Murder by the Book

By Eric Brown

Who is killing the crime writers of London? Find out in this “consistently entertaining . . . crime debut from sci-fi veteran Brown” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
London, 1955. When crime writer Donald Langham’s literary agent asks for his help in sorting out “a delicate matter,” little does Langham realize what he’s getting himself into. For a nasty case of blackmail leads inexorably to murder as London’s literary establishment is rocked by a series of increasingly bizarre deaths. With three members of the London Crime Writers’ Association coming to sudden and violent ends, what at first appeared to be a series of suicides looks suspiciously like murder—and there seems to be something horribly familiar about the various methods of dispatch.
 
With the help of his literary agent’s assistant, the delectable Maria Dupré, Langham finds himself drawing on the skills of his fictional detective hero as he hunts a ruthless and fiendishly clever killer—a killer with old scores to settle.
 
“[A] well-paced first mystery. . . . Readers will hope a sequel is in the works.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781780104133

Eric Brown

Twice winner of the British Science Fiction Award, Eric Brown is the author of more than twenty SF novels and several short story collections. His debut crime novel, Murder by the Book, was published in 2013. Born in Haworth, West Yorkshire, he now lives in Scotland.

Book preview

ONE

Langham sat at his desk and pecked with two fingers at the keys of his battered Underwood. He was halfway through the last chapter of his latest novel and the end was in sight. Sam Brooke, his private investigator, was trailing a villain down Regent Street, little realizing that he was being lured into a trap from which it would take all his ingenuity and resourcefulness to escape.

The shrill summons of the phone sounded beside him on the desk. He cursed it initially, then decided to take a break. There were times, especially towards the end of a book, when his enthusiasm to get it finished needed curbing. He’d answer the call, then have a spot of lunch and think about the dénouement.

He laid aside his pipe, long extinguished but still gripped between his teeth, and picked up the receiver – the ‘bakelite bone’ he’d called it in one of his early, more flowery novels. ‘Donald Langham here.’

‘Donald, Donald, my dear boy. Forgive my importunate call. You must curse me, curse me! Be honest now, have I interrupted the muse?’

Langham smiled to himself. ‘Not at all, Charles. I was just about to knock off for lunch.’

‘You assuage my guilt, my dear boy. Did you say lunch? Similar thoughts crossed my mind not two minutes ago. If you hie yourself towards Pimlico in thirty minutes I’ll stand you a repast at the Beeches – though their standards have fallen somewhat of late. I recall the feasts we enjoyed in those far off, pre-war days …’

Lunches with Charles Elder were always protracted, boozy affairs, with one postprandial drink turning into three or four, and often finishing not a minute before four o’clock. That would rule out an afternoon shift at the Underwood … but the novel was almost finished anyway. He’d complete it in the morning.

He interrupted his agent’s purple musings. ‘Lunch would be excellent. I’m on my way.’

‘I have,’ Charles said, ‘a delicate matter to put before you. Very delicate indeed.’

‘I’m intrigued.’

‘Not over the phone, dear boy. Drop by the office and we’ll pop around the corner. No doubt you’ll want to pay your silvery-tongued respects to Maria.’

‘She’s working today?’

‘On the phone to some spotty sub-editor at Gollancz as we speak. I’ve had to increase her hours of late – the agency has never been so busy. I’m working like a demon for my seven-and-a-half per cent, and the thanks I get?’

‘You know I never begrudge you your pound of flesh, Charles.’

‘I’m not talking about you, Donald. I refer to the baying hounds of Grub Street, the semi-literate hacks who think they’re Hemingway and demand advances commensurate with their delusions. As if the importuning of talentless scribblers were not enough, now this.’

‘"This"?’ Langham echoed.

‘Over lunch, Donald. All will be revealed. Now, my ample stomach rumbles its discontent. Come hither, Donald, post haste!’

