Firefly and the Cotswolds Murders

By Elaine Hatfield and Richard L. Rapson

This novel is a gentle mysterypart dreamscape and part history. In this, the third and last of the Firefly stories, Firefly reminisces about Tiny Tims and her days at Captain Barneys Circus, their time spent dealing with the silent film greatsEadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, and the Lumire brothersand their adventures in the Cotswolds, in Victorian England. She recalls the delights of the early Hollywood film industry and Tims bravery during World War II, entertaining troops with the USO. And most importantly, Firefly recounts the role played by the two little detectives in defending Atlas and their Circus friends, when they were accused of the Cotswolds Ripper murders. This is a wistful and elegiac novel of a lost world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453578148

Elaine Hatfield

Elaine Hatfield, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii, has written 12 books—two of which won the American Psychological Association’s National Media Award. Richard L. Rapson, Professor of History at the University of Hawaii, has also written a dozen books, most of which have focused on the psychology of American life, past and present. He has been a T.V. moderator, Dean of New College, and named by the Danforth Foundation as one of the nation’s best teachers. Together the authors have published a sextet of serious novels and detective stories.

Book preview

Copyright © 2010 by Elaine Hatfield and Richard L. Rapson.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2010913834

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4535-7813-1

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4535-7812-4

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4535-7814-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

Roll ’Em: Tiny Tim’s Credits

Endnotes

Previously Published Short Story Collections,

Novels, and Mysteries

Books by Elaine Hatfield and Richard L. Rapson

Fiction

Rosie

Recovered Memories

Darwin’s Law

Deadly Wager: A Kate MacKinnon Murder Mystery

Vengeance is Mine: A Kate MacKinnon Murder Mystery

The Adventures of Firefly, the Tiny Detective

Take up Serpents: The Further Adventures of Firefly, the Tiny Detective

Hijacked!

Dangerous Characters

The G-String Murders

Non-Fiction

Equity: Theory and Research

Emotional Contagion

Love, Sex, and Intimacy: Their Psychology, Biology, and History

Love and Sex: Cross-cultural Perspectives

By Richard L. Rapson

Britons View America: Travel Commentary, 1860-1935

Individualism and Conformity in the American Character

The Cult of Youth in Middle-Class America

Major Interpretations of the American Past

Denials of Doubt: An Interpretation of American History

Fairly Lucky You Live Hawaii! Cultural Pluralism in the 50th State

American Yearnings: Love, Money, and Endless Possibility

Amazed by Life: Confessions of a Non-Religious Believer

Magical Thinking and the Decline of America

By Elaine Hatfield

Interpersonal Attraction

Equity: Theory and Research

A New Look at Love

Human Sexual Behavior

Mirror, Mirror: The Importance of Looks in Everyday Life

Psychology of Emotion

See: http://www.elainehatfield.com/novels.htm

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Saturday, September 15, 1945

San Francisco, California

CHAPTER 1

Firefly’s Tale

Firefly Revisits the Past

When Jimmy Dickens, a young reporter from The San Francisco Chronicle, telephoned, begging for an interview, my first instinct was to say No. What could be gained by talking to the press? Tiny Tim certainly doesn’t need me to burnish his reputation. Currently, the San Francisco Academy of Art is featuring Pioneers of the Modern Cinema: Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, and Timothy Untermüller: 1865 to 1943. I’ve been invited to a dizzying array of cocktail parties, museum retrospectives, and college seminars celebrating the trio’s work.

Clearly, Tim is a star in the fiery firmament of 19th century filmmakers. An American success story. A rag-tag boy who got his start with Captain Barney’s Circus. A showman, who opened San Francisco’s first penny Nickelodeon parlor. (And whose indecent pictures of Parisian dancing girls caused a scandal.) Who studied with stars like Muybridge, Edison, and Auguste and Louis Lumière. An artist who perfected his craft during the heyday of Hollywood. (Who else would have thought of including tiny Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz?) No matter how bad things were—and they were often very bad—Tim was no quitter. Days before his death in May 1943, Tim (who was so sick he could barely crawl out of bed) spent his time barnstorming with such Hollywood stars as Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, and the Andrews Sisters—entertaining American WW II servicemen.

