The Wintringham Mystery: Cicely Disappears

By Anthony Berkeley and Tony Medawar

Republished for the first time in nearly 95 years, a classic winter country house mystery by the founder of the Detection Club, with a twist that even Agatha Christie couldn’t solve!

Stephen Munro, a demobbed army officer, reconciles himself to taking a job as a footman to make ends meet. Employed at Wintringham Hall, the delightful but decaying Sussex country residence of the elderly Lady Susan Carey, his first task entails welcoming her eccentric guests to a weekend house-party, at which her bombastic nephew – who recognises Stephen from his former life – decides that an after-dinner séance would be more entertaining than bridge. Then Cicely disappears!

With Lady Susan reluctant to call the police about what is presumably a childish prank, Stephen and the plucky Pauline Mainwaring take it upon themselves to investigate. But then a suspicious death turns the game into an altogether more serious affair…

This classic winter mystery incorporates all the trappings of the Golden Age – a rambling country house, a séance, a murder, a room locked on the inside, with servants, suspects and alibis, a romance – and an ingenious puzzle.

First published as a 30-part newspaper serial in 1926 – the year The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published, The Wintringham Mystery was written by Anthony Berkeley, founder of the famous Detection Club. Also known as Cicely Disappears, the Daily Mirror ran the story as a competition with a prize of £500 (equivalent to £30,000 today) for anyone who guessed the solution correctly. Nobody did – even Agatha Christie entered and couldn’t solve it. Can you?

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780008470111

Anthony Berkeley

Anthony Berkeley was an English crime writer. He also wrote under the pen names Francis Iles and A. Monmouth Platts.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THE CRIME THAT CHRISTIE COULDN’T CRACK

PICTURE the scene.

It is 18 March 1926. At Styles, a house in Sunningdale, Berkshire, a woman is reading a newspaper. To be precise, she is reading the Daily Mirror and she has just finished the latest instalment of a novel which has been serialized daily in the newspaper since the beginning of the month. The novel is a mystery and it features two tropes of the Golden Age of crime and detection—there is a ‘closed circle’ of suspects and there is a seemingly ‘impossible crime’, the mysterious disappearance of a young socialite called Stella Vernon.

The serialization forms a competition and the newspaper has challenged its readers to answer two questions:

HOW DID STELLA DISAPPEAR?

WHO CAUSED HER DISAPPEARANCE, AND WHY?

Significant prizes are at stake: for the correct solution, ‘or the entry that is most nearly correct’, there is a first prize of £250—equivalent to more than £15,000 (US $20,000) today; the second prize is worth £125; and there are twenty-five ‘consolation prizes’ of £5 each.

Accompanying the fifteenth instalment a short article explains that solutions should ‘not exceed 150 words in all for both questions [and] must be written only on one side of a sheet of paper’. The article also notes that ‘all the clues essential for the successful solving’ of the mystery had been published. Competitors were instructed to ‘read very carefully’ the instructions which gave them until the following Saturday, 20 March, to post their entries—‘any entries bearing a postmark dated later than the 20th will be ineligible for consideration’.

Two questions … and time is running out.

She picks up her pen and begins to write her solution.

The novel, of course, was the one you are holding in your hand, and the woman was none other than Agatha Christie. Even in 1923 Christie was already a highly respected writer of mystery fiction, not least for The Mysterious Affair at Styles, whose publication three years earlier had introduced her most enduring character, the retired Belgian police officer Hercule Poirot.

In the 1920s, crime fiction and puzzles were everywhere, and Agatha Christie’s enthusiasm for such forms of entertainment was boundless. Crossword puzzles first appeared in the United Kingdom in February 1922 and Christie was an immediate fan. She was also no novice when it came to entering newspaper competitions like the one offered by the Daily Mirror. In March 1923, another British newspaper, the Daily Sketch, had begun serialization of The Mystery of Norman’s Court by John Chancellor. That novel was set in a country house where an obnoxious guest is found dead in a locked and bolted room; he has been stabbed, though no weapon can be found.

