“I’m not being superior,” said Dalgliesh. “You can put it down to envy. I resent the way in which fictional detectives can arrest their man and get a full confession gratis on evidence which wouldn’t justify me in applying for a warrant. I wish real-life murderers panicked that easily. There’s also the little matter that no fictional detective seems to have heard of the Judge’s Rules.”
“Oh, the Honourable Martin is a perfect gentleman. You could learn a lot from him, I’m sure. Always ready with the apt quotation and a devil with the women. All perfectly respectable of course but you can see that the female suspects are panting to leap into bed with the Hon. if only Seton would let them. Poor Maurice! There was a certain amount of wishfulfilment there I think.”
“What about his style?” asked Dalgliesh, who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted.
“Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written I imagine with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable. I didn’t want to take him on when he left Maxwell Dawson five years ago but I was outvoted. He was almost written out then. But we’ve always had one or two crime novelists on the list and we bought him. Both parties regretted it, I think, but we hadn’t yet come to the parting of the ways.”
“What was he like as a person?” asked Dalgliesh.
“Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else’s, which didn’t exactly make for popularity.”
“A typical writer, in fact?” suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.
“Now Adam, that’s naughty. Coming from a writer, it’s treason. You know perfectly well that our people are as hard-working, agreeable and talented a bunch as you’ll find outside any mental hospital. No, he wasn’t typical. He was more unhappy and insecure than most. I felt sorry for him occasionally but that charitable impulse seldom survived ten minutes in his company.”
Dalgliesh asked whether Seton had mentioned that he was changing his genre.
“Yes, he did. When I last saw him about ten weeks ago. I had to listen to the usual diatribe about the decline of standards and the exploitation of sex and sadism but then he told me that he was planning to write a thriller himself. In theory, of course, I should have welcomed the change, but, in fact, I couldn’t quite see him pulling it off. He hadn’t the jargon or the expertise. It’s a highly professional game and Seton was lost when he went outside his own experience.”
“Surely that was a grave handicap for a detective writer?”
“Oh, he didn’t actually do murder as far as I know. At least, not in the service of his writing. But he kept to familiar characters and settings. You know the kind of thing. Cosy English village or small-town scene. Local characters moving on the chessboard strictly according to rank and station. The comforting illusion that violence is exceptional, that all policemen are honest, that the English class system hasn’t changed in the last twenty years and that murderers aren’t gentlemen. He was absolutely meticulous about detail though. He never described a murder by shooting, for example, because he couldn’t understand firearms. But he was very sound on toxicology and his forensic medical knowledge was considerable. He took a great deal of trouble with rigor mortis and details like that. It peeved him when the reviewers didn’t notice it and the readers didn’t care.”
Dalgliesh said: “So you saw him about ten weeks ago. How was that?”
“He wrote and asked to see me. He came to London purposely and we met in my office just after six-fifteen when most of the staff had left. Afterwards we came here to dine. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Adam. He was going to alter his will. This letter explains why.” He took a folded sheet of writing paper from his wallet and handed it to Dalgliesh. The paper was headed “Seton House, Monksmere Head, Suffolk.” The letter, dated thirtieth July, was typed and the typing, although accurate, was inexpert, and something about the spacing and the word division at the end of lines marked it as the work of an amateur. Dalgliesh realised immediately that he had recently seen one other typescript by the same hand. He read:
Dear Gurney,
I have been thinking over our conversation of last Friday-and here I must digress to thank you again for a most enjoyable dinner-and I have come to the conclusion that my first instinct was right. There is absolutely no sense in doing things by half. If the Maurice Seton Literary Prize is to fulfill the great purpose which I plan for it the capital outlay must be adequate, not only to ensure that the monetary value of the award is commensurate with its importance, but also to finance the prize in perpetuity. I have no dependents with a legitimate claim on my estate. There are those people who may think they have a claim but that is a very different matter. My only living relative will be left a sum which hard work and prudence will enable him to augment should he choose to exercise these virtues. I am no longer prepared to do more. When this and other small bequests have been made there should be a capital sum of approximately £120,000 available to endow the prize. I tell you this so that you may have some idea of what I intend. As you know my health is not good and although there is no reason why I should not live for many years yet, I am anxious to get this affair under way. You know my views. The prize is to be awarded biennially for a major work of fiction. I am not interested particularly in encouraging the young. We have suffered enough in recent years from the self-pitying emotionalism of the adolescent writer. Nor do I favour realism. A novel should be a work of imaginative craftsmanship not the dreary shibboleths of a social worker’s casebook. Nor do I restrict the prize to detective fiction; what I understand by detective fiction is no longer being written.
Perhaps you will think over these few ideas and let me know what you suggest. We shall need trustees of course and I shall consult lawyers in regard to the terms of my new will. At present, however, I am saying nothing about this plan to anyone and I rely on you to be equally discreet. There will inevitably be publicity when the details are known but I should much deplore any premature disclosures. I shall, as usual, be staying at the Cadaver Club for the last two weeks in October and I suggest that you get in touch with me there.
Yours sincerely,
Maurice Seton
Dalgliesh was conscious of Gurney’s little black eyes on him as he read. When he had finished he handed back the letter, saying: “He was expecting rather a lot of you, wasn’t he? What was the firm getting out of it?”
“Oh, nothing, my dear Adam. Just a lot of hard work and worry and all of course for the greater glory of Maurice Seton. He didn’t even restrict the prize to our list. Not that it would have been reasonable, I admit. He wanted to attract all the really big names. One of his chief worries was whether they would bother to apply. I told him to make the prize large enough and they’d apply all right. But £120,000! I never realized he was worth that.”
“His wife had money… Did he talk to anyone else about his plan do you know, Max?”
“Well, he said not. He was rather like a schoolboy about it. Tremendous swearings to secrecy and I had to promise I wouldn’t even telephone him about it. But you see my problem. Do I, or do I not, hand this over to the police?”