Danger at my Heels Read online

  Gordon Meyrick

  Danger at my Heels

  Death was falling, swiftly, ruthlessly. It made you very conscious of living.

  After eight years abroad, Michael Stephen is back in Second World War London—the fortunate survivor of a shipwreck. Avoiding the incessant bombing of the Blitz, he instead gets swept up into something even more perilous—a mystery involving an international plot. It is one which will strike at the heart of the British war effort.

  The plot takes Stephen on an amazing journey of subterfuge, secret codes, nightclubs, spies, rural England and romance.

  Danger at my Heels was originally published in 1943. This new edition includes an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  To

  Penny

  In gratitude for her help in

  this adventure

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Dedication

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  About the Author

  Titles by Gordon Meyrick

  The Body on the Pavement – Title Page

  The Body on the Pavement – Chapter I

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Gordon Meyrick’s corpus of crime fiction appeared in the few short years between 1941 and 1943, the year of his tragic untimely demise at the age of 34. While the book for which he is best known is his posthumously published The Ghost Hunters (1947), a collection of short stories about the exploits of Arnold Perry, a most percipient paranormal investigator, which the author completed shortly before his death (though it was not published until four years later), his entertaining crime novels--The Green Phantom, The Body on the Pavement, Pennyworth of Murder, and Danger at My Heels--merit reprinting. Decidedly in the thriller vein, Meyrick’s mysteries concern gangs of crooks and master criminals in the style of such masters of the form as Edgar Wallace, John Buchan and E. Phillips Oppenheim. This milieu was one with which Meyrick had at least passing acquaintance, for he was the tall, dapper son of Kate Meyrick, England’s notorious between-the-wars “Queen of the Nightclubs” and one of the country’s most notable cultural figures in the two decades between the First and Second World Wars.

  Kate Meyrick was born Kate Evelyn Nason in Ireland in 1875. Having lost her birth parents by the age of seven, Kate with her sister was sent to live with a grandmother and two great-aunts in a sprawling mansion in Dublin (now a five-star Radisson hotel). “Here everything was of a bygone age,” she later dryly recalled. “There were three servants who had been in the family for more than half a century, the gardener was eighty-four, the coachman only a year or two his junior. The governesses set to educate my sister and myself were also of an age to harmonise with the surroundings.”

  To the disappointment of her relations, Kate rejected matrimony with a wealthy man in order to wed a young doctor, Ferdinand Richard Holmes Merrick. After their marriage in 1899 the couple moved to southern England, residing successively at Southsea and Brighton. There Dr. Meyrick, as he now styled himself (this spelling of the surname struck the young couple as posher) treated a clientele of well-off mental patients. Kate meanwhile bore eight children, six daughters and two sons, during the years of her marriage. These were Mary Ethel Isobel (1900-1938), Dorothy Evelyn (1902-1987), Henry Lyster (1903-1968), Kathleen Holmes (1907-1978), Gordon Holmes (1909-1943), Eileen Margaret Nason (1910-1959), Lilian Agnes (1912-1987) and Gwendoline Irene (1914-2002).

  Kate’s marriage, which had long been troubled, finally broke down irretrievably after the First World War, when she sued Ferdinand for divorce and he counter-sued her, damningly citing a co-respondent. With this standoff achieved, no divorce actually materialized; yet the couple permanently separated, with Kate being left custody of the minor children, including younger son Gordon, who was only ten at the time. Now in her forties, Kate moved with her brood to London and launched a colorful midlife career as a nightclub proprietor. (The partner in her first venture was the man who had been named as the co-respondent in Dr. Merrick’s divorce suit.) The middle-aged mother of eight soon became a fixture of city nightlife, as well as, in the stern eyes of legal authority, “the most inveterate lawbreaker in London”—all on account of her grave crime of selling liquor after hours.