Although The Mystery of Norman’s Court is not among the genre’s high points, it was adapted for the stage under the title Who Did It? Its author, John Chancellor, would be all but forgotten, even among crime fiction aficionados, had he not also assembled and edited Double Death: An Exercise in Detection, a curiously cumbersome round-robin detective story written by several better-known authors including Dorothy L. Sayers and Freeman Wills Crofts. [1]

With The Mystery of Norman’s Court, the Daily Sketch invited its readers to investigate the murder and identify ‘who did it, and how did he (or she) do it?’ The competition was heavily advertised across Britain and the prizes were simply extraordinary. There was a first prize of £1,000, equivalent today to more than £60,000 (US $80,000), topped up by an extra £300 if the solution was received by 27 March 1923. The second prize was worth £400, with a third prize of £200 and a fourth prize of £100, as well as four prizes of £50 each and five prizes of £20, while £100 would be awarded to the newsagent from whom the winner bought his copy of the Sketch.

With prizes like this, the challenge was irresistible and Agatha Christie was among the amateur sleuths to enter. She did not win but, with eleven others, shared the runners’ up prize, each receiving an amount equivalent in value today to more than £2,000 (US $2,750).

While none of Christie’s own novels was ever published as a competition, at least one of her peers would seem to have been inspired by the success of the Sketch’s competition. That writer was Anthony Berkeley Cox, best known at that time as a humorist but never slow to exploit an opportunity to make money. As he had only published one novel-length detective story at this point, the authority on Cox’s work Arthur Robinson has concluded that Cox probably approached the Daily Mirror rather than the other way round but, whatever the truth, the newspaper began serialization of The Wintringham Mystery on 1 March 1926, three years to the day after the Sketch had published the first instalment of The Mystery of Norman’s Court.

A short piece to promote the competition reported that Cox ‘confesses that he has always been an eager reader of the mystery stories of other people and has derived immense pleasure when his battle of wits with the author has resulted in his own favour’. Ostensibly, this had prompted him to try to write one for himself:

‘In my early, more modest days, I thought I should be satisfied if I could puzzle forty-nine readers out of fifty. But later I became more ambitious, and began to wonder whether it would be possible to devise a problem which would baffle all but a small percentage of more than a million readers. I realized that it is not in the intricacy of the puzzle that is set, but in its very simplicity that success may be achieved. It took me several months to hit on the idea of The Wintringham Mystery, and as many months to write it. In fact, I don’t mind admitting that I have written it seven times over, and it has been the greatest fun throughout.’

Whatever the number of discarded drafts, Cox must have been extremely pleased when no competitor succeeded in providing a wholly satisfactory solution to The Wintringham Mystery, and the editor decided to divide the first and second prizes, totalling £375, among ‘five competitors of equal merit’. Nonetheless, the Mirror was very satisfied with the competition and gleefully reported that it had ‘attracted widespread interest, many thousands of entries being received from all parts of Great Britain and Ireland, and a considerable number from France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland. Poland, Austria, Rumania, Turkey and Holland were also represented amongst the competitors’. Even better for the class-conscious newspaper, ‘all classes of the community seem to have taken part of the competition, and many wrote in complimentary terms of the serial and expressed the pleasure they had derived from attempting to solve the mystery.’

As we have seen, one of the applications was from Agatha Christie. While she had submitted her entry to the Daily Sketch’s competition under her own name, her solution to The Wintringham Mystery was submitted in the name of her husband, Colonel A. E. Christie. Christie’s fame had grown considerably since 1923 and a newspaper might have been expected to look askance at an entry from the author of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Secret Adversary, The Murder on the Links, The Man in the Brown Suit and The Secret of Chimneys, as well as numerous short detective stories …

However, Christie proved to be less of a detective than Hercule Poirot. Although she failed to win the Wintringham Mystery competition, she did receive one of the £5 consolation prizes, equivalent to £300 (US $400) today. Moreover, always astute, she also made good use of the experience. Five years later the circumstances of the newspaper competition appeared in her novel The Sittaford Mystery (published in the US as Mystery at Hazelmoor), and five years after that, in 1936, Christie was invited to be one of the judges for a competition run by yet another newspaper, the Sunday Chronicle, in which readers were challenged to provide a solution to The President’s Mystery Story, a multi-authored round-robin novel based on an idea by Franklin D. Roosevelt, [2] which had been published in the American magazine Liberty the previous year.

