduce new complications merely “to make it more difficult.” He must be ready, if called upon, to explain his own clues coherently and plausibly; and to make sure that he was playing fair in this respect, each writer was bound to deliver, together with the manuscript of his own chapter, his own proposed solution of the mystery. These solutions are printed at the end of the book for the benefit of the curious reader.

Secondly, each writer was bound to deal faithfully with all the difficulties left for his consideration by his predecessors. If Elma’s attitude towards love and marriage appeared to fluctuate strangely, or if the boat was put into the boat-house wrong end first, those facts must form part of his solution. He must not dismiss them as caprice or accident, or present an explanation inconsistent with them. Naturally, as the clues became in process of time more numerous, the suggested solutions grew more complicated and precise, while the general outlines of the plot gradually hardened and fixed themselves. But it is entertaining and instructive to note the surprising number of different interpretations which may be devised to account for the simplest actions. Where one writer may have laid down a clue, thinking that it could point only in one obvious direction, succeeding writers have managed to make it point in a direction exactly opposite. And it is here, perhaps, that the game approximates most closely to real life. We judge one another by our outward actions, but in the motive underlying those actions our judgment may be widely at fault. Preoccupied by our own private interpretation of the matter, we can see only the one possible motive behind the action, so that our solution may be quite plausible, quite coherent, and quite wrong. And here, possibly, we detective-writers may have succeeded in wholesomely surprising and confounding ourselves and one another. We are only too much accustomed to let the great detective say airily: “Cannot you see, my dear Watson, that these facts admit of only one interpretation?” After our experience in the matter of The Floating Admiral, our great detectives may have to learn to express themselves more guardedly.

Whether the game thus played for our own amusement will succeed in amusing other people also is for the reader to judge. We can only assure him that the game was played honestly according to the rules, and with all the energy and enthusiasm which the players knew how to put into it. Speaking for myself, I may say that the helpless bewilderment into which I was plunged on receipt of Mr. Milward Kennedy’s little bunch of brain-teasers was, apparently, fully equalled by the hideous sensation of bafflement which overcame Father Ronald Knox when, having, as I fondly imagined, cleared up much that was obscure, I handed the problem on to him. That Mr. Anthony Berkeley should so cheerfully have confounded our politics and frustrated our knavish tricks in the final solution, I must attribute partly to his native ingenuity and partly to the energetic interference of the other three intervening solvers, who discovered so many facts and motives that we earlier gropers in the dark knew nothing about. But none of us, I think, will bear any malice against our fellow-authors, any more than against the vagaries of the River Whyn, which, powerfully guided by Mr. Henry Wade and Mr. John Rhode, twin luminaries of its tidal waters, bore so peacefully between its flowery banks the body of the Floating Admiral.

PROLOGUE

By G. K. Chesterton

“THE THREE PIPE DREAMS”

THREE glimpses through the rolling smoke of opium, three stories that still hover about a squalid opium joint in Hong Kong, might very well at this distance of time be dismissed as pipe dreams. Yet they really happened; they were stages in the great misfortune of a man’s life; although many who played their parts in the drama would have forgotten it by the morning. A large paper-lantern coarsely scrawled with a glaring crimson dragon hung over the black and almost subterranean entrance of the den; the moon was up and the little street was almost deserted.

We all talk of the mystery of Asia; and there is a sense in which we are all wrong. Asia has been hardened by the ages; it is old, so that its bones stick out; and in one sense there is less disguise and mystification about it than there is about the more living and moving problems of the West. The dope-peddlers and opium hags and harlots who made the dingy life of that place were fixed and recognised in their functions, in something almost like a social hierarchy; sometimes their vice was official and almost religious, as in the dancing-girls of the temples. But the English naval officer who strode at that instant past that door, and had occasion to pause there, was in reality much more of a mystery; for he was a mystery even to himself. There were bound up in his character, both national and individual, the most complex and contradictory things; codes and compromises about codes, and a conscience strangely fitful and illogical; sentimental instincts that recoiled from sentiment and religious feelings that had outlived religion; a patriotism that prided itself on being merely practical and professional; all the tangled traditions of a great Pagan and a great Christian past; the mystery of the West. It grew more and more mysterious, because he himself never thought about it.

Indeed there is only one part of it that anybody need think about for the purposes of this tale. Like every man of his type, he had a perfectly sincere hatred of individual oppression; which would not have saved him from taking part in impersonal or collective oppression, if the responsibility were spread to all his civilisation or his country or his class. He was the Captain of a battleship lying at that moment in the harbour of Hong Kong. He would have shelled Hong Kong to pieces and killed half the people in it, even if it had been in that shameful war by which Great Britain forced opium upon China. But when he happened to see one individual Chinese girl being dragged across the road by a greasy, yellow ruffian, and flung head-foremost into the opium-den, something sprang up quite spontaneously within him; an “age” that is never really past; and certain romances that were not really burned by the Barber; something that does still deserve the glorious insult of being called quixotic. With two or three battering blows he sent the Chinaman spinning across the road, where he collapsed in a distant gutter. But the girl had already been flung down the steps of the dark entry, and he precipitated himself after her with the purely instinctive impetuosity of a charging bull. There was very little in his mind at that moment except rage and a very vague intention of delivering the captive from so uninviting a dungeon. But even over such a simple mood a wave of unconscious warning seemed to pass; the blood-red dragon-lantern seemed to leer down at him; and he had some such blind sensation as might have overwhelmed St. George if, charging with a victorious lance, he had found himself swallowed by the dragon.