  The nature of London nightlife had greatly changed after the Great War, as hard-pressed aristocrats sold their regal townhouses, which had become much too expensive to maintain. As one authority has put it, the venue for posh entertaining in the city shifted “from private ballrooms to public nightclubs.” For example, Grosvenor House, the splendid townhouse of the Dukes of Westminster, was sold and demolished in 1927 and replaced by a grand hotel (named, appropriately enough, the Grosvenor House Hotel). Detective novelist E.R. Punshon (reprinted by Dean Street Press) referenced the decline of London townhouses in his 1936 novel The Bath Mysteries, where we learn that police sergeant Bobby Owen’s aristocratic uncle is saddled with a monstrous white elephant of a dilapidated city mansion.

  While flagging aristocrats fled from their townhouses, the energetic “Ma Meyrick” (as she was familiarly known to society) stuck her finger into many a boozy pie. Her most famous--or infamous in the eyes of the law--establishment was the “43,” so named for its location in the basement at 43 Gerrard Street, Soho. In his novel Brideshead Revisited, author Evelyn Waugh referenced both Kate Meyrick and 43, slightly disguised as “Ma Mayfield” and the “Old Hundredth.” Additionally, the detective novelist A. Fielding must have had an approximation of Kate in mind when in her mystery The Case of the Two Pearl Necklaces (1936) she devised the character of a notorious female nightclub proprietor, “Mrs. Finch,” who is determined to have her daughter, Violet, marry into the aristocracy. Quite contrastingly with Ma Meyrick, however, Fielding’s crass and mercenary Mrs. Finch is singularly charmless.

  Unfortunately for Kate, her popularity in the City attracted an empowered legal nemesis in the stern form of Sir William Joynson-Hicks, home secretary in the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. After taking office Joynson-Hicks vowed “to stamp out the evil of drinking after hours.” Under wartime Great Britain’s Defence of the Realm Act [DORA], passed in 1914, the government possessed, an authority has noted, “extraordinary powers of interference in public events and private lives.” Originally DORA was justified “as a measure to keep munition workers out of the pubs during factory hours,” but it was retained in place even after its original justification had vanished. By the end of 1928 the vigilant Sir William had prosecuted sixty-five clubs, including Kate Meyrick’s 43.

  Kate’s legal troubles culminated in her being charged in 1928 with bribing a police sergeant to warn her when her premises were being surveilled. For committing the crime of bribery (which for the remainder of her life she vociferously denied), Kate was sentenced in January 1929 to fifteen months hard labor at Holloway Prison. After her release in 1930 (the year Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional mystery writer Harriet Vane, on trial for murder, was locked up in Holloway in the detective novel Strong Poison), the bloodied but unbowed Kate, undeterred from her vocational ways, would serve two briefer stints of incarceration. Increasingly frail after her myriad legal battles and terms of imprisonment, Kate succumbed in an influenza pandemic in 1933. At the time of her death she
was only 57.

  The censorious Joynson-Hicks had expected to find London’s nightclubs “filled with whores” but instead discovered, to his consternation, that they were “crammed with ‘society.’” Kate herself was a “lady” who made a great deal of money as a nightclub owner (though she had very little of it left at her death). This lucre she spent lavishly to educate her eight children at elite schools (Rodean and Harrow). Three of her daughters married aristocrats: “May,” the 14th Earl of Kinnoull; “Dolly,” the 26th Baron de Clifford; and Gwendoline, the youngest, the 6th Earl of Craven. Another daughter, Nancy, wed wealthy Edward FitzRoy St. Aubyn, a kinsman of Baron St. Levan.

