Martin Edwards: A Voice Like Velvet

‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’

Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd.,1929

Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.

COLLINS CRIME CLUB

an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This Detective Story Club edition 2018

First published in Great Britain as The Announcer by Hurst and Blackett 1944

‘The Alarm Bell’ first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine by Mercury Publications, Inc. 1945

Introduction © Martin Edwards 2018

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2018

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: 9780008265342

Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008265359

Version: 2018-04-11

FOR

R. E. SIMONS

( In Rome )

AFFECTIONATELY

Although the descriptions of Broadcasting House are authentic and come from first-hand experience, all the characters in this book are entirely fictitious. No portrayal of any BBC announcer, or any other person, is in any way intended.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

The Alarm Bell

Keep Reading …

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

A VOICE LIKE VELVET recounts the misadventures of Ernest Bisham, a middle-aged BBC radio announcer who just happens to be a highly accomplished cat-burglar. An unlikely premise? Perhaps, yet the author was careful to include a disclaimer making it clear that Ernest isn’t based on anyone in real life, let alone at the BBC. The story is skilfully written and quietly suspenseful. Like the rest of Henderson’s unusual, off-kilter crime fiction, however, it has suffered long and undeserved neglect.

So often, the fate of a novel—whatever its quality—depends upon how effectively it is first presented to the reading public. Hurst and Blackett published this book in October 1944 with the unexciting title The Announcer , and subtitled it simply ‘a novel’. Certainly, Henderson offers an intriguing and perceptive study in character, but it would surely have been wise to market the story as a crime novel—which, unquestionably, it is. Yet it seems to have been regarded as belonging to a different category from the author’s crime writing, and was therefore published under one of his pen-names, D. H. Landels, even though the previous year Constable had published Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper under Henderson’s own name, and that novel became the most successful of his short life.

When Random House published this book in the US in 1946, they changed the title to A Voice Like Velvet (a phrase which crops up in the narrative) and made no bones about the criminous nature of the story: ‘People who have a weakness for stories about gentlemen crooks—and judging by the popularity of Raffles, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, etc., there are thousands of them—will be delighted to make the acquaintance of Ernest Bisham.’ This time, the novel appeared under Henderson’s own name, and the blurb made the most of his earlier success: ‘ Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper caused something of a sensation in mystery circles two years ago. His new book is the kind that English writers, for some reason, do much more expertly than our own. You will be seeing it on the screen before long; we hope it will not be too different from this fourteen-karat original.’ This was more like it in terms of exploiting the book’s commercial potential, and the critics were impressed. Kirkus Reviews , for instance, appreciated the way Henderson ‘combines a psychopathic study with [an] effective hare and hounds adventure’. But he was a writer forever dogged by bad luck. He died the very next year, and as far as I have been able to ascertain, no screen version of the novel was ever made. Not even (or perhaps especially not) by the BBC.

The crime story focusing on a criminal, rather than a detective, pre-dates Raffles, the ‘amateur cracksman’ created by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law E. W. Hornung towards the end of the nineteenth century; in fact it pre-dates the detective fiction genre. William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) was published almost half a century before Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, which is commonly regarded as the first detective story. Through the years, the criminal protagonist has maintained an appeal to readers, as witness the success of Patricia Highsmith’s books about Tom Ripley and Jeff Lindsay’s about Dexter Morgan. (Incidentally, British readers unfamiliar with Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford may like to know that he was a swindler created by George Randolph Chester early in the twentieth century.)

So Henderson was working in a long-established tradition, but A Voice Like Velvet has a distinctive flavour. Ernest’s activities may remind us of Raffles, but Henderson explores his character’s state of mind in a way that Hornung never attempted. He also teases his readers, who cannot be sure what fate has in store for Ernest. As a crime writer, Henderson belongs to that loose group of authors who were influenced, directly or indirectly, by the work of Anthony Berkeley’s alter ego Francis Iles, author of two ground-breaking crime novels of the early Thirties, Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact . Richard Hull, Bruce Hamilton, C. E. Vulliamy and Henderson were among those whose mysteries, like Iles’ masterpieces, brimmed with irony and an awareness of the fallibility and limitations of conventional systems of justice.

It would be a step too far to describe Ernest as a self-portrait, but certainly he and Henderson had much in common, including a failed first marriage. Both men worked for the BBC, and