In 1927, The Wintringham Mystery was published in book form by John Long Ltd. For this version, Cox made a few changes to the original manuscript, toning down some of the more floridly romantic passages in the first half of the novel and rewriting some sections to improve the flow. Although the story was essentially the same, there were two major differences between the serial and the book. In the latter the name of the vanishing debutante is changed from Stella to Cicely, a change that was echoed in a new title, Cicely Disappears. And although the serialization had been credited to A. B. Cox, the novel was published as by ‘A. Monmouth Platts’, an opaque pen-name that Cox derived from the names of the two adjoining houses where he had lived as a child: Monmouth House and The Platts.

Despite the praise he garnered in his lifetime, Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971) had an ambivalent relationship with crime and mystery fiction. Although he is now considered a giant of the genre and one of its greatest innovators, writing—indeed work of any kind—was for Tony Cox simply a means to an end.

Cox is best remembered as ‘Anthony Berkeley’, the name he used for his detective stories, most of which feature an amateur investigator, the surprisingly fallible Roger Sheringham. In some senses he was Roger Sheringham—at the very least the two have much in common. Sheringham, like his creator, was the son of a doctor and both were born in a small English provincial town—in Cox’s case, Watford, north of London. Both went to public school and then to Oxford, where Cox achieved a third in classics and Sheringham a second in classics and history. Both also served in the First World War. Cox was invalided out of the army with his health permanently impaired, while Sheringham was ‘wounded twice, not very seriously’. Sheringham became a best-seller with his first novel, as did Cox, and both men spoke disparagingly of their own fiction while being intolerant of others’ criticism. Against this background, Cox’s comment that Sheringham was ‘founded on an offensive person I once knew’ is clearly an example of the writer’s often-noted peculiar sense of humour.

Humour, and above all ingenuity, are the hallmarks of the Sheringham novels and, while many of Cox’s contemporaries concentrated on finding ever more improbable means of dispatching victims and ever more implausible means of establishing an alibi, Cox focused on overturning the established conventions of the crime and mystery genre. Thus the explanation of the locked room in the first Sheringham novel, The Layton Court Mystery (1925), is absurdly straightforward. In another, the official detective is right while the amateur sleuth is wrong. In another, the last person known to have seen the victim alive is, after all, the murderer. And while facts uncovered by Sheringham are almost always capable of more than one explanation, his own initial deductions are rarely entirely correct.

Some of the Sheringham novels have their roots in certain historical crimes, such as The Wychford Poisoning Case: An Essay in Criminology (1926), inspired by the murder in 1889 of James Maybrick, and The Silk Stocking Murders (1928), partly based, it seems, on the London ‘silk stocking murder’ in 1926 of a young woman by a one-legged man.

In all, Roger Sheringham appears in ten novel-length mysteries—one of which Cox dedicated to himself—and Sheringham is also mentioned in passing in two other novels, The Piccadilly Murder (1929) and Trial and Error (1937). Perhaps the best-known of the Sheringham novels is The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), which again is based on a real-life crime dating from 1922. This was the unsuccessful attempt by a disgruntled horticulturist to murder the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, Brigadier-General Sir William Horwood, by sending him a box of chocolates, laced with arsenic.

Cox first used the poisoning attempt on Horwood as the basis of a comic short story ‘The Sweets of Triumph’, published—with dubious taste—only a month after the attempt on Horwood’s life. The novel, which also exists as a novella entitled ‘The Avenging Chance’, is a much more serious and elaborate affair than the original short story. There is a poisoning, which is investigated not only by the police but also by Roger Sheringham and other members of ‘The Crimes Circle’, a private dining club of criminologists. In a brilliant riposte to a prominent critic’s complaint that detective stories were only difficult to solve because any of the suspects might have committed the crime concerned, Cox has each member of the Crimes Circle advance a plausible explanation of the poisoning. One by one the solutions are proposed and one by one they are demolished, including—to the reader’s surprise—the solution proposed by Sheringham. Eventually the mystery is solved by the unassuming Ambrose Chitterwick, whose hobbies include philately and horticulture—tweaking the nose of anyone who remembered that it was a horticulturist who made the attempt to poison Sir William Horwood.

As well as being a superb puzzle, with multiple solutions, The Poisoned Chocolates Case is fascinating for the links between the fictional ‘Crimes Circle’ and the Detection Club, which Cox was founding as a dining club for crime writers in 1929—the same year that The Poisoned Chocolates Case was published. The Detection Club, at least initially, comprised ‘authors of detective stories which rely more upon genuine detective merit than upon melodramatic thrills’, though that definition has been significantly stretched more than once over the ninety-odd years of the Club’s existence. Over the years, Cox would collaborate with members of the Detection Club on various fundraising ventures such as an anthology of true crime and also four round-robin mysteries, including The Floating Admiral (1931), whose entertaining sequel—The Sinking Admiral—was published by HarperCollins in 2016.