  Gordon, who unlike his siblings never married, trained as a solicitor, like his elder brother Henry, but in 1935, two years after his mother died, he scored a success on stage at London’s Q. Theater with the mystery thriller The Green Phantom. Two years later he followed Phantom was another criminous Q. Theatre production, The Second Shot. After his thirtieth birthday he turned to crime fiction writing as a fulltime avocation. Throughout the 1930s Gordon resided with his unmarried sisters on Marylebone Road at 3 Park Square West, part of an elegant row of stuccoed Regency houses designed by famed architect John Nash and completed in 1824. (Before her death Kate Meyrick had lived there too.) By 1941, however, he was living on his own in tony Kensington at 16e Kensington Court, in a flat in a charming nookish Victorian-era structure modestly tucked beneath its taller neighbors. (A one-bedroom flat in this building recently was offered for sale for one and a quarter million pounds.) It may have been at Kensington Court that Gordon mysteriously fell from a window to his death on the pavement in November 1943. A modern relation of Gordon observes, “whether he threw himself or fell purely by accident or because he was drunk is unknown.” Of course as an inveterate reader of detective novels, when I first read of Gordon’s death I thought not merely of accident or suicide, but also of murder. In an odd coincidence (or was it?), Gordon’s second detective novel, The Body on the Pavement (originally published in 1942, not too long before Gordon’s death), concerns, as the title suggests, the mysterious death of a man who falls from--or is he pushed?--the roof of a posh block of flats.

  Thus in The Body on the Pavement is another strange murder case presented to ace Scotland Yard detective Rex Haig, who is handsome, expensively educated, relentlessly humorous and rather smug. (Whether the humor or the smugness wins out will depend on the reader.) Perhaps reflecting the author’s own social insecurities--Gordon was educated at Harrow, but his doting mama naturally had a notorious reputation as a nightclub owner arrested several times for selling liquor after hours in violation of DORA--many of the characters in the novel (Rex of course excepted) seem to be consumed with public school envy.

  It soon becomes apparent to the reader that The Body on the Pavement is less a tale of austere detection than a breezy mystery thriller in the manner of the late bestselling English Crime King Edgar Wallace. In the classic Wallace manner, Inspector Haig realizes he is up against a dastardly conspiracy by a criminal gang. To entertain his readers Gordon presents a colorful and frequently quirky cast of characters, including pretty Joan Hamilton, imperiled country heiress; a small-time con named (distractingly for modern American readers) Larry King; a handsome crooked couple, representatives of “the more dubious section of London’s West End population,” Tony Miller and Millicent Thorpe (“And don’t call me Millicent. The name is Thelma.”); Oscar Pendleton, a pansyish bachelor (“I was sitting in that chair. . . . reading a book by Marcel Proust.”); and Mr. Mander, a prim lawyer with a passion for peroxide blondes. These characters, as well as the author’s rapid pace and lightly humorous writing style, elevate The Body on the Pavement above the usual period British thriller. These same qualities are present as well in Gordon’s Danger at My Heels, rather a pastiche of John Buchan’s classic thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). Danger also benefits from its wartime detail (the London Blitz) and the author’s obvious familiarity with London.

  Why did Gordon, a single man in his early thirties, apparently not serve in the Second World War? I have no definite answers, though one can make surmises. In Danger, which is set in the spring of 1941, Michael Stephen, the narrator of the novel, who is the age of the author at the time the novel takes place, has returned to England after eight years in a foreign country, with the hope of serving in the navy. Certainly aspects of the novel must have been drawn from Gordon’s life:

  I . . . found there was a good chance for the R.N.V.R. [Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve]—only it meant a wait of two or three months. So I took a quarterly tenancy of a flat in Kensington Court, on the top floor, and went into immediate possession.

  At Kensington Town Hall I got a gas-mask, and from the Food Office a ration card; this entitled me to a quarter of a pound of butter, half a pound of sugar, two ounces of tea, and one and tuppence worth of meat a week. I dumped this lot in my new flat, and went out to get some lunch. I remember worrying lest a period of boredom and inactivity lay before me. It makes me smile to think of that now.

  At the local pub the narrator, in rather an amazing coincidence (this sort of thing happens in John Buchan too, not to mention Edgar Wallace), is taken for a near double of his, someone who had an appointment at the pub at the very same time. And of course this near double is up to no good at all. Soon not only the police, but enemy spies, are after our hero. The only thing for him to do is, to quote the title of a Patricia Wentworth thriller, Run!

