Frank Richardson - The Mayfair Mystery - 2835 Mayfair

Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain as 2835 Mayfair by Mitchell Kennerley 1907

Published as The Mayfair Mystery by The Detective Story Club Ltd

for Wm Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1929

Introduction © David Brawn 2015

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1929, 2015

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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.

Source ISBN: 9780008137083

Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008137090

Version: 2015-07-06

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk First published in Great Britain as 2835 Mayfair by Mitchell Kennerley 1907 Published as The Mayfair Mystery by The Detective Story Club Ltd for Wm Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1929 Introduction © David Brawn 2015 Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1929, 2015 A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. 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. Source ISBN: 9780008137083 Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008137090 Version: 2015-07-06

Introduction

Chapter I: THE DEAD MAN

Chapter II: CONCERNING THE CORPSE

Chapter III: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE CORPSE

Chapter IV: THE ALLEGED ADA

Chapter V: AT THE GRIDIRON

Chapter VI: THE TROUBLE WITH MINGEY

Chapter VII: MAINLY ABOUT LOVE

Chapter VIII: 2835 MAYFAIR

Chapter IX: 69 PEMBROKE STREET

Chapter X: THE MINGEY MYSTERY

Chapter XI: ‘PURE BROMPTON ROAD’

Chapter XII: AT THE CARLTON

Chapter XIII: A LITTLE DINNER

Chapter XIV: THE EVIDENCE OF NELLIE

Chapter XV: INSPECTOR JOHNSON

Chapter XVI: ‘UNCLE GUSSIE’

Chapter XVII: A PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE

Chapter XVIII: JOHNSON AND BARLOW

Chapter XIX: THE DETECTIVES

Chapter XX: JOHNSON BECOMES BRIGHTER

Chapter XXI: NEWS OF SARAH

Chapter XXII: THE CURE FOR CANCER

Chapter XXIII: THE MYSTERIOUS BEHAVIOUR OF SIR CLIFFORD OAKLEIGH

Chapter XXIV: UNPOPULARITY

Chapter XXV: ‘I LOVE YOU’

Chapter XXVI: ‘UNCLE GUSSIE’ IS NONPLUSSED

Chapter XXVII: AT THE SAVOY

Chapter XXVIII: DISAPPOINTMENT

Chapter XXIX: REGGIE LOSES HIS JOB

Chapter XXX: AN UNFORTUNATE MEETING

Chapter XXXI: THE DISMISSAL OF MINGEY

Chapter XXXII: THE ASSISTANCE OF SMALLWOOD

Chapter XXXIII: MORPHIA?

Chapter XXXIV: A POSSIBLE CLUE

Chapter XXXV: HARDING MAKES HEADWAY

Chapter XXXVI: THE RETURN OF MIRIAM

Chapter XXXVII: THE ACCIDENT

Chapter XXXVIII: ‘SOMETHING IS ON HER MIND’

Chapter XXXIX: AN ASTOUNDING DISCOVERY

Chapter XL: MIRIAM’S DEFENCE

Chapter XLI: AT THE POLICE-COURT

Chapter XLII: THE SOLUTION

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. was celebrating exactly 100 years of book publishing when in the spring of 1919 Sir Godfrey Collins and his staff announced its first detective novel— The Skeleton Key by Bernard Capes. Capes, a prolific and versatile writer best known for his ghost stories, had delivered his manuscript to Collins shortly before falling prey to the worldwide flu pandemic in the autumn of 1918, and died before his most lucrative book in a 20-year writing career was published.

Sir Godfrey, who had served in the Victorian navy and later entered politics to become a Liberal M.P. and later Secretary of State for Scotland, had become head of publications at the Glasgow-based printing company in 1906 when his uncle, the ambitious and colourful William Collins III, plunged to an untimely death down an empty lift shaft in a freak accident at his Westminster flat. It is not known now whether Sir Godfrey had intended The Skeleton Key to be a one-off book or the start of a new initiative, but its immediate success coincided with a growing post-war interest in modern exciting fiction based on crime and mystery. Within ten years of The Skeleton Key , Collins had built up a rich stable of reliable and popular crime writers, among them Lynn Brock, J. S. Fletcher, Anthony Fielding, Herbert Adams, John Stephen Strange, Hulbert Footner, G. D. H. & M. Cole, J. Jefferson Farjeon, Vernon Loder, John Rhode, Francis D. Grierson, Miles Burton, Philip MacDonald, Freeman Wills Crofts and, in 1926, Agatha Christie.

Nearly all new novels in the early 1920s were hardback, usually costing 7/6 each, and the most popular titles were frequently rejacketed and reprinted in a ‘cheap edition’, still in hardcover but often smaller in size and always on cheaper paper. In fact, the idea of making cheap hardbacks out of popular copyright fiction by living authors (as opposed to nineteenth-century classics, as had been the convention) was one of Godfrey Collins’ earliest initiatives. His revolutionary ‘Books for the Million’ first went on sale in May 1907, but to Collins’ dismay rival publisher Thomas Nelson beat them into the shops with the same idea just three days earlier.

By 1928 Collins had pretty much cornered the market in this area with a rapidly growing number of different series, including Collins Classics , The Literary Press , The Novel Library , The London Book Co. and Westerns (later renamed The Wild West Club ), with more than 2,500 cheap fiction titles now appearing in the Collins catalogue. It was probably therefore inevitable that Godfrey Collins would add another imprint to the growing range of sixpenny hardbacks: The Detective Story Club .

Launched in July 1929, the series included the whole panoply of crime writing: classic mystery novels from the previous century; tales of true crime; modern detective stories; and a growing publishing phenomenon, ‘the Book of the Film’, inspired by cinema’s new ‘talkies’. Twelve Detective Story Club books had been published by Christmas 1929, and another 60 or so would follow over the next five years. All had brand new colourful jacket designs with matching spines, finished off with the distinctive stamp of the masked ‘man with the gun’, an evolution of a sinister Zorro-like mask motif which had adorned 1920s Collins crime covers to distinguish them as detective novels.