Would talking to Mr. Dickens add to Tiny Tim’s fame? Hardly! Last week, Variety declared: STICKS NIX HICK PIX—pointing out that in the Midwest, movie-goers are staying away from old classic films in droves. It went on to shower praise on film innovators of yesteryear like Muybridge, Edison, and Tiny Tim. The puff piece christened Tim: Jack Armstrong—the All American Boy, describing him as an American patriot and characterizing his life as a true Horatio Alger story. Can Tim do better than that? Hardly! Think about it. If you were a little fellow—42 inches tall, with pigeon breast, humped back, and arms that are weirdly short—do you really think you would consider yourself a Jack Armstrong? When any schoolyard bully can make your life a misery? Come on now! Do you really think you would consider yourself an American patriot, when the servicemen you so admire laugh in your face when you volunteer for the Marines? No? So why, then, should you be surprised to discover that Tim was a complex man—sweet-spirited and angry, supremely confident and tormented by doubts? A man of honor and a bit of a sleazy con-man? Aren’t we all?

What did young Jimmy Dickens want? A host of possibilities sped through my mind. Was he keen to rake up all the old Captain Barney’s Circus scandals? To ask me to sell out our Hollywood friends? (Show folk are all a bit nutty, you know!) Was he some kind of muckraker, who was just dying to spill the beans about Tim’s peddling racy French photographs, Elks Club stag films, and other sordid gimcracks? To reveal that Tim was forced to sail a little close to the wind to secure the money to film his masterpieces? To show disdain for the kind of showbiz devilment Tim and I got up to out of a sheer love of fun and rascality? These were the scandals that I would move heaven and earth to keep buried.

Well, it turned out it was none of that.

When Mr. Dickens rang the bell—holding it down for a minute or two (so persistent was he)—I threw open the door, hopping mad, and planning to toss him out on his ear. One look, though, and I found myself grinning—so like Tiny Tim was he. Jimmy Dickens resembled a Dagwood Bumstead cartoon character: Brylcreemed hair sticking up like porcupine quills. A tie askew and a dress shirt so rumpled you’d swear he’d slept in it. He reminded me of one of those Bugs Bunny perpetual motion machines, spilling an armload of papers as he raced through the door. But I suspect the real reason I trusted him was that he was little more than a boy: a boy almost as short as Tiny Tim! How can you not warm to a fellow no bigger than a minute? How can you not trust him? So I invited him in for tea and cookies, and as we chatted, I discovered that he was the real deal. He wasn’t interested in sullying Tiny Tim’s reputation or sneering about our Captain Barney’s Circus days. He cared not a whit for spicy Hollywood gossip. What fascinated him was the tale of the Cotswolds Fair murders—a tale as shrouded in the mists of mystery as Jack the Ripper’s crimes.

As a kid, Jimmy Dickens had yearned to join the circus. He was obsessed with grifters, scam artists, and sleight-of-hand merchants. With spielers, magicians, fire-eaters, freak shows, and pickled punks. As we sat sipping our tea, Jimmy presented me with a welcome gift: a cache of garishly colored posters advertising Captain Barney’s Circus, Adam Forepaugh and the Wild West Circus, and Barnum and Bailey’s Circus. My Lord! I hadn’t seen those paste-ups in 50+ years!

Where did you get those? I asked amazed.

"In the Chronicle’s trash," he said matter-of-factly.

I caught my breath. The trash!

Turns out the Chronicle is moving to spiffy new offices on Kearny and Market, so they decided to do a bit of housecleaning. They sent a goodly amount of old treasures over to the California Historical Society, but there were boxes of stuff of no interest to anyone anymore, and so they just tossed it. Taking one look at my stunned face, Jimmy mumbled: Sorry.

Shocking isn’t it: realizing that people can toss your life away, just like that!

Thought you might like them, he said apologetically and indeed I did.

We leafed through the dusty posters, and oh!—the confusion of feelings that swirled within me. There was a paste-up depicting Hercules the Strong Man, fighting a lion. (Hard not to resent a brute like Hercules, who took such pleasure in tormenting Tim and me. How he despised little people. Tossing us in the sawdust was just sport for him.) I smiled at the next three posters, though. How bittersweet to recall Captain Barney’s wicked scams. To catch sight of my sweet Circus friends, once again. There was Delilah, the Queen of the Night (murdered, when the ropes to her trapeze were slashed) and Mr. Bones (the thin man), poisoned with a lethal dose of arsenic. And my beloved Zlatko Dragovic, the Circus manager, tried and hung for those horrific murderers. In spite of his cruelty, it’s hard not to pity him, at least a little. In his madness, he truly believed he was sacrificing the weak so that Captain Barney’s could survive. The greatest good for the greatest number, was his creed. Poor misguided man.

