The Crime of My Life, page 1
The Crime
of My Life
Favorite Stories
by
Presidents of the Mystery
Writers of America
Edited by
Brian Garfield
Each year members of the Mystery Writers of America pick one of their peers to become president of the organization, an honor with both critical and personal dimensions. When the association’s past presidents agreed to become their own best critics and choose a favorite story each had written, the present collection was born.
Edited by award-winning Brian Garfield, whose own story “Scrimshaw” is included, the collection presents a glorious range of crime and suspense fiction. Each contributor tells why he chose his story and gives us some of the history behind the tale.
What scope and variety they’ve provided! Helen McCloy’s rich story of Victorian China was written in 1935 but not published until 1946. Since then it has become a classic, translated into many languages and dramatized for radio and TV. You’ll find grand deception in Richard Martin Stern’s “Present for Minna” and Faustian fantasy in Lawrence Treat’s unforgettable “Give the Devil His Due.”
A vintage Stanley Ellin story (need we say more!), Georges Simenon’s “Blessed Are the Meek” and a puzzler starring Captain Leopold by Ed Hoch—without whom any such collection would be incomplete—are also in store for the mystery fan.
Other gems from the renowned John D. MacDonald, Robert Bloch, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Lillian De La Torre, Harold Q. Masur, and Hillary Waugh add even more luster to this priceless collection.
About the Editor
Brian Garfield is the thirty-ninth president of The Mystery Writers of America. He is the award-winning author of Hopscotch and many other crime novels, and now lives in Sherman Oaks, California.
Jacket design by Laurie McBarnette
Walker and Company
720 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10019
Printed in the United States of America
Copyright © 1984 by the Mystery Writers of America
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electric or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are fictitious.
First published in the United States of America in 1984 by the Walker Publishing Company, Inc.
Published simultaneously in Canada by John Wiley & Sons
Canada, Limited, Rexdale, Ontario.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
The Crime of my life.
1. Detective and mystery stories, American.
I. Garfield, Brian, 1939- II. Mystery Writers of America.
PS648.D4C7 1984 813’.0872’08 83-40389
ISBN 0-8027-0761-0
ISBN 0-8027-7256-0 (pbk.)
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Bloch, Robert: “The Man Who Knew Women,” © 1959 by King Size Publications, Ltd., first appearing in The Saint, July, 1959
Davis, Dorothy Salisbury: “The Purple Is Everything,” © 1964 by Dorothy Salisbury Davis, first appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June, 1964. Reprinted by permission of Mcintosh and Otis, Inc.
De la Torre, Lillian: “Milady Bigamy,” © 1978 by Lillian de la Torre, first appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July, 1978
Ellin, Stanley: “The Question,” © 1962 by Stanley Ellin, first appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November, 1962
Garfield, Brian: “Scrimshaw,” © 1979 by Brian Garfield, first appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December, 1979
Hoch, Edward D.: “The Leopold Locked Room,” © 1971 by Edward D. Hoch, first appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October, 1971
Masur, Harold Q.: “Framed for Murder,” © 1977 by Harold Q. Masur, first appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June, 1977
McCloy, Helen: “Chinoiserie,” © 1946 by Helen McCloy, first appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July, 1946. Copyright renewed, and reprinted by permission of the author.
MacDonald, John D.: “Hangover,” © 1956 by John D. MacDonald, first appearing in Cosmopolitan, July, 1956
Simenon, Georges: “Blessed Are the Meek,” © 1949 by Georges Simenon, first appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April, 1949
Stern, Richard Martin: “Present for Minna,” © 1950 by United Newspapers Corporation, copyright renewed 1978 by Richard Martin Stern, first appearing in This Week, February, 1950
Treat, Lawrence: “Give the Devil His Due,” © 1972 by Lawrence Treat, first appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February, 1973
Waugh, Hillary: “Galton and the Yelling Boys,” © 1970 by H.S.D. Publications, Inc., 1970, first appearing in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March, 1970
CONTENTS
Cover
Description
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Helen McCloy
CHINOISERIE
Richard Martin Stern
PRESENT FOR MINNA
John D. MacDonald
HANGOVER
Edward D. Hoch
THE LEOPOLD LOCKED ROOM
Lawrence Treat
GIVE THE DEVIL HIS DUE
Harold Q. Masur
FRAMED FOR MURDER
Robert Bloch
THE MAN WHO KNEW WOMEN
Stanley Ellin
THE QUESTION
Hillary Waugh
GALTON AND THE YELLING BOYS
Lillian de la Torre
MILADY BIGAMY
Brian Garfield
SCRIMSHAW
Georges Simenon
BLESSED ARE THE MEEK
Dorothy Salisbury Davis
THE PURPLE IS EVERYTHING
INTRODUCTION
All the contributors to this anthology have been presidents of the Mystery Writers of America, Inc., an organization whose age (and sometimes even wit) equals that of the late but perennial Jack Benny: MWA celebrates the 39th anniversary of its founding at the time of this book’s publication. And each contributor was asked to pick a favorite story from his or her own body of work.
