Beware of the Trains by Edmund Crispin

Author:Edmund Crispin
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1953-10-17T05:00:00+00:00

The Quick Brown Fox

The port had been round several times, and Wakefield’s temperamental dogmatism was by now somewhat inflamed by it.

“Just the same,” he said, irrupting on a discussion whose origin and purpose no one could clearly remember, “detective stories are anti-social, and no amount of sophistries can disguise the fact. It’s quite impossible to suppose that criminals don’t collect useful information from them, fantastic and farfetched though they usually are. No one, I think”—here he glared belligerently at his fellow-guests—“will attempt to contest that. And furthermore——”

“I contest it,” said Gervase Fen; and Wakefield groaned dismally. “For all the use criminals make of them, the members of the Detection Club might as well be a chorus of voices crying in the wilderness. Look at the papers and observe what, in spite of detective fiction, criminals actually do. They buy arsenic at the chemist’s, signing their own names in the Poisons Book, and then put stupendous quantities of it in their victims’ tea. They leave their fingerprints on every possible object in the corpse’s vicinity. They invariably forget that burnt paper, if it isn’t reduced to dust, can be reconstituted and read. They spend, with reckless abandon, stolen bank-notes whose serial numbers they must know are in the possession of the police.…

“No, on the whole I don’t think criminals get much help from detective stories. And if by any chance they are addicts, that fact by itself is almost certain to scupper them, since their training in imaginary crime—which as a rule is extremely complicated—tends to make them over-elaborate in the contriving of their own actual misdeeds; and that, of course, means that they’re easy game.… For instance, there was the Munsey case.”

“It has always been my opinion,” said Wakefield to the ceiling, “that after-dinner conversation should be general rather than anecdotal. Moreover——”

“I’d known all the family slightly,” Fen went on, unperturbed, “over quite a long period of years; but I suppose that it was George Munsey, the head of the house, whom I knew best. Chance threw us together in Milan in 1928, when I was lecturing at the University there and he was engaged in some prolonged financial transaction to do with motor-cars. And although his household, which I met later, proved to be a pleasant one, I never got to know any of its members well enough to be able to regard them as individuals—as other, I mean, than the natural appendages of George. George himself was a little, round, chuckling man who’d made money on the Stock Exchange; but I’ve always felt that he must have made it more or less accidentally, because he had none of that appalling narrowness which you normally get in people who are engaged in breeding money from money. On the contrary, in fact: George was a man with hobbies—collecting ghost stories; running a toy theatre which he made and wrote the plays for, himself; bird-watching; illuminated manuscripts; and heaven knows what not else—and that fact made him livelier and more intelligent

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