Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 14, No. 71, October 1949
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by Philip MacDonald
W. Somerset Maugham begins his introductory remarks to “A Writer’s Notebook” by making this curious and provocative statement: “I forget who it was who said that every author should keep a notebook, but should take care never to refer to it.” We know many authors who religiously maintain commonplace books of ideas, impressions, scraps of dialogue, news clippings, and all the other germs and sperms of literary creation; and so far as we can tell, these authors refer to their notes nearly every time they find themselves in need of “inspiration.” True, we know even more authors who do not keep journals of any kind, but without exception these authors are constantly berating themselves for their laziness, and constantly promising to go out and buy a shiny, leather-bound, hand-tooled, gilt-edged notebook and turn over a new leaf.
Speaking for ourselves, we are of the lazy genus. We have no notebooks, and if we had, they would be more apt to contain Daliesque doodling than detectival data. Nevertheless, we are all for notebook discipline — it must be of enormous help in a criminological crisis, compared with the haphazard slovenliness to which we are addicted and on which consequently we must depend. The occasional memoranda we commit to paper are usually indecipherable scrawls on the backs of envelopes, scribblings on the margins of newspapers, notations on menus, timetables, and paper napkins. We once put an important jotting on the back of a ticket-stub, and then placed the stub in the band of our hat — to make sure it wouldn’t get lost; but we never found the stub again — perhaps we put it in someone else’s hat!
Anyway, Philip MacDonald admits to the notebook habit, and through the years he has accumulated a whole collection of them. Recently he was glancing through a dusty daybook, more than twenty years old, and his eyes lit on a particularly cryptic entry. It was sandwiched between longer notes which, despite their greater detail, meant nothing whatever to him; but that cryptic entry, by some quirk of memory, suggested “a story without a title” (see pages 5 and 6).
This is a tale of those dear dead days when the world seemed fit to live in...
It is the tale of how young Howard Huntoon of Philadelphia (Bingo to his friends and family) paid a visit to Great Britain and collected for himself not only a beautiful wife but the foundations of a sizeable fortune.
If anyone had told Bingo, before he sailed, that he would come back with a wife, he would have laughed at the very idea. If anyone had gone on to say that he would marry into the bookmaking business, he would have laughed even louder.
But that, of course, was before he had met Deborah Delaney.
Deborah was the daughter of Robert Delaney — and Robert Delaney, as you will remember if you ever were in England in those merry days, was the man whose impressive picture, over the slogan ROBBIE ALWAYS PAYS, you were constantly seeing on the advertising pages.
But you will hear more of Mr. Delaney later — and, as it were, straight from the horse’s mouth. So let us return to Deborah, a far more delectable subject than her sire.
Deborah Delaney, at the time of this tale, was not only a darling but was held by cognoscenti to be the third most beautiful female in the British Empire. It is not surprising, therefore, that her impact upon Bingo was immediate and devastating.
They met at the Duchess of Dorset’s “Character” Charity Ball — Mme. de Pompadour and Abe Lincoln — and once having set eyes upon each other, remained inseparable throughout the whole coruscating affair.
They had lunch together the next day, and dinner the night after that, and a whole day on the Thames the day after that — so that within a week it became clear to each of them that the prospect of life without the other was not to be borne.
And neither was the prospect of waiting a whole year, until Deborah was twenty-one, any more acceptable.
“But,” said Deborah, sadly shaking her lovely head, “there’s Father to be reckoned with. And, as you would say, my Sweet, he’s going to be tough!”
“He is?” said Bingo. “Why?”
“Because, my Pet,” said Deborah, “you haven’t what he considers enough money. Also, what money you have, you didn’t make yourself.”
“Oh,” said Bingo.
Mr. Robert Delaney, it developed, was not only tough, he was impossible. He heard Bingo out, which didn’t take him long, and then launched upon a tirade which was compounded in almost equal proportions of sermon, autobiography, and disparagement, the last being concerned with Bingo in particular and all things American in general.
To poor Bingo, Mr. Delaney, seated behind his vast, shining desk, seemed a singularly repellent barrier across the road to happiness. Mr. Delaney, a self-made man, looked and behaved, as someone had once remarked, very much as if he’d done the construction in the dark, and it was all young Mr. Huntoon could do to refrain from advising him to walk the six blocks to St. James’s Park and go jump in the lake.
“It ain’t that I’m ’ard-’earted,” said Mr. Delaney. “Far from it! If you was a young chap with gumption, now, ’oo wasn’t frightened to go out and make y’rself a pound or two by the use of your own so-called brains, it’d be a different matter. But the way it is — well, you can’t expect me to sit ’ere and give my countenance to any foreign-born idler, with no more prospects than a — a — than a foreign-born idler, courting my daughter!”
At this point Mr. Delaney slapped the desk-top with his well-fleshed hand.
“So that’s it, me lad!” he said. “And in a nutshell!”
Bingo swallowed, and drew a deep breath, and said, with the utmost courtesy, “What do you imagine, Mr. Delaney, that a — uh — foreign-born idler would have to do in order to convert himself into a suitable son-in-law?”
“Now that,” said Mr. Delaney, “is a civil question, so I’ll give you a civil answer, young man. The day you come in ’ere and show me ten thousand pounds you’ve made with your own brains — well, that day you can ’ave my permission to pay your attentions to Debby!
“Provided,” added Mr. Delaney, “that she still wants ’em. Do I make myself clear?”
“Oh, yes,” said Bingo. “Perfectly.”
It was at the third of the lovers’ clandestine meetings after this distressing interview that Bingo said, “Lookit, honey: what’s the lowdown on this racket of your old man’s?”
“Lowdown?” said Deborah. “What’s that, my Precious?”
Bingo told her, and she said, “Oh, I see. Well, Father’s a sort of glorified bookie...”
After which, Miss Delaney launched into a succinct description of her father’s business. Mr. (ROBBIE ALWAYS PAYS) Delaney was, it seemed, by far the biggest “Off-the-Course” (i.e., bet-by-mail) bookmaker in the British Isles, where the law has always allowed a man to put his money on a horse. The accounts of Mr. Delaney’s clients were all established upon a weekly basis, and every Saturday his staff both received and paid out weekly checks, doing, explained Deborah, a great deal more of the former than the latter, which accounted for her father’s formidable wealth.
“Hmm!” grunted Bingo when she had finished. “And anyone can open an account?”
“Absolutely anybody,” said Deborah decisively. “If they don’t pay on the dot, though, the account’s candied.”
Bingo seemed thoughtful. “Tell me,” he asked, “how soon before a race does a guy have to mail his bet?”