Langham replaced the receiver, fetched his overcoat and descended the staircase to the quiet side street. His battered Austin Healey sat in the bright April sunlight, as reliable as an old dog that had seen better days. He eased himself in behind the wheel and winced at a sudden twinge in his lower back. He was forty and, despite his usual sanguine take on life, had begun to feel old of late. Aches and pains, along with the fact that his father had died of a heart attack in ’thirty-five at the age of fifty, ushered in unwelcome thoughts of mortality.

He checked in the wing mirror and pulled out into the street.

Over the course of the past two decades – with a break during the war – he’d published over twenty mystery novels, several of which he was reasonably proud. He had a small group of friends, mainly men of his own age and in the same line of work, and a two-bedroom flat at the respectable end of Notting Hill.

He told himself that if his life lacked excitement these days, then that was fine by him. His wartime experiences had provided more than enough excitement to last a couple of lifetimes, and anyway he’d always daydreamed, during intolerably hot nights in Madagascar and India, of living the quiet life in London, writing mystery novels and seeing friends over pints of bitter in snug hostelries.

Now he was living that life and sublimating any subconscious desire for action by putting his hapless private detective through all manner of life-threatening perils. It was true what a friend had said in the pub last week: he lived vicariously via the exploits of Sam Brooke.

The tree-lined streets of Pimlico hove into view and Langham turned the corner into Cambridge Street. The Charles Elder Literary Agency was situated down the leafy side street, surrounded by expensive mansions and the occasional high-end solicitor’s office. Elegant women in their fifties, draped with fox stoles, walked bouffant poodles and yappy Pekinese. This was a million miles from Sam Brooke’s usual stamping ground, and Langham’s, if truth be told, and he never visited his agent without being aware that he and Charles inhabited two entirely different worlds.

He parked outside the agency office, bought a bouquet of mixed blooms from a roadside vendor, then hurried up the steps and pressed the bell. He slipped inside, assailed by the scent of beeswax, and took the short flight of stairs to the first floor. Everything about the premises exuded a luxury at odds with the general post-war penury that prevailed in the capital: the brilliant white gloss paint that covered, in multiple coats, the banister and handrail; a carpet so new and thick that he was in danger of turning an ankle as he climbed.

He tapped on the door to the outer office and entered when Maria carolled, ‘Come in!’ with a slight Parisian accent.

She was seated behind her desk, leaning forward with her hands clasped and her chin resting on the ridge of her knuckles, and a smile irradiated her features when she saw the bouquet.

‘Donald! You are always smiling and bearing flowers.’

He handed them over. ‘To brighten the place, not that the place needs brightening, what with—’

She stopped him. ‘Always the same old line, Donald! And you call yourself a writer?’

He pointed to the communicating door. ‘Charles …?’

‘He is waiting for you, but he is not well. I will tell you that now.’

‘Not well?’

‘Something is troubling him, I know.’ She held her head to one side and regarded Langham.

‘No doubt he’ll pour out his woes over lunch,’ he said.

‘Lunch,’ she said almost wistfully, ‘and while you are enjoying steak tartare and crème anglaise, I will be eating my Bovril sandwiches.’

He almost suggested, then, that she might like to share a more substantial meal with him that evening … but his damned innate reserve stopped the words on his lips. Maria Dupré was ten years his junior, breathtakingly gorgeous, and the daughter of the French cultural attaché to London. She worked in the agency three days a week, but of her life outside the office Langham knew nothing.

What he did know was that, despite the superficial banter and the ease with which they swapped jokes when their paths crossed fleetingly, he was constitutionally unable to do anything to escalate the terms of their relationship. Charles Elder found his reserve amusing, and mercilessly baited Langham about it whenever he had the chance.

‘Right-ho, I’ll go and see what’s troubling his nibs.’

Maria arranged the flowers in a vase and Langham tapped on the communicating door.

A stentorian baritone boomed, ‘Enter!’

He stepped into Charles’s hallowed, book-lined sanctum where the ever-present scent of Havana cigars vied with overtones of whisky. A monstrous aspidistra, which Charles playfully referred to as his child, loomed in one corner.