After we’d put away the posters, Mr. Dickens got down to business. Though you’d never guess it from Jimmy’s American ways, he is a British citizen—a distant cousin of the famed Charles Dickens. While viewing the California Academy of Art exhibit, he’d realized that Tiny Tim and I had been present during the glory days of the British Empire and the Cotswolds Fair. That we’d met King Edward VII, the notorious Lord and Lady Campden, the Chipping Campden country folk, and were privy to all the Cotswolds’ scandals from long gone by. You know what really happened in the Cotswolds murders! he exclaimed. Would I be willing to talk to him? To show him Tiny Tim’s 1895 photographs? Would I! You bet I would. Today, few cared about those magical, bygone days.

It’s odd. As Jimmy quizzed me, I found my eyes brimming with tears. Why? I realized that I’d been granted a wish. A wish so secret, so deeply yearned for, so beyond imagining—that I’d never even dared to dream of it’s fulfillment. So very much like poor Dick Whittington and his cat, dreaming that he might be crowned Lord Mayor of London! And now, here it was! I’d had a loving husband, my Tim. Riches beyond my wildest imagining. A fine house (and cat) and now here was Jimmy: giving me a chance to dwell on the Cotswolds days once more. A chance to rail against the world’s injustices. A chance to complain about how King Edward VII and Lord and Lady Campden heaped scorn on the artists of Mr. Wallace’s Circus—good men and women all—as well as on the Campden townfolks. How the powerful almost got away with murder! And for the truth to come out after all these years! For Scotland Yard and the Campden constabulary to be officially vindicated! Funny that people dismiss the injustices of 1895 as yesterday’s news. Whilst for me, who was there, it’s a newsflash Hot off the presses. The events of 50 years ago still seared in my heart!

So now I’m sitting here with the young whippersnapper Jimmy Dickens, pouring over all my yellowing scrapbooks and diaries. My life is spread out on the coffee table, Tiny Tim and our whole story, waiting to be told.

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Firefly and Tiny Tim (1895)

Saturday, September 14, 1895

Chipping Campden, England

CHAPTER 2

Firefly’s Journal

Times Prove Hard for Our Little Friends,

Firefly and Tiny Tim.

Mr. Eadweard Muybridge is a madman—signed, sealed, and certified.

Four years ago, when we told our friends at Captain Barney’s Circus that Tim (my new bridegroom) and I were going to pool what little money we had so he could go to London and work with The Master cine-ma-photographer, Mr. Eadweard Muybridge, they were thunderstruck.

You’ve lost your senses! they exclaimed. Tim and I would be fools to cast our lot with such a wild man! Worried for us, they recounted all the rumors of darkness and betrayal that we knew only too well.

’Tis true that Muybridge is a bit daft. In his youth, he was in a stagecoach mishap. He lingered twixt Heaven and Hell for seven days. Since then, he’s never been quite right. Sooner or later, all his friends disappoint him and he turns on them with a wrath bordering on insanity. He squabbled with Leland Stanford, his wealthy patron, as to who was the true author of Animal Locomotion. He alienated all his friends in legal wrangles he had no chance to win. Once, in a drunken rage, he shot his best friend, Harry Larkyn because he suspected Larkyn was comporting with his wife. In the trial that followed, Muybridge was found Not guilty since no California jury would punish a man for gunning down his wife’s paramour. But still—

’Tis also true that amid insult and calumny, Muybridge sent Flora, his dear wife, packing and consigned their infant son, Harry, to an orphans’ asylum. All that is true. Rumor also had it that since arriving in London, Muyridge has done little work. Instead, he wanders the Kingston-upon-Thames streets, disheveled and in a drunken stupor, raving about the injustices of the world. But Tim and I didn’t care two figs about mad. The denizens of Captain Barney’s Circus Wonders and Marvels are all a little dotty. Mad is nothing to us. We dreamed we could learn much from what remained of Muybridge’s tattered genius.

Tiny Tim had big dreams. Recently, pioneers like Emile Reynaud, Augustin La Prince, Auguste and Louis Lumière, George Meliés, and Muybridge had crafted the zootrope (the wheel of life), the zoopraxiscope (a kind of magic lantern), the praxinoscope, the kinematograph, and the mutascope.[1] Tim dreamed of inventing magical moving and talking