The Incredible Crime Read online

  The Incredible Crime

  With an Introduction by Kirsten T. Saxton

  Lois Austen-Leigh

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017

  First E-book Edition 2017

  Introduction copyright © 2017 Kirsten T. Saxton

  Originally published in 1931 by Herbert Jenkins

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library

  Acknowledgements with gratitude to A Room of One’s Own Press

  ISBN: 9781464207471 ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

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  Contents

  The Incredible Crime

  Copyright

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  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

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to the following people and organizations for their help on this project: Diana Birchall, for sharing her work on Lois Austen-Leigh; Tony and Debbie Bone, for welcoming me to Cob House; Damaris Brix and Freydis Welland (great-nieces of Lois Austen-Leigh) and Viola Jones and Valerie Peyman for kindly providing primary materials; Kristen Hanley Cardozo, for the initial find; the generous folks of Aldeburgh, Winterbourne, and Wargrave who shared their stories and time, and Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, Mills College, and the British Library for research support.

  Introduction

  Kirsten T. Saxton

  The Incredible Crime opens with a blisteringly funny scene. The main character, Prudence, tosses a crime novel across the room, mocking the improbable “bilge” that is “modern detective fiction”: “When you go to stay in a country-house,” she exclaims, “you do not step on corpses or meet blood trickling down the stairs.” Her friend remonstrates, “but what with ‘complexes’, ‘unconscious urges,’ and ‘compensations,’ people in the country-house may be up to any devilment you like.”

  Lois Austen-Leigh’s playful satire lets us know we are in the hands of a capable and confident writer. That The Incredible Crime is, in fact, a country-house mystery is delicious.

  The granddaughter of Jane Austen’s favourite nephew, Lois Austen-Leigh (1883–1968) purportedly wrote her novels on the very writing desk at which her famous relative penned her masterpieces and which was donated to the British Library by Joan Austen-Leigh, founder of the Jane Austen Society of North America and Lois’s niece. Published in 1931, The Incredible Crime is the first of the four critically acclaimed novels Austen-Leigh published during the Golden Age, that period of crime fiction spanning the period between the two world wars.

  Her novels are infused with the adroit plotting, cheeky humour, and modern sensibility that enliven the Golden Age. The plot of The Incredible Crime is as entertaining as its humour, with a narrative described by critics as: “very exciting…thrills and sensations go hand in hand” in “a most readable yarn.” The thrills are accompanied by deft forays into the tradition of coastal smuggling, academic satire, the drug trade, government spies, the pleasures and dangers of country house life, modern policing, and the exigencies of romance for spirited young women who know their own minds.

  Set both in a venerable Cambridge college and a stately manor, The Incredible Crime cleverly bridges the academic and the village mystery traditions, using and upending the conventions of each. Its Cambridge sections locate the novel solidly within the tradition of British university crime fiction. The novel leads us through hallowed college halls with their sometimes touching, sometimes amusing daily rituals, petty jealousies, and potentially deadly plots. As a professor, I can attest that the novel’s good-natured send-up of Cambridge academics remains painfully pertinent (nobody gets promoted just for being a good teacher!).

  As for the village, Wellende Hall, the “magnificent stately old” country house on the sea, evokes an ancient rural sea-swept England of smugglers, fox hunts, nobles, and loyal servants, a slow-paced counterpoint tied to the rhythms of the land in contrast to the bustle of the university. Austen-Leigh is at home in the almost feudal setting of the village, and her descriptions of Suffolk evoke her love of the coast’s natural beauty, its “soft brown russets” and the “startling whites of the gulls.”

  Just as The Incredible Crime combines conventions from the traditions of village and college mysteries, it also offers a sparkling union of the Jane Austen novel of manners with the mystery genre. Like Austen, Austen-Leigh focuses on insular communities, and our pleasure derives in part from the affectionate, sometimes mocking, particularities of habit, locale, and ritual. Austen-Leigh also uses the particular to comment on the general. While we may not identify with Cambridge in the 1930s, we understand the peccadilloes of self-importance and the genuine power of radical intelligence. We might not “know” the country house world, but we recognize the shared emotional landscape of a closely connected community, the generosity wealth makes possible, and the envy and parochialism it instills.

  Austen-Leigh’s fiction is typical of the Golden Age in its descriptions of crimes set in a world that, while modern in sensibility, is also deeply nostalgic. In her novels, both the university and the village estate should rightly be ruled by kindness, wisdom, loyalty and merit. However, Austen-Leigh avoids simple stereotypes; when she employs stock characters—the faithful retainer, the oblivious professor, or the idealized patriarch—she does so to interesting ends. Ethical people cross legal lines, and crime can be morally murky. Although men are haunted by their combat experiences, these traumatic memories also create an appreciation of both the absurdity and the comfort of social niceties. Women drive fast cars, swear, and push against old-fashioned limits, but seek idealized romance with benevolent successful patriarchs-to-be.