Charles himself was standing at the far end of the room, his corpulent figure silhouetted against the sunlit window. He resembled, Langham thought, a tweed-clad brandy glass.

‘Donald, my dear boy! Delighted, absolutely delighted. Had you turned down my suggestion of lunch, I would have been bereft. Bereft.’

He approached Langham with his hand outstretched like some beseeching dowager, as if desiring it to be kissed. He took Langham’s hand in limp fingers and squeezed. ‘So glad you could make it. Let’s eat!’

Charles’s face was almost as vast as his stomach, pink and porcine and topped with a snowy peak of white hair. He was such a caricature of himself that passers-by were apt to turn and stare as he sallied forth, swinging his gold-topped walking stick and harrumphing snatches of Bach.

As they left the office – followed by an ironic ‘Bon appétit!’ from Maria – Charles was muttering about the quality of the menu at the Beeches, which Langham knew from experience would be excellent.

He had known Charles Elder for almost twenty years, ever since his first novel was taken on by the agency, and Charles had changed little in that time. He seemed always to have been in his mid-fifties, gargantuan and patrician, a refugee from an earlier, grander era that had vanished with the war.

At their first meeting, Charles had intimidated Langham with a casual remark. ‘Very interested in the book. We don’t usually touch mysteries, dear boy, but this one shows distinct promise. Now tell me, where did you school?’

‘Ah …’ Langham had flushed, swallowed, and told the truth: ‘I … I didn’t. That is, I left school at sixteen and worked in my father’s office.’

‘Good God, sir, for someone with no education you write like an angel. You read, of course? I mean Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell. If I’m not mistaken, I detected their influences.’

Langham had used this as ladder to climb from the hole he’d dug for himself. ‘All those, yes,’ he’d lied.

‘Had you down as a fellow Oxford man, my dear boy. But no matter …’

Over the years he had come to know and like the man – despite, or even because of, the fact that he was unlike Langham in every respect.

They strolled down Gloucester Street, Charles swinging his stick and humming to himself. Usually Charles would have been enquiring about Langham’s latest book, muttering encouragingly about the next advance he’d screw from the shysters at Harrington, but today he was decidedly quiet. Preoccupied, Langham thought. Maria was right: something was troubling him.

They entered the Beeches and Charles made straight for his usual table by the window, the head waiter in flapping attendance. Langham watched the waiter slide the chair beneath Charles’s buttocks, and mused that two chairs might soon be needed to bear the load. Charles busied himself with the wine menu, his piggy eyes scouring the vintages, and in due course ordered a claret.

‘Chateau Pontet, nineteen thirty, Donald. One of the finest.’

Langham smiled, wishing he could order a pint of bitter. He glanced around the room at the well-dressed clientele. He forever felt out of place when dining with Charles, conscious of his elbow-patched tweed jacket and threadbare corduroy trousers.

They ordered; Charles a steak au poivre, and Langham a pork chop. The wine waiter poured Charles a taster, and he duly swilled the mouthful with a series of theatrical grimaces and pronounced it satisfactory.

Langham watched the waiter depart. ‘The delicate matter?’ he asked.

Charles pulled a pained face, took a swallow of claret, then said, ‘I will come to that in due course, my dear boy. Such things cannot be rushed.’

Langham ventured, ‘Harrington getting cold feet about the Sam Brooke series?’

‘What?’ Charles waved his napkin. ‘They love the books, dear boy. Don’t fret on that score.’ He paused, the acreage of his pink face rearranging itself into a frown, as if he were attempting to recall something. ‘Remind me, Donald, immediately after the war … what did you do?’

Thrown by the question, Langham sat back, nursing his glass. ‘A friend I met in field security in India, Ralph Ryland, set up an investigative agency. He wanted someone to do the legwork.’ He shrugged. ‘I decided to write part time and work three days a week for Ralph. I saw it as an opportunity to get some experience that might feed into the books.’

‘And I think it did, dear boy. Your books positively reek of your time spent chasing cut-throats through Whitechapel.’

