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    The Case of the Grand Alliance: A Ludovic Travers Mystery
    The Case of the Grand Alliance: A Ludovic Travers Mystery
    The Case of the Grand Alliance: A Ludovic Travers Mystery
    Ebook240 pages4 hours

    The Case of the Grand Alliance: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

    By Christopher Bush

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    About this ebook

    Woman falls from window of flat. Doctor says killed instantly.

    Well, thought Ludovic Travers as he set the newspaper aside, that finally put a period to a highly unsuccessful case. The woman, a Mrs. Strand, had seemed a bit deranged when she came to him for help in locating some missing friends, but he quest led to a dead end.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDean Street Press
    Release dateApr 4, 2022
    ISBN9781915014757
    The Case of the Grand Alliance: A Ludovic Travers Mystery
    Author

    Christopher Bush

    Christopher Bush is a debut author of ‘Jake’s Lunchbox Surprise’, alongside being a primary school teacher with a passion for sparking children’s creative instincts. His fun-filled experiences with his cheeky, mischievous and most of all, brilliant children have inspired his first children’s book. Chris hopes to bring as big a smile to children’s faces, as much as they have to his.

    Read more from Christopher Bush

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      Book preview

      The Case of the Grand Alliance - Christopher Bush

      INTRODUCTION

      Rosalind. If it be true that good wine needs no bush [i.e., advertising], ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine, they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues.

      —Shakespeare, Epilogue, As You Like It

      The decade of the 1960s saw the sun finally begin to set on that storied generation which between the First and Second World Wars gave us detective fiction’s Golden Age. Taking account of both deaths and retirements, by the late Sixties only a bare half-dozen pre-World War Two members of the Detection Club were still plying their deliciously deceptive craft: Agatha Christie, Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson), Gladys Mitchell, John Dickson Carr, Nicholas Blake and Christopher Bush, the subject of this introduction.  Bush himself would pass away, at the age of eighty-seven, in 1973, having published, at the age of eighty-two, his sixty-third Ludovic Travers detective novel, The Case of the Prodigal Daughter, in the United Kingdom in the spring of 1968. 

      In the United States Bush’s final detective novel did not appear until late November 1969, about four months after the horrific Manson murders in the tarnished Golden State of California. Implicating the triple terrors of sex, drugs and rock and roll (not to mention almost inconceivably bestial violence), the Manson slayings could not have strayed farther from the whimsically escapist death as a game aesthetic of Golden Age of detective fiction. Increasingly in the decade capable of producing psychedelic psychopaths like Charles Manson and his family, the few remaining survivors of the Golden Age of detective fiction increasingly deemed themselves men and women far out of time. In his detective fiction John Dickson Carr, an incurable romantic, prudently beat a retreat from the present into the pleasanter pages of the past, setting his tales in bygone historical eras where he felt vastly more at home. With varying success Agatha Christie made a brave effort to stay abreast of the times (Third Girl, Endless Night), but ultimately her strivings to understand what was going on around her collapsed into the utter incoherence of Passenger to Frankfurt and Postern of Fate, by general consensus the worst mystery novels that Dame Agatha ever put down on paper.

      In his detective fiction Christopher Bush, who was not quite two years older than Christie, managed rather better than the Queen of Crime to keep up with all the unsettling goings-on around him, while never forswearing the Golden Age article of faith that the primary purpose of a crime writer is pleasingly to puzzle his/her readers. And, in contrast with Christie and Carr, Bush knew when it was time to lay down his pen (or turn off his dictation machine, as the case may be), thereby allowing him to make his exit from the stage on a comparatively high note. Indeed, Christopher Bush’s concluding baker’s dozen of detective novels, which he published between 1957 and 1968 (and which have now been reprinted, after more than a half-century, by Dean Street Press), makes a generally fine epilogue, or coda, to the author’s impressive corpus of crime fiction, which first began to see the light of day way back in the jubilant Jazz Age. These are, readers will find, good bushes (to punningly borrow from Shakespeare), providing them with ample intelligent detective entertainment as Bush’s longtime series sleuth Ludovic Travers, in the luminous twilight of his career, makes his final forays into ingenious criminal investigation. 

