The “locked room mystery” is a staple of traditional detective fiction, but in Calamity in Kent, John Rowland offers an unusual variation on the theme. The body of John Tilsley, who has been stabbed to death, is found in a locked carriage of a seaside cliff railway.
The setting is the resort of Broadgate, a name suggesting a fictional blend of Broadstairs and Ramsgate. Newspaperman Jimmy London, who narrates the story, is lodging by the sea, convalescing after a serious (but tantalisingly undisclosed) illness that has caused him to give up his job. Jimmy comes across a man behaving strangely; this proves to be the wonderfully named Aloysius Bender, operator of the railway, who tells Jimmy he has found a corpse in his cliff lift.
Jimmy, whose behaviour at times is a rather odd mix of the naive and the unscrupulous, is so keen to re-ignite his career with a sensational story that he interferes with the crime scene, and when Aloysius departs to fetch the police, he takes from the dead man’s pocket a notebook containing “various queer combinations of figures”, perhaps some kind of code. An enigmatic stranger comes on to the scene, claiming to be a local doctor. He says he knows the deceased, but makes a hasty getaway before the police arrive.
At this point, Jimmy enjoys a stroke of luck. The local cop, Inspector Beech, happens to be accompanied by the affable Inspector Shelley of Scotland Yard, John Rowland’s regular detective, and an old pal of Jimmy’s. What is more, Shelley enlists Jimmy’s help with the investigation: “there are people who might talk to a journalist, who…would not talk so readily to a policeman.” Jimmy’s investigations eventually lead him into danger, although it has to be said that the cunning villain he encounters proves in the end to be almost as obliging as Inspector Shelley; this is a light mystery with thrillerish elements, rather than a cerebral whodunit.
The use of the cliff railway as a crime scene is an especially nice touch, very much in keeping with the seaside backdrop. In Britain, the hey-day of cliff railways was in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth; they were usually to be found at resorts which boomed before cheaper air travel made holidays in warmer climates more affordable. Twenty-five pre-war cliff railways survive to this day. These include Ramsgate cliff lifts, although the original cliff railway at Broadstairs has been supplanted by the new Millennium Cliff Lift.
The “locked room” or “impossible crime” concept clearly appealed to Rowland—the late Bob Adey’s definitive study of the sub-genre, Locked Room Murders, lists not only this title but also Suicide Alibi (1937; “death by shooting in a room under observation”) and Death Beneath the River (1943; “death by shooting of a man driving a car through a road tunnel”), in both of which Shelley also appeared. One must concede, however, that the explanation for the locked cliff railway carriage conundrum does not display the devilish ingenuity that one associates with, say, the Americans John Dickson Carr and Clayton Rawson, or Scotland’s Anthony Wynne (whose Murder of a Lady, another British Library Crime Classic, is a clever example of the form).
The real life Wallace murder case, which dates back to 1930, is mentioned twice during the story, a clue to Rowland’s interest in the famous Liverpudlian mystery; he had written a book about the case, published in 1949. According to John Gannon’s much more recent The Killing of Julia Wallace (2012), the late Richard Gordon Parry, now widely considered to have been the real murderer, said he was approached by Rowland’s agent while the book was being written. There is no way of verifying this intriguing but improbable claim.
Calamity in Kent was first published in 1950, and references to life in post-war Britain—newsprint rationing, the nationalisation of the coal industry, and black market scams—are scattered through the text. In spirit, however, this book has more in common with breezy popular fiction of the 1930s, when Rowland started writing, rather than with crime fiction of the 1950s, such as Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel. Strangers on a Train, published in the very same year as Calamity in Kent, illustrated the shift in authorial preoccupations and readers’ tastes since the Golden Age of Murder between the wars.
John Herbert Shelley Rowland (1907–1984) seems to have recognised that the times were changing for crime novelists. Many leading writers of the Golden Age—examples include Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley—had already abandoned the genre to pursue other interests, and Rowland switched his focus. Those references to the Wallace case hint at an increasing interest in “true crime”, and after 1950, he concentrated on non-fiction for the remainder of his career. He did, however, become a member of the Crime Writers’ Association, which was founded in 1953, and his later output included further “true crime” titles and books on popular science. He became a Unitarian minister, and his son Fytton recalls that he spent each morning at work in his study—writing sermons, as well as such books as Poisoner in the Dock and Unfit to Plead? A likeable, unassuming man, he would no doubt be astonished that his long-forgotten crime novels are now finding a new readership in the twenty-first century.
Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com