Langham smiled. ‘I’d hardly say that …’

‘Too modest! Too modest by half. That is why maiden aunts up and down the country positively lap up your thrillers, Donald. Authenticity. You scare the pants off them with your villains because you’re so convincing. The doyen of the lending libraries!’ Charles finished.

‘Thank you. I’ll have that carved on my gravestone.’

Their orders arrived and Charles, goggle-eyed at the prospect of tucking into his inch-thick steak, inserted a napkin between the collar of his shirt and his bullfrog’s throat. He looked for all the world, Langham thought, like a pensionable Billy Bunter.

‘Why the interest in what I did back then?’

Charles slipped a wedge of steak into his mouth, chewed, then said, ‘Let me ask a question of my own, dear boy. Is the investigative agency still running?’

‘Well, it was when I bumped into Ralph just before Christmas.’

He started on his chop, watching Charles as he did so. His agent was nodding slowly, mulling something over behind his bright blue eyes. ‘That is interesting …’

Langham leaned forward. ‘Would you mind telling me what all this is about, Charles? Do you need a private investigator?’

Charles masticated another mouthful of steak with porcine industry, laid down his knife and fork, and stared across the table at Langham. ‘My dear boy, how long have you known me?’

Langham blinked. ‘Twenty years, give or take a few months.’

‘And you know very well what I am?’

Langham found himself smiling. ‘An agent of impeccable taste, a gourmand, a bon viveur, a collector of objets d’art nonpareils …’

‘Your flattery brings a blush to my already sanguine countenance. I mean,’ Charles persisted, ‘you are well aware of my predilections? My – how shall I say? – my preferences?’

‘How could I not be?’

‘And yet, for a man of your age and upbringing, you show a remarkable tolerance.’

Langham smiled. ‘I had my eyes opened during my time in the army, Charles.’

‘Ah, the armed forces, my boy! I attempted to enlist in 1916; did I ever tell you? Myself and a sweet little thing I first met at Eton. We drilled together in the OTC. Needless to say, I was deemed surplus to requirements. And tragic Crispin stopped a bullet at Ypres.’

While Charles’s dewy eyes focused on the past, Langham smiled as he considered his shock, back in ’thirty-seven, when he first realized that Charles Elder was homosexual. He’d kept his agent at a mental arm’s length at the time, and it was not until Madagascar, when he met and fought alongside other men of the same persuasion – one of whom became a good friend – that his prejudices were dispelled.

‘Very well, Charles. Out with it. What’s happened?’

‘That’s what I like about you. You’re down to earth, you speak your mind, and if you have any prejudices you keep them well hidden.’

‘You haven’t heard my drunken rants about the local Tory council.’

Charles smiled. He wiped his mouth with his napkin, stared at Langham, and then sighed. ‘I’ve been a damned fool, Donald.’

Langham nodded. ‘Tell.’

‘The same old story, Donald. The cravings of the flesh are tied ineluctably to the desires of the heart; in my case, my boy, the sexual and the personal are, shall we say, conflicted … In here,’ and Charles lodged a fist against his breastbone, ‘I want nothing more than the bliss of domesticity, the faithful love of a good man, while another part of me loves, I mean loves, the thrill of the chase … Do you appreciate my meaning?’

‘Ah …’ Langham nodded. ‘I think so.’

‘I waffle, Donald; I waffle. I could never write with the clipped precision of yourself. My screeds would run to Jamesean prolixity. But I digress. Where was I?’

‘Conflicted desires.’

‘Quite. You see, in a word, I made a silly mistake and now I am reaping the dire consequences. I met a young gentleman … Gentleman? What am I saying? He was a scallywag, albeit a charming scallywag. He works in Hackney swimming baths, where I am wont weekly to disport myself. One day, perhaps six months ago, we found ourselves in conversation and he tipped me the old How do you do and suggested I come back at six, when he’d be closing the place, for a few extra-curricular lessons. Do you see what I mean, Donald, about the weakness of the flesh?’

‘You succumbed?’