      *

      In the last thirteen Ludovic Travers mystery novels, Travers’ entrée to his cases continues to come through his ownership of the Broad Street Detective Agency. Besides Travers we also regularly encounter his elegant wife, Bernice (although sometimes his independent-minded spouse is away on excursions of her own), his proverbially loyal secretary, Bertha Munney, his top Broad Street op, Hallows (another one named French, presumably inspired by Bush’s late Detection Club colleague Freeman Wills Crofts, pops up occasionally), John Hill of the United Assurance Agency, who brings Travers many of his cases, and Scotland Yard’s Inspector Jewle and Sergeant Matthews, who after the first of these final novels, The Case of the Treble Twist (in the U.S. Triple Twist), are promoted, respectively, to Superintendent and Inspector. (The Yard’s ex-Superintendent George Wharton, now firmly retired from any form of investigative work whatsoever, is mentioned just once by Ludo, when, in The Case of the Dead Man Gone, he passingly imparts that he and Wharton recently had lunch together.) 

      For all practical purposes Travers, who during the Golden Age was a classic gentleman amateur snooper like Philo Vance and Lord Peter Wimsey, now functions fully as a professional private eye—although one, to be sure, who is rather posher than the rest. While some reviewers referred to Travers as England’s Philip Marlowe, in fact he little resembles the general run of love and leave ’em/hate and beat ’em brand of brutish American P.I.’s, favoring a nice cup of coffee (a post-war change from tea), a good pipe and the occasional spot of sherry to the frequent snatches of liquor and cigarettes favored by most of his American brethren and remaining faithful to his spouse despite encountering a succession of sexy women, not all of them, shall we say, virtuously inclined. 

      This was a formula which throughout the period maintained a devoted audience on both sides of the Atlantic consisting, one surmises, of readers (including crime writers Anthony Berkeley, Nicholas Blake and the late Alan Hunter, creator of Inspector George Gently) who preferred their detectives something less than hard-boiled. Travers himself sneers at the hugely popular (and psychotically violent) postwar American private eye Mike Hammer, commenting of an American couple in The Case of the Treble Twist: She was a woman of considerable culture; his ran about as far as Mickey Spillane [a withering reference to Mike Hammer’s creator]. Yet despite his manifest disdain for Mike Hammer, an ugly American if ever there were one, Christopher Bush and his wife Florence in the spring of 1957 had traveled to New York aboard the RMS Queen Elizabeth, and references by him to both the United States and Canada became more frequent in the books which followed this trip.

      Certainly The Case of the Treble Twist (1957) features tough customers and an exceptionally cruel murder, yet it is also one of Bush’s most ingeniously contrived cases from the Fifties, full of charm, treacherous deception and, yes, plenty of twists, including one that is a real sockaroo (to borrow, as Bush occasionally did, from American idiom). Similarly clever is The Case of the Running Man (1958), which draws, as several earlier Bush books had, on the author’s profound love and knowledge of antiques.  By this time Bush and his wife, their coffers having burgeoned from the proceeds of his successful mysteries, resided in the quaint medieval market town of Lavenham, Suffolk at the Great House, a splendidly decorated fourteenth-century structure with an elegant Georgian-era façade which he and Florence purchased in 1953 and resided in until their deaths. The dashing author, whom in 1967 Chicago Tribune mystery reviewer Alice Crombie swooningly dubbed one of the handsomest mystery writers on either side of the Channel or Atlantic, also drove a Jaguar, beloved by James Bond films of late, well into his eighties. 

      The Case of the Running Man includes that Golden Age detective fiction staple, a family tree, but more originally the novel features as a major character a black American man, Sam, the devoted chauffeur of the wealthy murder victim. Sam, who reminds Ludovic Travers of Rochester, Jack Benny’s factotum of television and radio, is an interesting and sincerely treated individual, although as Anthony Boucher amusingly pronounced at the time in the New York Times Book Review, he speaks a dialect never heard by mortal ear—an odd compounding of American Negro and London cockney.