MWA presidency is a coveted honor rather than an administrative position. It is one of the three recognitions by which MWA publicly applauds a peer. (The other two are the Grand Master Award, bestowed once in a lifetime on a writer for his or her body of work, and MWA’s well-known Edgar Allan Poe Award—the annual “Edgar,” the mystery’s equivalent of the Oscar.) Election to the presidency is the equivalent of a salute from one’s colleagues for one’s work. It is without price, and I, like the 38 previous occupants of the office, am moved by the great compliment.
The tales herein represent a wide range of crime and suspense storytelling; the mystery is not a monolithic or formulaic genre. There are stories of clever detection by Edward D. Hoch (the only writer I know who makes a living by writing short stories), Harold Q. Masur (who writes so persuasively about lawyers because he is one) and Hillary Waugh (who virtually invented the police-procedural detective story). We are guided through an exotic place and time by Helen McCloy (who may put scholars to shame with her knowledge of nineteenth-century China) and through an exotic mind by Stanley Ellin (who is the reigning master of the mystery short story). We are enthralled by the trick ending of a con-game story by Robert Bloch (whose Psycho is still the touchstone of mad-killer thrillers) and we are held in suspense by John D. MacDonald (who is, I think, one of the best living American writers) and by the others represented in this collection.
To have included stories by all the past presidents of MWA would have been prohibitive—the printing costs alone for such a large volume would have put its price far beyond most readers’ means. We decided therefore to limit the contents of this book to stories written by MWA presidents who are still alive and working. And the list of contributors was further shortened by the fact that some of the former presidents—the novelist, Phyllis A. Whitney, for example—have never written mystery short stories.
This book contains stories by all the living MWA presidents who were able to provide them. But the volume would be incomplete without acknowledgment of and a salute to all the presidents.
Chronologically, here is the honor roll:
Baynard Kendrick
Ellery Queen
Hugh Pentecost
Lawrence G. Blochman
John Dickson Carr
Helen McCloy
Anthony Boucher
George Harmon Coxe
Helen Reilly
Stuart Palmer
Georges Simenon
Dorothy Salisbury
Davis Margaret Millar
Rex Stout
Raymond Chandler
Frances & Richard Lockridge
Vincent Starrett
John D. MacDonald
Howard Haycraft
Edward D. Radin
Ross Macdonald
John Creasey
Herbert Brean
James Reach
Stanley Ellin
Robert Bloch
Richard Martin Stern
Hillary Waugh
Harold Q. Masur
Aaron Marc Stein
Phyllis A. Whitney
Lawrence Treat
Mignon G. Eberhart
Robert L. Fish
Lillian de la Torre
William P. McGivern
Thomas Walsh
Edward D. Hoch
Brian Garfield
—BRIAN GARFIELD
“Chinoiserie” was written in 1935 when I came across a book about the first journey of the Siberian Railway. I was so fascinated by Victorian China that I went on to read every book about it that I could find in the Oriental Room of the New York Public Library. After that the story just wrote itself.
For more than thirty years, “Chinoiserie” has been republished all over the world in many languages. Just before World War II, it was heard as a radio play in Singapore where there is a large Chinese colony. Just after the Vietnam War, it was shown as a television play in the city I still think of as Hanoi, where there are also many Chinese. These two incidents pleased me more than anything else in the history of the story because they suggested that the Chinese themselves felt it was an accurate and sympathetic portrayal of Victorian China.
—HELEN McCLOY
CHINOISERIE
HELEN McCLOY
This is the story of Olga Kyrilovna and how she disappeared in the heart of Old Pekin.
Not Peiping, with its American drugstore on Hatamen Street. Pekin, capital of the Manchu Empire. Didn’t you know that I used to be language clerk at the legation there? Long ago. Long before the Boxer Uprising. Oh, yes. I was young. So young I was in love with Olga Kyrilovna. . .Will you pour the brandy for me? My hand’s grown shaky the last few years. . .
When the nine great gates of the Tartar City swung to at sunset, we were locked for the night inside a walled, medieval citadel, reached by camel over the Gobi or by boat up the Pei-ho, defended by bow and arrow and a painted representation of cannon. An Arabian Nights city where the nine gate towers on the forty-foot walls were just ninety-nine feet high so they would not impede the flight of air spirits. Where palace eunuchs kept harems of their own to “save face.” Where musicians were blinded because the use of the eye destroys the subtlety of the ear. Where physicians prescribed powered jade and tigers’ claws for anemia brought on by malnutrition. Where mining operations were dangerous because they opened the veins of the Earth Dragon. Where felons were slowly sliced to death and beggars were found frozen to death in the streets every morning in the winter.
It was into this world of fantasy and fear that Olga Kyrilovna vanished as completely as if she had dissolved into one of the air spirits or ridden away on one of the invisible dragons that our Chinese servants saw in the atmosphere all around us.
It happened the night of a New Year’s Eve ball at the Japanese Legation.