In the early 1930s, in parallel with writing detective stories, Cox decided to take crime writing in what was then a radically new direction. For this, he decided to use the name of one of his mother’s ancestors, a smuggler called Francis Iles; and for three years the true identity of ‘Francis Iles’ remained a secret. With Malice Aforethought (1931), the first ‘Iles’ novel, Cox broke the mould of crime fiction—in more than one sense. At a stroke he broadened its range and its respectability, although the plot of the novel has its roots in an early short story and it could also be regarded as a variant of the inverted mystery popularized by Richard Austin Freeman’s ‘Dr Thorndyke’ stories in the Edwardian era. However, Malice Aforethought is a much more complex proposition. From the first sentence the plot appears quite clear, but Cox is not concerned with plotting as such. His focus is psychology: in Malice Aforethought it is the psychology of the murderer; and in the second ‘Iles’ title, Before the Fact (1932), it is the psychology of the victim. Both of the novels are based on a real-life crime in which a man set out to his murder his wife and, sardonically, Cox chose to dedicate them—respectively if not respectfully—to his first and second wives.

In all, three novels were published as by ‘Francis Iles’, with the third—As for the Woman (1939) —less focused on crime and for that reason perhaps less successful than it might have been had it appeared under yet another name and been presented simply as a ‘straight’ novel. At least one more ‘Iles’ novel was announced, but by the mid-1930s Cox was tiring of writing fiction. There were two final ‘Anthony Berkeley’ mysteries, Not to be Taken (1938) and Death in the House (1939)—both, incidentally, published as competitions in John O’London’s Weekly—while Sheringham, who hadn’t appeared in a novel since 1934, would feature in a few wartime propaganda pieces and a radio play. From time to time some non-series short stories and true-crime essays appeared, sometimes by ‘Berkeley’ and sometimes by ‘Iles’, and in the late 1950s two volumes of limericks and several musical works were published under his own name. He also wrote some other radio plays for the BBC, including one that was credited to ‘Anthony Berkeley’, introduced on its original broadcast by ‘Francis Iles’, and that included two songs composed by ‘Anthony B. Cox’!

In all, Cox published twenty-four books in a little over fifteen years, including fourteen classic full-length detective stories and two sublime psychological thrillers. He also wrote several humorous novels as well as more than 300 stories, sketches and articles. There was also an unconvincing political tract on the evils of over-regulation, an unpublished—and probably unpublishable—diatribe against Mrs Wallis Simpson, a handful of stage and radio plays, and even a comic opera. And he reviewed crime fiction and other books for various newspapers, including his old school magazine, The Shirburnian.

Since his death in 1971, Cox’s reputation has continued to grow. In Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (1972), Julian Symons praised Cox as the author of ‘one of the most stunning trick stories in the history of detective fiction’ and also for the ‘Francis Iles’ novels, in which Cox had pioneered the move away from what Symons called the ‘puzzle of the classical kind’. More recently, the crime writer Martin Edwards—Symons’ successor as President of the Detection Club—has lauded Cox for his ‘dazzling’ contribution while, in a coda to a recent edition, providing a particularly dazzling final, final, final twist to Cox’s ‘stunning trick story’, The Poisoned Chocolates Case.

More than any of his contemporaries, Cox was responsible for the maturing of crime fiction. He was bold and ingenious. Dorothy L. Sayers praised him for ‘his energetic efforts to escape from the thraldom of formula’, while Christianna Brand—reminiscing about her neighbour and fellow Detection Club member—mused that ‘sometimes I have thought he was really the cleverest of all of us’. Perhaps the last word should be left to Agatha Christie; for Christie, Anthony Berkeley Cox was ‘detection and crime at its wittiest—all his stories are amusing and intriguing, and he is a master of the final twist, the surprise denouement’.

This new edition of Anthony Berkeley Cox’s most elusive mystery—the first in almost a century—retains his much better original title but reproduces the revised text from Cicely Disappears, providing readers with an opportunity to compete with the Queen of Crime herself and attempt to solve The Wintringham Mystery.

