Zenobia put out the flame of the single mutton tallow candle and sat listening, listening to the sounds in the garden, the sound of the owls and of the wind rising over the river. And slowly, when the sounds persisted, she took her father’s pistol and, raising it, fired through the door, to frighten the ghostly intruders. The sound of a shot and then a silence while Zenobia stood there in the darkness with the smoking pistol in her hand, waiting... waiting!
There was only silence. They had gone away. There was nothing but the sighing of the wind and the faint hooting of the owls...
And in the morning (my grandfather said) Zenobia was awakened by the brilliant spring sun streaming in at the window and by the happy clamor of the thrushes and cardinals in the garden. The sunlight fell upon the wedding dress that lay spread out over the chair at her side. And when she had dressed and gone downstairs (she was singing, she told my grandfather) she unbolted the doors and windows one by one until she came to the last which opened into the garden. And there, full in the path, face downward, his red hair flaming in the sunlight, lay Jock McDougal — dead — with a bullet through his heart.
I looked up and saw the figure of Jabez, sitting now under a tree in the lane, still puzzling. We shall never again see Zenobia White with the procession of cats at her heels, her yellow taffeta trailing the white dust. Zenobia White is dead. She is being buried tomorrow in her wedding dress.
Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture
by Victor L. Whitechurch
Which half-dozen important books of detective short stories, published in the twentieth century, are now the hardest to find, and therefore the least accessible to the general public? That’s an interesting question, and we decided to pose it to three of America s outstanding crime connoisseurs — Vincent Starrett, Anthony Boucher, and James Sandoe. Mr. Starrett nominated Clifford Ashdown’s THE ADVENTURES OF ROMNEY PRINGLE (1902), H. Frankish’s DR. CUNLIFFE, INVESTIGATOR (1902), B. Fletcher Robinson’s THE CHRONICLES OF ADDINGTON PEACE (1905), J. S. Fletcher’s THE ADVENTURES OF ARCHER DAWE, SLEUTH-HOUND (1909), A. J. Rees’s INVESTIGATIONS OF COLWIN GREY (1932), and C. Daly King’s THE CURIOUS MR. TARRANT (1935). Mr. Boucher, leaning more on historical and qualitative significance, suggested William MacHarg’s and Edwin Balmer’s THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF LUTHER TRANT (1910), T. S. Stribling’s CLUES OF THE CARIBBEES (1929), Harvey J. O’Higgins’s DETECTIVE DUFF UNRAVELS IT (1929), Percival Wilde’s ROGUES IN CLOVER (1929), Frederick Irving Anderson’s BOOK OF MURDER (1930), and C. Daly King’s THE CURIOUS MR. TARRANT (1935). Mr. Sandoe’s list included Clifford Ashdown’s THE ADVENTURES OF ROMNEY PRINGLE (1902), Gilbert K. Chesterton’s THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES (1905), T. S. Stribling’s CLUES OF THE CARIBBEES (1929), Frederich Irving Anderson’s BOOK OF MURDER (1930), Henry Wade’s POLICEMAN’S LOT (1933), and C. Daly King’s THE CURIOUS MR. TARRANT (1935).
The truth is, there are a good hundred books of detective short stories published since 1900 that are now extremely-to-excessively hard to find. It is really unfair to try to isolate the six hardest — luck plays too large a part in every book collector’s campaigning. Also, it is sometimes easier, paradoxical as it may seem, to locate an expensive rare book than an inexpensive one. One reason for this is that bookdealers and bookscouts naturally go after the high-priced rarities with infinitely more patience and persistence than they are willing to expend on books that, no matter how scarce and desirable, will bring them only relatively small profits or commissions. Many a time in the early stages of our own collecting we came upon a notoriously difficult book standing unwept, unhonored, and unsung on some obscure dealer’s shelf, and modestly priced to boot; but we have learned through bitter experience that this apparent availability did not mean the book in question was common. We were just lucky — another copy of the volume might not turn up in the next ten years. The internationally famous collector, Ned Guymon of San Diego, once told us that at the very beginning of his collecting career he received a large carton of miscellaneous books from England which averaged him a mere shilling per copy; yet in that “grab-bag” he found a paperback first edition of which there are still only three known copies in the United States!
Judging from our own experience, we would agree with Messrs. Starrett, Boucher, and Sandoe on five of their choices, ROMNEY PRINGLE is without question one of the Kohinoor rarities — there are only four copies extant, including the one in the British Museum of London, MR. TARRANT, DR. CUNLIFFE (the only title in the three lists, by the way, which is still missing in your Editor’s collection), and ARCHER DAWE are tremendously elusive gentlemen of the genre. And the English first edition of Chesterton’s THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES is also a permanent entry on most collectors’ want-lists — although the U. S. first edition is not too uncommon.
For the sixth scarcity-of scarcities we would unqualifiedly name a book which fails to appear on any of the lists above. To our mind it is second only to ROMNEY PRINGLE in sheer unbelievable rarity. We refer to Victor L. Whitechurch’s THRILLING STORIES OF THE RAILWAY (1912), a paperback featuring Thorpe Hazell, fanatical devotee of vegetarianism and setting-up exercises and probably the first railway-detective to appear in covers. This book seems to have vanished almost completely into the limbo of lost literature. In twenty years we have seen but three copies of this book, and only one of them intact.
So, continuing our policy of bringing to EQMM readers the rarest of the old as well as the finest of the new, we now offer you a Thorpe Hazell railway ratiocination. There are nine “cases in the private note-book” of Thorpe Hazell, all interesting, but one outstanding. Dorothy L. Sayers considers “Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture” the most ingenious of Thorpe Hazell’s investigations. We are in full accord with Miss Sayers’s critical judgment. To the best of your Editor’s knowledge this story has appeared in the United States only once — in one of Miss Sayers’s anthologies. It deserves reprinting as a modem classic.
The affair of the freight car on the Didcot and Newbury branch of the Great Western Railway was of singular interest, and found a prominent place in Thorpe Hazell’s notebook. It was owing partly to chance, and partly to Hazell’s sagacity, that the main incidents in the story were discovered, but he always declared that the chief interest to his mind was the unique method by which a very daring plan was carried out.
He was staying with a friend at Newbury at the time, and had taken his camera down with him, for he was a bit of an amateur photographer as well as book-lover, though his photos generally consisted of trains and engines. He had just come in from a morning’s ramble with his camera slung over his shoulder, and was preparing to partake of two plasmon biscuits, when his friend met him in the hall.