‘That is one way of describing it, my dear boy. I will spare you the details, suffice to say that we had the place to ourselves and the rapscallion exhibited a desire to please matched only by his gymnastic prowess. I’m sorry, I’m making you blush.’

‘The wine,’ Langham said.

‘That was the first occasion. I returned monthly, and again last week, which is when the wretched photographs were taken. To cut a long story short, the photographs – lurid beyond your imaginings – arrived yesterday, along with a typed demand for a hundred pounds.’ Charles shook his head. ‘The sad thing is that my recollection of our intimacy is so beautiful, and yet the photographic evidence of the act suggests a grim carnality.’ He pushed his plate away, having demolished the steak. ‘I must admit to a terrible rage when I think that our time together meant nothing more to Kenneth than the opportunity to fleece me.’

Tears filmed his eyes like silver cataracts. Langham looked away while Charles dabbed at them with his napkin.

‘And you would like me to approach my contact at the investigative agency and have him look into the matter?’

Charles smiled. ‘Would that be possible, dear boy? I mean, how might this continue? A hundred pounds now – and what next week? I know I’m not short of a penny or two, but a hundred pounds! If I don’t pay …’

‘There was a specific threat in the letter?’

Charles waved. ‘Something along the lines of what might some of my more respectable clients think if the truth got out? To be honest, I fear more the opprobrium of the judiciary. I fear, I admit, a spell of her Majesty’s pleasure in the Scrubs.’

Langham thought about it. ‘Can I give you a word of advice?’

‘I’m all ears, dear boy.’

‘I suggest you don’t take it to an investigative agency. I’d keep mum about it. Inform no one.’

Charles looked incredulous. ‘What, and cough up a hundred pounds to the little villain?’

‘Charles, leave it with me. I’ll look into it. I’d like to see the note, and I want to know a little more about this young man, Kenneth.’

‘Are you sure you want to get mixed up in all this, my boy?’

Langham reached across the table and patted Charles’s hand. ‘I’m doing this for a good friend. I’m sure I can put the frighteners on our Kenneth.’

Charles winced. ‘The frighteners? Now you’re sounding like Sam Brooke.’

‘I learned a thing or two at the agency. I just never thought they’d be of much use outside my fiction.’

‘You don’t know how grateful I am, dear boy. What say we adjourn to the office? I have the most wonderful twenty-year-old single malt we might sample …’

Maria was on the phone when they arrived back at the agency.

‘The contract stipulates six per cent, Mr Kenyon. And my client wants it understood that the delivery date, as agreed, will not be before the thirty-first of July.’

Maria listened to the response with her head tipped to one side, her lips pursed in an amused moue. Her long dark hair fell around an aquiline face, which with hooded eyelids and downturned mouth gave her a look at once exotically foreign and droll. Langham found it hard to tear his gaze away from her.

‘That’s all very well, but my client insists that the agreement – the gentleman’s agreement – was for a delivery date of the first of August, and I, too, must insist that we keep to this.’

Charles stood beside Maria’s desk, a fingertip pressed to his pursed lips as he listened. He winked at Langham, a gesture eloquent of his pride in Maria’s negotiating skills.

He waved Langham into his office, eased the door shut and poured two stiff whiskies.

‘She really is the most accomplished aide-de-camp I could hope for, Donald. You don’t know what a relief it is to be able to leave the running of the agency in Maria’s capable hands.’

Charles dropped into his chair behind a vast mahogany desk piled high with books and manuscripts. He raised his glass – reduced to the size of a thimble in his padded paw – to his lips, sipped and closed his eyes in bliss.

‘Ah … Drink has charms to soothe the savage breast, to misquote Congreve.’

Langham sat opposite and took a sip of whisky; it filled his mouth like honey, with a smooth afterburn on the swallow.

Charles said, ‘I suppose you need to see the letter, my boy?’

‘And the envelope.’

His agent opened the top right drawer of his desk and withdrew the envelope.

‘When did you say it arrived?’ Langham asked.