TONY MEDAWAR

January 2021

CHAPTER I

THE PHOTOGRAPH

BRIDGER, confidential valet to Stephen Munro, Esq., of 196B Half Moon Street, was a man of singularly equable temperament. Even the fact that he laboured under the first name of Ebenezer, which is enough to upset anyone, did not appear to cause Mr Bridger any sleepless nights; he bore the burden with the same calm stoicism with which he had carried out his duties for the last eight years as servitor to Mr Stephen Munro, both as batman in France and as general valet-housemaid-private-secretary in the more strenuous times of peace. Bridger was forty-two to his master’s twenty-seven, and life held no further disillusions for him.

This was fortunate, because Stephen Munro, eating the admirable kidneys and imbibing the faultless coffee which Bridger had prepared, was meditating the disclosure of a piece of news which to anybody not so fortuitously equipped would have been less of a disillusionment than a plain cataclysm.

He drew his purple dressing-gown a little more closely round his tall, lithe, athletic frame and leaned back in his chair. ‘There’s one thing I will say for you, Bridger,’ he remarked with the contented sigh of the delectably fed, ‘you can cook kidneys.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Bridger agreed stolidly, preferring his employer a heavy silver box. ‘Cigarette, sir?’

‘Thanks.’ Stephen extracted one from the box and applied it to the match which Bridger was now holding out to him. He inhaled a couple of deep mouthfuls of smoke, and began to stroke the hair on the left side of his head with a gesture that was habitual to him. Stephen’s hair was inclined to be distinctly curly, and though this had delighted the heart of his mother, Stephen himself regarded it in the light of an affliction; as a small child he had thought that assiduous stroking movements must succeed eventually in smoothing it out, and though, like Bridger, life held few more illusions for him, the habit persisted.

‘Bridger,’ observed Stephen with the utmost cheerfulness, still mechanically smoothing the unsmoothable. ‘Bridger, I’m afraid I’ve got a bit of a shock for you.’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Bridger politely, beginning to clear away the breakfast things.

Stephen inhaled again and blew out a thin cloud towards the ceiling. ‘I suppose,’ he meditated, ‘that if anybody had come along during the last half-dozen years and asked you what I was, the answer adjudged correct would have been that I was a gent of independent means, wouldn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Exactly. And that would have been the truth, Bridger. For the fact of the matter is that my means have been a jolly sight too independent. They’ve taken unto themselves wings, Bridger, and flown away.’

‘Yes, sir, said Bridger, apparently unmoved.

‘That’s right,’ Stephen approved. ‘Don’t be sympathetic; I know perfectly well I don’t deserve it. But one must live up to one’s principles, mustn’t one? And my guiding principle has always been Safety Last.’

‘Yes, sir, Bridger assented with a shade more emphasis, his thought perhaps on certain incidents connected with the late European fuss—incidents which had gained for Captain Munro both a D.S.O. and a Military Cross.

‘So when I stepped conveniently into possession of Uncle Alfred’s small wad just when I needed it at the end of the war,’ Stephen went on, as if constrained to defend himself against imputations which had never been spoken, ‘I quite rightly decided to have half a dozen years of life and let the future go to pot. You agree with that, I do hope, Bridger?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Bridger, rattling plates and cups together.

‘Well, it’s gone. Oh, do stop that row, man! How can I tell you the story of my young life while you’re playing at thunderstorms with that crockery?’ Perhaps Stephen’s nerves were not quite so non-existent as he would have liked to suppose.

Bridger stopped rattling and stood respectfully to attention.

‘Anyhow,’ Stephen continued, ‘the long and the short of it is that I’ve come to the end, Bridger. Exit Stephen Munro, Esq., gentleman of leisure, through trap-door L.; enter Steve Munro, world’s worker. In other words, I’ve got to start on a job of hard labour.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Bridger agreed laconically.

‘You’re a difficult person to move, Bridger,’ Stephen complained, gazing at his servitor not without admiration. ‘Would you say anything except Yes, sir if an angel came and called you one night and told you the last trump was blowing the réveillé and you were wanted on parade? I suppose you realize that what this mass of verbiage really amounts to as far as you’re concerned is the sack?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Stephen sighed. ‘One day I shall give you a dictionary, Bridger. I think you’ll find it interesting reading. Some of the simpler bits you might even learn by heart—words