  As mentioned at the top of this introduction, Gordon Meyrick wrote two other crime novels, The Green Phantom (an Edgar Wallace title if ever there were one) and Pennyworth of Murder, both of which it would be jolly to see reprinted, both for their intrinsic entertainment value and as testaments to a tragically foreshortened life of promise left unfulfilled. One cannot help but feel that the Meyricks, mother and son, got rather a raw deal from life. When he died at 34 after publishing his four crime novels Gordon Meyrick left an estate of just £131 (today about £5300, or USD7100), which he loyally left to his elder brother Henry—a pennyworth of murder indeed! Today Gordon lies forgotten in a humble plot in Kensal Green cemetery in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, rather overgrown with grass, together with his beloved mother, Kate, the deposed Queen of the Nightclubs. If Edgar Wallace was the King of Thrillers and E. Phillips Oppenheim the Prince of Storytellers, perhaps we can at least posthumously crown Gordon Meyrick one of the genre’s royal princelings.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  In March, 1941, the S.S. Cawnstor, bound for England, was bombed off the south-west coast and sank quickly. I was lucky enough to be picked up by a destroyer that got us ashore at Swansea. My papers and passport were in the sea, but my money, tied in a belt round my middle, was safe.

  I had been out of the country for eight years, so it was worth a wetting to get back. As soon as the formalities were over, I went to London, because that was the place I wanted most to see. Probably many people think of that city as dirty and unfriendly—but to me it’s home. I knew as soon as I smelt it at Paddington Station that I was back for good.

  When you’re away, imagination can play hell with you. I had pictured an England torn and stressed by bombing; instead, it was extraordinary to see how small was the damage—relatively speaking, I mean.

  Most of the features of a modern city at war were new to me; the sandbags on doorsteps, the water tanks in the street, the air-raid shelters, windows criss-crossed with paper to prevent splinters flying; the curiosity of blast-glass windows, intact in the shell of a bombed house, or a bath dangling, apparently unsupported, in the air. And overhead the balloon barrage—silver sausages floating in a misty blue.

  The most extraordinary thing was the calmness of the people. Later I learnt that after a bad blitz there was considerable tension. Then, with glass and debris littering the streets, tired A.R.P. and A.F.S. workers dealt with blitzed and burning houses, while grim silent crowds watched; the dust and smoke hung in t
he air—you could smell the air raid for days.

  London seemed more silent than I remembered it. Like a convalescent invalid, she had taken a few knocks, and now, with her wounds patched up, she was out and about again.

  I spent that evening at the Ritz Cinema, seeing Gone With The Wind. Afterwards, there came my first experience of another phenomenon—the black-out. To me—a novice—it was uncanny. A giant city sheltering in the cloak of night; most of its inhabitants burrowed underground. I have a vivid peace-time memory of Piccadilly Circus. The electric light signs flashing at the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and over the Monico; the brilliantly-lit facade of the London Pavilion and the Criterion. Crowds, noise, cars, evening dress. Now, nothing but a black void. Pin-points of light from slowly moving cars, ghostly omnibuses; dimly-seen pedestrians, a few of whom flashed dimmed torches. . . . Uncertain steps—and a gingerly feeling for the edge of pavements. The night presses on you; gone is the sense of direction and distance, a hundred yards can seem like a mile. I was glad to get back to my hotel and from the bedroom window watch my first air raid. The barrage was terrific; roar after roar of anti-aircraft guns. Each blast shook the house, and the sound went reverberating over the roof-tops like thunder. The momentary flash, lighting the buildings in silhouette, gave you the impression of lightning. Away in the south-east a red glow lit the heavens. Incendiary bombs had started some fires.

  Then there appeared half a dozen star-like objects that hung suspended in the sky. These parachute flares gave a white, dazzling effect, lending their immediate vicinity the appearance of ghost-like day. Occasionally there was a sickening crump as a bomb fell.

  It was an exhilarating scene. Though it made me feel small and helpless—and very angry. I wished that I had a giant hand to haul down those murderous insects that were indiscriminately bombing the civilians of London.