      The Case of the Careless Thief (1959) takes Ludo to Sandbeach, the Blackpool of the South Coast, as the American jacket blurb puts it, with a dozen hotels, a race track, a dog track, a music hall and two enormous dance halls. Anthony Boucher deemed this hard-hitting, tricky tale, which draws to strong effect on contemporary events in England, one of Ludovic Travers’ best cases. Likewise hard-hitting are The Case of the Sapphire Brooch (1960) and The Case of the Extra Grave (1961), complex tales of murderous mésalliances with memorably grim conclusions. The plot of The Case of the Dead Man Gone (1961) topically involves refugee relief groups, while The Case of the Heavenly Twin (1963) opens with a case of a creative criminal couple forging American Express Travelers Checks, concerning which Americans of a certain age will recall actor Karl Malden sternly enjoining, in a long-running television advertising campaign: Don’t leave home without them. In contrast with many of his crime writing contemporaries (judging from the tone of their work), Bush actually learned to watch and enjoy television, although in The Case of The Three-Ring Puzzle, a tale of violently escalating intrigue, Travers dryly references Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s famous observation that England’s population consisted of mostly fools when he comments: I guess he wasn’t too far out at that. But rather remarkable an estimate perhaps, considering that in his day there were no television commercials. 

      Of Bush’s final five Ludovic Travers detective novels, published between 1964 and 1968, when the Western World, in the eyes of many, was going from whimsically mod to utterly mad, the best are, in my estimation, the cases of The Jumbo Sandwich (1965), The Good Employer (1966) and The Prodigal Daughter (1968). In Sandwich a crisp case of a defrauded (and jilted) gentry lady friend of Ludo’s metamorphoses into a smorgasbord of, as the American book jacket puts it, blackmail, black magic, a black sheep, and murder. It all culminates in a confrontation on a lonely Riviera beach in France, setting of some of Ludovic Travers’ earliest cases, between Ludo and a desperate killer, in which Bernice plays an unexpectedly active part. Ludo again travels to France in the highly classic Employer, which draws most engagingly on the sleuth’s (and the author’s) dabbling in the world of art and is dedicated to his distinguished Lavenham artist friends, the couple Reginald and Rosalie Brill, who resided next door to Bush and his wife at the fourteenth-century Little Hall, then an art student hostel for which the Brills served as guardians. In The Guardian Francis Iles (aka Golden Age crime writer Anthony Berkeley) pronounced that Employer represented Bush at his most ingenious.

      Finally, in Daughter Travers finds himself tasked with recovering the absconded teenage offspring of domineering Dora Marport, sober-sided head of the organization Home and Family, which is righteously devoted to the fostering, so to speak, of family life as the stoutest bulwark against the encroachment of ever-more numerous hostile forces: sex and violence in literature, films and on television; pornography generally, and the erosion of responsibility and the capability for sacrifice by the welfare state. Can Travers, a Great War veteran who made his debut in detective fiction in 1926, bridge the generation gap in late-Sixties London? Ludo may prefer Bach to the Beatles, but in this, the last of his recorded cases, he proves more with it than one might have expected. All in all, Daughter makes a rewarding finish to one of the longest-running and most noteworthy sleuth series in British detective fiction.

      Curtis Evans

      1

      EVA STRAND

      It was four years ago, in 1959, that we at the Broad Street Detective Agency became involved in the tragic affair of Eva Strand. She didn’t call by appointment. Bertha Munney, our secretary-receptionist, rang through at about half-past eleven one June morning to say that a Mrs. Eva Strand would like to see me personally, and professionally. She added that the matter about which Mrs. Strand wanted to see me was reasonably urgent. That last phrase is a kind of code we use. Since Bertha is speaking in the presence of a prospective client, there has to be some kind of private arrangement to give me in my room an idea of both business and client. What Bertha had told me over the inter-com. was that I ought to see Mrs. Strand and that the said Mrs. Strand was perturbed but not unduly so.

      So Bertha showed the lady into my room. A lady, by the generally accepted meaning, she definitely was. She was in the late forties, tallish, very spare and perfectly assured. Flecks of greying hair showed at the edges of the beehive hat. In her younger days she must have been someone at whom one turned to look: now there was still a distinction, though the face was pale and the dark eyes a bit sunken.

      Mrs. Strand? I said, and smiled as I took over from Bertha.

      Yes, she said. And you’re Mr. Travers?

      Yes, Mrs. Strand. But won’t you sit down?

      But she didn’t take at once the chair I moved for her. The Mr. Travers who knows my husband?

      Her name wasn’t all that common and I didn’t have to think very long. Martin Strand was a member of my club and I had served with him recently on a committee. We weren’t in any way friends: just the usual club acquaintances who nod and smile at each other across a dining table or wave a quiet hand in the reading room. I did have quite a respect for him. He was in fact the kind of man whom one regrets not to have known much earlier and much better.

