COLONEL Anthony Ruthven Gethryn well qualifies for the category of Disappearing Detectives in that, though he was once a highly popular figure, the very last of his exploits appeared as long ago as 1959. This was The List of Adrian Messenger, subsequently made into a film which surfaces very occasionally on television. But before it Gethryn’s adventures were all chronicled in a cluster of ten which began in 1924 with The Rasp and ended in 1938 with The Nursemaid Who Disappeared, itself written after a five-year gap.
However, Gethryn deserves to reappear. He is, despite his noticeably stiff upper lip and other marks of the stereotype, a very human character. Witness in this book his plainly amorous, though decently unstressed, relations with his attractive younger wife, Lucia. In The Rasp we learnt that he had had a ‘good war’, rising from Private to his present rank, as well as a stint in Intelligence. ‘Oh, I know I’m a filthy spy,’ he said, characteristically showing himself as the English gentleman in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes for whom subterfuge is always somewhat to be despised, and at the same time as nicely self-deprecating.
We learnt, too, that Gethryn was rich and could afford to buy into a curious periodical, The Owl, which gave him, as here, a squad of useful journalist-spies to do his dirtier work when necessary. And we learnt that he ‘read for the Bar; was called, but did not answer’, i.e. that he was intelligent enough to have been your ‘brilliant barrister’ but was unencumbered with legal practice and so free to become the classical amateur detective.
Indeed, he is clearly one of the Great Detectives who came down to us from Holmes and before him Le Chevalier Auguste Dupin of Edgar Allan Poe. He has that necessary combination of ratiocination (the word was invented by Poe for his hero), indicated by the potential devastating legal argument, and intuition, indicated however symbolically by his ‘long sensitive fingers’. Like Holmes, too, there was a double strain in his make-up: he was the son of an English squire and of a Spanish actress and painter. And there is one other infallible sign of the Great Detective in him, to be seen in the pages ahead: his pipe. The pipe is the subtle message to us readers that the great man has gone into that trance-like state in which he will mysteriously combine the discoveries made by his ratiocinative mind with the sudden leaps of intuition, plunging deep into himself (and into us) to produce the entirely unexpected solution. Dr Watson, we remember, spoke eloquently of ‘the unsavoury pipe’ that was the companion of Holmes’s ‘deepest meditations’ and, after Gethryn, Simenon’s Maigret was a pipe-smoke wreather of formidable cloudiness.
Indeed, in the early pages here Chief Inspector Pike is made to exclaim of Gethryn: ‘You can’t be wrong.’ The Great Detective, with a notable case or two as exceptions so as to prove the rule, must always in the end be right. And, of course, Gethryn, being Gethryn, also gently mocks at himself as Great Detective. ‘We think, but we don’t speak,’ he says to Lucia. ‘We say it’s because we aren’t ready for speech. But …’ Yet in fact so it is. He is not ready. The pipe is not yet lit.
The mockery comes from a later strand in the history of detective fiction: the tradition springing from Trent in that classic of the genre, E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case of 1913, a book that set out to deflate the pure puzzle and succeeded in creating the detective with a human face. Or, since Sherlock Holmes is a real human being if ever there was, Trent saw the birth of the un-superman detective, the man with feelings to the fore. Thus Gethryn mocks himself; Gethryn genuinely worries for the victim of the plot whom he is striving to save. Gethryn, as we have noted, physically loves his wife.
So what about this adventure of his in particular? It was the first book to be chosen for the Crime Club, that ingenious reader-grabbing scheme hatched by Collins Publishers in 1930, which anyone could join free and be tempted with detective stories chosen by a panel headed by no less a figure than the Headmaster of Eton, Dr Alington. Partly because of this, partly because Arnold Bennett (the Melvyn Bragg of those days) hailed The Noose for its ‘startling revelation’, and partly because the Evening Standard bought the rights and heavily advertised it, the book quadrupled MacDonald’s sales at a blow.
It deserved its popularity, and still deserves popularity despite the odd dated reference (the ‘nine o’clock walk’ is the one taken by those about to be hanged; Dean Inge was a notorious ‘modern churchman’, perhaps today’s Bishop Jenkins; a tamasha is Anglo-Indian for a party). It deserves popularity, indeed, despite a comment recorded of it by its author in old age, that it was ‘awfully old-fashioned’. I don’t think it is. Witness, as a small instance, what Gethryn does to the unmasked murderer at their eventual midnight confrontation: it is an action that is the delight of every violence-merchant of the 1980s.
So, finally, who was the man who so knocked his own early success? He was born in 1899, son of the novelist and playwright Ronald MacDonald, grandson of the Scottish writer, George MacDonald, whose narrative poem ‘Within and Without’ Tennyson admired. Philip MacDonald, like Gethryn, fought in World War I, then wrote his crime stories and in the early 1930s was lured to Hollywood. There his screen credits included Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca but he wrote for himself little other than short stories, ending his days in the Motion Picture Retirement Home. Yet the short stories were of the highest quality. They brought him two Edgar Allan Poe Awards from the Mystery Writers of America and these words of praise from the critic Anthony Boucher:
‘MacDonald is at once a craftsman of writing, whose prose, characterisation and evocation of mood (comic or terrible) might be envied by the most serious literary practitioners.’
They are words I am happy to echo of this book.
H. R. F. KEATING
April 1985