‘Two days ago. By some fortuitous stroke of providence Maria was half an hour late, or she would have opened the mail …’ Charles closed his eyes in a theatrical display of horror. ‘I don’t know what I would have said had she found this … this terrible testimony to my weakness.’

‘She knows about …?’

‘She’s no fool, Donald. Of course she knows. But there’s a difference between knowing and having one’s face rubbed in the sordid facts.’

‘I don’t want to see the photos,’ Langham hastened to add, ‘just the envelope and the note.’

Pulling a distasteful face, Charles withdrew the photographs, slipped them quickly back into the drawer and passed the envelope to Langham.

The agency’s address was typed on the manila envelope, and the postmark at the top right corner was smudged beyond legibility. Langham opened the flap and took out a single sheet of paper.

The short, typed message was brutally, gloatingly, to the point.

Dear Charles,

Enclosed, six of the very best showing you in flagrante delicto, shall we say? I’m sure you would not want your clients au fait with your peccadilloes … The price for my silence is a bargain at a mere hundred pounds.

Langham looked up. Charles was wincing. ‘What do you make of it, my boy?’

‘Interesting.’

‘Interesting? Is that all?’

Langham asked, ‘Whoever did this didn’t stipulate a time or place for the delivery of the hundred pounds.’

Charles placed a hand on his brow. ‘I have that missive to anticipate. I await the postman’s arrival with the eagerness of a lovesick beau. I’ve told Maria I’m expecting an important communiqué and I want her to send all the post in to me.’

Langham read the note again. ‘I might be wrong, but this doesn’t sound like the type of language a young swimming instructor might use. Or am I being unfair? What do you think?’

‘It is a trifle flowery, and the use of the French …’ Charles frowned. ‘I agree. Kenneth is a cockney tyke, and I assume his reading tastes run to the Wizard, not Proust.’

‘Maybe it’s the work of his accomplice, the photographer?’

‘In all likelihood they’re running a very lucrative business, preying upon the lovelorn and the lonely. If only they could see the heartache they cause.’

Langham slipped the letter into the envelope and passed it back to Charles. ‘I’ll pay Kenneth a visit and see what he has to say for himself. Try not to worry. I know that’s easier said than done, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have the matter sorted out in no time.’

‘My boy, you don’t know how grateful I am.’

Langham looked at his watch. It was almost four. ‘And as they say, there’s no time like the present.’

Charles forestalled him. ‘The baths are closed half a day today, my boy. The queers of London are spared Kenneth’s poisoned charms.’

Langham finished his whisky. ‘In that case I’ll pay him a visit tomorrow. I’ll be in touch, and notify me as soon as you get another letter.’

Charles reached across the desk and grasped Langham’s hand. ‘My dear boy, my gratitude knows no bounds.’

Maria was busy typing a letter

Reviews for Murder by the Book

[bookdivasreads · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Donald Langham is an author of hard-boiled detective mysteries. He has an assortment of friends, including detectives, private investigators, and authors, but generally lives a somewhat solitary existence churning out books and book reviews in order to make a living. He's friendly with his agent, Charles Elder, and thinks nothing of being asked to help when Charles admits to being blackmailed. Charles is unable to go to the police because in 1955 homosexuality is a punishable crime. One thing leads to another and before you know it Donald and Charles' lovely assistant, Maria Dupré, are involved in a real life murder mystery. Can they solve the mystery before another murder occurs?Murder by the Book is the first in the Langham and Dupré mystery series. This was a well-written and captivating "whodunit" mystery. There were just enough twists and turns to the plot to keep me wondering until the bitter end. I enjoyed the somewhat flirtatious budding romance between Donald and Maria and it added just the right amount of tension to the overall story without overpowering the mystery aspect. The blackmail and murders were rather tame compared to today's standards but were intrinsic parts of the story. Murder by the Book incorporates a lot of subjects including blackmail, murder, romance, envy, and suspense. The bad guys are really bad and the good guys come in a variety of shades of grey. If you enjoy well-crafted mysteries then you definitely want to add Murder by the Book to your reading list. I can't wait to read the next book in this series.