  Like her well-known relative, Austen-Leigh accomplishes this complexity through the use of a slightly ironic narrator whose distance from the characters allows a more knowing voice to shape our point of view. For example, to critique the detective’s suspicions of local drug smuggling, the professor pulls out a “dirty looking book” and reads aloud a long quote about the improbabil
ity of holding such “dreadful suspicions” of evil occurring in “the country and age in which we live.” The detective comments, that’s “very good. Who wrote it?” The professor responds: “A parson’s daughter—more than a hundred years ago.”

  If we recognize the source as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, we get the irony. Both Austen’s novel and The Incredible Crime are genre novels that overtly take up the question of the value of genre. The quote also establishes the detective as a reader of Austen—fine praise indeed, and yet his interpretation signals his good-natured naiveté: as the agent knows, England does indeed include such evil. Both Austen-Leigh and Austen defend the homely English countryside, while locating danger as coming from within rather than without.

  The Incredible Crime was hailed by critics as “the very essence of mystery” for its plot, well-drawn characters and “passages of unusual beauty…especially in her descriptions of Cambridge and the coast of Suffolk.” The Times Literary Supplement praised the novel as “writing and analysis of character…of a much higher order,” adding that, “Miss Austen-Leigh might consider a more serious vein of writing.”

  We who love crime fiction can be delighted that she did not.

  Lois Austen-Leigh (1883–1968)

  Lois Austen-Leigh and her siblings grew up on stories of the genius of their famous Aunt Jane. Her father, Arthur Austen-Leigh, Austen’s great nephew, was Rector at Winterbourne, Gloucester, where Lois was born and lived until they moved to Wargrave, Berkshire, where he served as Vicar until retiring in 1911.

  Lois’s diaries from Wargrave (1898–1906) offer a snapshot of an exuberant, comfortably situated English girl in the years before the War: swoony commentary on her brothers’ Cambridge friends; dramatic accounts of the horrors of caring for chickens; and the various joys and travails of teachers, cancelled picnics, and new frocks. They also record her excellent ear for language and eye for detail and hint at the sparkling tone we see in her fiction decades later. As a young woman, she seems to have had the same flair for the unconventional that we see in her heroines; she reportedly carried out her parish good deeds by zipping about on her motorbike.

  Few records remain of her daily life other than these early writings. We know she learned about the inner workings of Cambridge from her uncle, Augustus Austen-Leigh (1840–1905), Provost of King’s College, and his wife Florence Lefroy Austen-Leigh. He was the first Provost under the new system whereby the college was open to the world beyond Eton, and Austen-Leigh’s fiction demonstrates that heady atmosphere.

  During World War One, between 1916 and 1918, Lois worked as a gardener for the Red Cross in Reading while her sister, Honor, worked as a nurse in Malta and then France. She was for many years the companion to her widowed aunt Florence; after Florence’s death in 1926, Lois invited a top Cambridge architect to design and build Cob House for herself and Honor in Aldeburgh, on the rugged Suffolk coast that animates all of her fiction.

  The sisters thrived as part of the Aldeburgh arts community: young local resident Benjamin Britten played the piano at their home, accompanied by Honor on viola; family friend M.R. James set his famous ghost story in the local inn down the road. Lois wrote her crime fiction in a room of her own with a view of the sea.

  Austen-Leigh took her writing seriously. Her novels are carefully crafted, and she did not change them in the face of criticism. M.R. James, the author who succeeded her uncle as Provost of King’s and was a close friend and mentor, wrote in a posthumously published letter that he refused Lois’s request to review The Incredible Crime because “the heroine, who’s the daughter of a retired Bishop, Master of a College, takes occasion to swear solidly for two whole minutes: the language isn’t reported, but I can’t imagine anyone being able to swear for 2 minutes without trespassing a good deal over the limits.”

  Lois Austen-Leigh stuck the course, and she was rewarded by critical success and a multi-book contract with the reputable publisher Herbert Jenkins. Her novels appeared in quick succession: The Incredible Crime was followed by Haunted Farm (1932), Rude Justice (1936), and her final novel The Gobblecock Mystery (1938).

  Like many women writers, however, Austen-Leigh downplayed her literary ambition; claiming she wrote novels only to “keep herself in champagne.” Her persistence, her novels’ self-consciously literary frames, and the excellence of her work suggest the claim was, like Jane Austen’s own description of her work as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work,” a wry, self-deprecating cover.

