Arthur Upfield - An Author Bites the Dust

Mrs Farn declined to smoke. Mrs Blake was writing a letter, and Bony proceeded to talk of Johannesburg, where he had once stayed for a week. Mrs Blake covered one sheet of the writing pad and began on the second. She covered that, half filled a third, folded the sheets, and placed them in an envelope, which she addressed. A stamp was obtained from a little book in her handbag. That done, she rose and made her way to the post box at the top of the front steps. Two minutes later she also left, driving a car.

“Well, Mrs Farn, that was a very nice interlude,” murmured Bony. “Thank you so much for bringing me here. We must come again. It has been most enjoyable.”

The Debunker

IT was seldom that Bony felt the need of advice, for he was master in the vast pastoral lands and the semi-deserts of inland Australia. But he was experiencing the need when lounging on Miss Pinkney’s front veranda on the morning following his visit to the Rialto Hotel, for now he was moving in a world in which he was not master, a world of human sophistication in a settled community.

It is often extremely difficult to bring to a successful conclusion an investigation of a plain case of homicide. Nevertheless, in every such case there is the body of the victim to announce the cause of death, be it by bullet or blunt instrument, by knife or poison. In effect, Superintendent Bolt had said, “A man named Mervyn Blake died suddenly one night. The medical men cannot tell us what killed him, only that he appears to have died from natural causes, as most of us die. Still, I’ve got a hunch that someone put the skids under him. My men have done their stuff, and they can’t produce any likely motive for murder.”

Bolt’s men had tackled the circumstances surrounding Blake’s death with the relentless efficiency of modern scientific detection. They placed under their microscopes much more than the dead man’s viscera and under microscopes of a different kind they had placed the dead man’s widow and his guests and his household staff in their search for a motive for murder.

There must be a motive for homicide unless the killer is an utter idiot. There was no evidence that Blake had committed suicide; in fact, the evidence of his death was opposed to the theory of suicide. And for all their probing, the Victorian C.I.B. under the redoubtable Inspector Snook had not been able to unearth one fact that would lift the finger of suspicion against any person.

Inspector Snook had written the summary, and it revealed that Inspector Snook had reached the opinion that there was no proof whatsoever that Mervyn Blake had died illegally, and that being so, he did not believe Blake had been murdered. Superintendent Bolt, on the other hand, thought he smelled homicide. He was not satisfied to pigeonhole that material gathered and, perforce, placed it in cold storage, and so in a spirit of friendship, he offered to take the case out of cold storage and give it to Bony to smell. And Bony smelled blood.

It is one thing to smell blood and another thing to find it. The only way to locate it in this Blake case was to discover a motive for killing Mervyn Blake.

Bony felt rather than knew that there was a something deep below the surface that Snook had not troubled to search for because he did not know it existed. To understand the stage, one must go behind the scenes and study the mechanism of the theatre, and Bony felt that to understand the profession of authorship and those who practised it, it would be necessary to delve and burrow into the lives of living writers and critics of literature to ascertain how they ticked.

Coming against this Blake case, he came to a world with which he was absolutely unfamiliar. How to gain entry into the world of literature inhabited by theBlakes and their friends was becoming a problem to Bony-until he remembered Clarence B. Bagshott.

Clarence B. Bagshott lived on a mountain top, and Bony had once accompanied him on aswordfishing trip to Bermagui, since when they had exchanged letters at long intervals. It had not been Bagshott’s mystery tales but his feet that had gained Bony’s interest in the man. His feet were exceptionally large, and the boots on them became professionally important in a case known as “The Devil’s Steps”. Inclined to call a typewriter a blood-drenched stone-crusher Bagshott had no guile, very little culture, and the vice of exaggeration.

Tall, lean and hard, middle-aged and active, Bagshott welcomed Bony in the manner of the prodigal’s father. Bony’s left arm was gripped and he was propelled forward into thehouse, and into the writer’s study where he was forced down into an easy chair beside the desk. A little breathless, he was left alone for five minutes, a period he occupied by making a number of his distinguished cigarettes, and then was presented with tea and cake, and urged to “relax, Bony, relax”.

Bagshott grabbed a chair, dragged it into position, and added, “You’re the very last bloke I expected to see, and yet-the pleasure’s all my very own. How’s things up your street?”

“Quite well. And you?”

“Oh, just so-so. I’ve got another five weeks, three days and-let me see-yes, and nine hours to go before starting off for Bermagui and theswordies. But I’m holding out with astonishing fortitude. Mylaunchman learnt a new tip from an American angler. Remember how we used to let the bait and the flanking teasers troll about forty feet astern of the boat? The new dodge is to increase that distance to a hundred feet astern.”

Bony sighed loudly, resignedly.

“Wish I were going with you,” he said.

“What’s going to stop you?” demanded Bagshott.

“Work, my Chief Commissioner, and all the circumstances that keep my nose to the grindstone, my dear Bagshott. I am even now using my annual leave to work for Superintendent Bolt.”

“Referring to?”

“The late Mervyn Blake.”

Bagshott grinned, his hazel eyes suddenly hard.

“I’ve had the thought that the passing of the great Mervyn Blake might attract you,” he said. “Can I do anything?”

Bony nodded and lit another cigarette. He inhaled deeply, drank half a cup of tea and then exhaled before saying, “An extraordinary case because of its lack of clues and the absence of any likely motive either for suicide or homicide. I am finding it delightfully absorbing. Bolt and his fellows got nowhere, and so far I’m not getting anywhere, either. Actually I’ve come to talk about personalities. Did Mervyn Blake ever criticize yourbooks?”

“Mine! Lord, no! I don’t produce literature.”

“Then what do you produce?”

“Commercial fiction.”

“There is a distinction?”

“Terrific.”

“Will you define it, please. ”

“I’ll try to,” Bagshott said slowly. “In this country literature is a piece of writing executed in schoolmasterly fashion and yet so lacking in entertainment values that the general public won’t buy it. Commercial fiction-and this is a term employed by the highbrows-is imaginative writing that easily satisfies publishers and editor because the public will buy it.”

“Go on,” urged Bony.

“Don’t know that I can,” Bagshott said, doubtfully. “Let’s get back to the starting point. You began it by asking if Blake ever criticized my work, and I said no.”

“And then you added that Blake did not criticize your work because you wrote commercial fiction,” Bony pressed on. “On several occasions I have felt an immovable object. I am feeling it now. Also I am feeling the current of hostility in you towards Blake and his associates. Do you think it reasonable to assume that that hostility in another would be strong enough to produce the act of homicide?”

“No,” was Bagshott’s answer. “I’ll tell you why I say no to that. The Blake-Smythe coterie in number is very small. It’s influence a few years ago was powerful, but it’s rapidly on the wane now. My hostility to it isn’t engendered by what it is doing to the growth of Australian literature but rather by what it’s done in the past.”