When I reached the Russian Legation for dinner, a Cossack of the Escort took me into a room that was once a Tartar general’s audience hall. Two dozen candle flames hardly pierced the bleak dusk. The fire in the brick stove barely dulled the cutting edge of a North China winter. I chafed my hands, thinking myself alone. Someone stirred and sighed in the shadows. It was she.
Olga Kyrilovna. . .How can I make you see her as I saw her that evening? She was pale in her white dress against walls of tarnished gilt and rusted vermilion. Two smooth, shining wings of light brown hair. An oval face, pure in line, delicate in color. And, of course, unspoiled by modern cosmetics. Her eyes were blue. Dreaming eyes. She seemed to live and move in a waking dream, remote from the enforced intimacies of our narrow society. More than one man had tried vainly to wake her from that dream. The piquancy of her situation provoked men like Lucien de l’Orges, the French charge.
She was just seventeen, fresh from the convent of Smolny. Volgorughi had been Russian minister in China for many years. After his last trip to Petersburg, he had brought Olga back to Pekin as his bride, and. . .well, he was three times her age.
That evening she spoke first. “Monsieur Charley. . .”
Even at official meetings the American minister called me “Charley.” Most Europeans assumed it was my last name.
“I’m glad you are here,” she went on in French, our only common language. “I was beginning to feel lonely. And afraid.”
“Afraid?” I repeated stupidly. “Of what?”
A door opened. Candle flames shied and the startled shadows leaped up the walls. Volgorughi spoke from the doorway, coolly. “Olga, we are having sherry in the study. . .Oh!” His voice warmed. “Monsieur Charley, I didn’t see you. Good evening.”
I followed Olga’s filmy skirts into the study, conscious of Volgorughi’s sharp glance as he stood aside to let me pass. He always seemed rather formidable. In spite of his grizzled hair, he had the leanness of a young man and the carriage of a soldier. But he had the weary eyes of an old man. And the dry, shriveled hands, always cold to the touch, even in summer. A young man’s imagination shrank from any mental image of those hands caressing Olga. . .
In the smaller room it was warmer and brighter. Glasses of sherry and vodka had been pushed aside to make space on the table for a painting on silk. Brown, frail, desiccated as a dead leaf, the silk looked hundreds of years old. Yet the ponies painted on its fragile surface in faded pigments were the same lively Mongol ponies we still used for race meetings outside the city walls.
“The Chinese have no understanding of art,” drawled Lucien de l’Orges. “Chinese porcelain is beginning to enjoy a certain vogue in Europe, but Chinese painters are impossible. In landscape they show objects on a flat surface, without perspective, as if the artist were looking down on the earth from a balloon. In portraits they draw the human face without shadows or thickness as untutored children do. The Chinese artist hasn’t enough skill to imitate nature accurately.”
Lucien was baiting Volgorughi. “Pekin temper” was as much a feature of our lives as “Pekin throat.” We got on each other’s nerves like a storm-stayed house party. An unbalanced party where men outnumbered women six to one.
Volgorughi kept his temper. “The Chinese artist doesn’t care to ‘imitate’ nature. He prefers to suggest or symbolize what he sees.”
“But Chinese art is heathen!” This was Sybil Carstairs, wife of the English inspector general of Maritime Customs. “How can heathen art equal art inspired by Christian morals?”
Her husband’s objection was more practical: “You’re wastin’ money, Volgorughi. Two hundred Shanghai taels for a daub that will never fetch sixpence in any European market!”
Incredible? No. This was before Hirth and Fenollosa made Chinese painting fashionable in the West. Years later I saw a fragment from Volgorughi’s collection sold in the famous Salle Six of the Hotel Drouot. While the commissaire-priseur was bawling, “On demande quatre cent mille francs,” I was seeing Olga again, pale in a white dress against a wall of gilt and vermilion in the light of shivering candle flames. . .
Volgorughi turned to her just then. “Olga, my dear, you haven’t any sherry.” He smiled as he held out a glass. The brown wine turned to gold in the candlelight as she lifted it to her lips with an almost childish obedience.
I had not noticed little Kiada, the Japanese minister, bending over the painting. Now he turned sleepy slant-eyes on Volgorughi and spoke blandly. “This is the work of Han Kan, greatest of horse painters. It must be the finest painting of the T’ang Dynasty now in existence.”
“You think so, count?” Volgorughi was amused. He seemed to be yielding to an irresistible temptation as he went on. “What would you say if I told you I knew of a Tang painting infinitely finer—a landscape scroll by Wang Wei himself?”
Kiada’s eyes lost their sleepy look. He had all his nation’s respect for Chinese art, tinctured with jealousy of the older culture. “One hears rumors now and then that these fabulous masterpieces still exist, hidden away in the treasure chests of great Chinese families. But I have never seen an original Wang Wei.”
“Who, or what, is Wang Wei?” Sybil sounded petulant.
Kiada lifted his glass of sherry to the light. “Madame, Wang Wei could place scenery extending to ten thousand li upon the small surface of a fan. He could paint cats that would keep any house free from mice. When his hour came to Pass Above, he did not die. He merely stepped through a painted doorway in one of his own landscapes and was never seen again. All these things indicate that his brush was guided by a god.”