  World War Two brought an end to Austen-Leigh’s writing career and to the Golden Age of detective fiction. Aldeburgh was a crucial defence site, and one can still see the marks at Cob House where the army set up defences to head off Germans approaching by sea. Lois and Honor drove an ambulance and worked in the fire brigade, and Lois’s letters express the exhaustion they felt in the face of the constant threat of bombardment and uncertainty.

  Despite her fine reviews and popularity in her lifetime, Lois Austen-Leigh seems to have fallen almost entirely out of memory. Robert Davies, editor of this series, comments that “even experts in the field have not heard of her.” Until now, her books have been almost impossible to find; I read them in the Rare Books room at the British Library, close to where Austen’s writing desk now sits. I am grateful to the Library and to Poisoned Pen Press for this chance to help bring them back into circulation.

  Chapter I

  “She kicked the corpse fretfully with her delicately-shod foot and, staggering dizzily against the bloody lintel of the door, looked fearfully over her shoulder. ‘God!’ she hissed, ‘shall we ever clean our souls of this ghastly crime?’ Her companion spoke not. Rage, pleading, lust, and pride, struggled for the mastery in his hot eyes!”…

  “What im-possible…in-credible…unutterable bilge; and that,” said Prudence Pinsent, pitching the book across the room, “is modern detective fiction!”

  “There is nothing stranger in fiction than there is in real life,” said a sententious voice.

  “Rot! When you go to stay in a country-house, you don’t step on corpses or meet blood trickling down the front stairs.”

  “No, but what with ‘complexes,’ ‘unconscious urges,’ and ‘compensations,’ the people in the country-house may be up to any devilment you like.”

  “Rot again.”

  “No, Prudence,” said Mrs. Skipwith, “there really is something in it; the tricks heredity can play—and the fact that the lengths of self-deception are endless; it’s always possible your friend may be an undiscovered lunatic or criminal.”

  “Rot again, but I wish you wouldn’t all talk when we are playing bridge.”

  “Well, I do like that, and you began by reading aloud when you were dummy.”

  Four people were seated playing bridge in the comfortable house in Cambridge of Susan Skipwith, wife of the Dolbey Professor of Entomology. They were four friends who met regularly once a week to play what they called bridge, but what others might have been tempted to describe as cards and chatter. The rubber concluded, they cut afresh for another.

  “Yes,” said Prudence, in her soft, refined voice, answering a question, “I love watching a good rugger match, but some blasted wife always gets between me and the realization of my desire.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why, you know as well as I do that a member may only take one woman into the pavilion—and whenever I suggest to a friend that he should take me, why, his…wife wants to go!”

  “Your father is not a member, I suppose?”

  “No, and would not go to a rugger match if he were.”

  The chatter ceased for a short time, while a hand was played. Mrs. Skipwith, Mrs. Gordon whose husband had come up to Cambridge a few years earlier with a great reputation from some Scottish University, Mrs. Maryon, a smart young woman recently married to a young Fellow of Prince’s College, and Prudence Pinsent, the only c
hild of the Master of Prince’s College, a retired bishop. The Pinsents had been connected with their college for some generations, and the present Master was a perfect specimen of that fast disappearing genus, the courtly divine. His daughter was singularly good-looking—she had a face that should have adorned, and would have been a valuable asset to, a saint in a stained-glass window, surmounted by a head of glorious red-brown hair, and when on duty in Cambridge she comported herself with the utmost dignity, though she reserved to herself the right to swear like a trooper when she chose.

  Susan Skipwith, her great friend, attributed this weakness to the overpowering effect of the background of awful respectability which surrounded her. Prudence herself was more inclined to lay it at the door of a far-back buccaneering ancestor.

  “I always think, Prue, you know,” said Susan Skipwith, “that on the whole you are singularly untroubled with wives.”

  “How you can have the barefaced immorality to make a statement of that kind I cannot think,” said Prudence, and in her indignation she laid her cards on the table; “you who know what my life is—Fellows’ wives that are, and Fellows’ wives to be, and the Lodge run like a private hotel for them all.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Mrs. Gordon soothingly, “we all have our bit of that. Why, is it true—”

  “Yes,” interrupted Prudence, “but you haven’t just been told by your best friend that you are untroubled by wives; why, d—it all, after the war even undergraduates had wives!”

  “Prudence,” said Susan firmly, “if you don’t pick up your hand and go on with the game I shall—” Silence reigned for a short time, broken only by the assertion from Susan that the rest were hers; this was met with a unanimous denial on the part of her opponents; finally, when with the air of a maligned martyr she succeeded in making the rest, Mrs. Gordon pointed out to her that it was only done owing to a slip on the part of Marcella Maryon.

  “As I was going to say before when Prudence interrupted me,” said Mrs. Gordon, “is it true that there are some eminent foreigners coming to Cambridge specially to see your Thomas about some discovery of his?”