      I got Eva Strand seated, and almost at once I began to notice the small signs of perturbation that Bertha had spotted. The gloved hands were fidgeting with the handbag and she was giving quick, almost furtive looks around the room.

      A cigarette, Mrs. Strand? I gave my best smile as I offered her the box.

      Thank you, no, she said. I was smoking far too much and had to give it up.

      Very brave of you. I generally smoke a pipe. If I remember rightly, your husband smokes a pipe too.

      Yes, she said. But about Martin, Mr. Travers. He’s on no account to know that I’ve been here to see you.

      Nobody will know, I assured her. If you’re here on your own confidential business, no one will ever know that you’ve been here.

      You definitely promise that?

      I give you my personal word. If you’re here to ask us to make, say, confidential enquiries, even the one who makes those enquiries will be as far as possible ignorant of the identity—even the sex—of the person for whom he’s working.

      I produced my best smile again. Does that reassure you?

      Thank you.

      She said it quietly. There was even a little smile, and the restless fingers were all at once still.

      There are two things I ought to add, I went on. We never on any account handle domestic problems—divorce and that kind of thing. I take it yours is not that sort of problem?

      Oh, no. Nothing like that. All I want you to do is find someone for me.

      Then we’ll certainly try to do just that, I told her. But there is one other thing. I may not be able to undertake the enquiry personally, but whoever does handle it will be someone to be implicitly trusted. I tell you that because it may help him and the enquiry if he knows your name. But we’ll come to that later. Suppose you tell me just what we have to do.

      I tell it to you in a somewhat roundabout way. I didn’t know Martin Strand’s financial position but I was pretty sure he was a reasonably wealthy man. He was chairman of Strandway Foods Limited, a large concern with branches in various parts of the world. When I later checked in the Financial Times I saw that the five-shilling shares of the company stood at just over eleven shillings.

      Eva Strand’s information about herself was given in what I can only call a very grudging way. During the war she was for a time in Norwich and there she met some people called Rawson who were extremely kind to her. In 1943, while she was there, a daughter, Ruth, was born to the Rawsons. Soon afterwards Eva left Norwich and in 1945 she married Martin Strand. His father was then chairman of the company and Martin, a junior director, spent his honeymoon in Vancouver where there was business to do with one of the company’s branches.

      When the young married couple returned to England in the early summer of 1946, Eva Strand tried to get into touch with the Rawsons but without success. She was of the opinion that they had left Norwich. A year or two later, when her husband was on a flying visit to Bombay, she had visited Norwich herself. She didn’t tell me what actual enquiries she had made but she assured me that the Rawsons were then no longer in the city, nor had they left any clear traces she could follow.

      We have to start somewhere, I said, so what was the Rawsons’ address when you knew them?

      She gave that quick, nervous clutching of the bag again. I don’t really know. I forget. I remember it was in that wide road as you come in from London.

      The Newmarket Road? Large Victorian houses well spaced? A lot of trees?

      Yes. That’s the road. About half-way along. I’m almost sure. A Georgian kind of house with a slate roof. On the right-hand side when you’re coming from the city. I forget the actual name. If it had one. I could always walk straight to it when I went there.

      And did you find it when you last went to Norwich again?

      No. Everything seemed to have changed. Everything changes so, you know.

      That’s only too true, I told her consolingly. But the Rawsons themselves. What were their names?

      Will—maybe William but she always called him Will. She was Janice.

      And what was Will Rawson’s business of profession?

      I really don’t know—not for certain. I believe he had something to do with farming.

      I gave a quick, incredulous smile. I think I flashed it off my face before she really noticed it.

      How old a man was he?

      In the thirties: the early thirties.

      Then his farming interests might mean that he was a representative for a fertiliser or machinery company?

      Yes, she said, and a bit too quickly. I seem to remember it was something like that.

      I asked some other questions: some direct and others from concealed angles, but little else emerged that seemed worth while. And there you may assume that the interview was at an end except for a few oddments. Let me give them categorically so that you can see what you can make of them.

      a. The Strands had an apartment at Knowland House, Lancaster Gate, but I was not to report to her there by letter. I was to ring her only between eleven and twelve in the morning.

      b. When I mentioned our terms, she agreed at once. She waved aside the retainer of fifty pounds and insisted on handing

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