The Poisoned Penman by Dan Andriacco

Author:Dan Andriacco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sherlock Holmes, mystery, crime, british crime, sherlock holmes novels, sherlock holmes fiction, sherlock holmes pastiche, sherlock holmes traditional fiction
ISBN: 9781780926346
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2014
Published: 2014-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen: The 43

A gay nightlife has the effect on looks and complexion of a long spell of sickness.

— Jean Paul Richter, Hesperus

Forrester seemed almost as angry with Standish as with Pike, Hale thought. Or did he just want Hale to think that? As a former member of Arthur’s, he would know Pike’s routine with the tea. He might also know which waiter he could hire to poison it. Sir James Forrester stayed on the suspect list.

And so did Harrison Scott. The difficulty in finding out anything about him was highly suspect. How could a man be a member of a social club like Arthur’s and never get his name in a newspaper?

Hale needed to talk to someone who knew things that didn’t appear in newspapers—someone like Langdale Pike, in fact. Since that wasn’t an option, where else could Hale go? He immediately thought of Patrick Balfour, who signed his column in The Sketch as “Mr. Gossip.”

In a few hours, Hale knew, Balfour would be collecting gossip at the after-hours nightclub called The 43. Hale could catch up to him there. The famous, or infamous, unlicensed club was owned by an Irish woman named Mrs. Meyrick. Hale had heard somewhere that she had six children and was divorced from a doctor who ran an asylum in Brighton for shellshock victims from the Great War. She encouraged gossip columnists to visit her establishment as a way of promoting the business. Balfour, among others, wrote about all the up-and-comers, politicians, actors, and so forth who frequented The 43.

The 43 didn’t even open until midnight. To kill time until then, Hale at first thought of writing Sadie a letter. Instead, he stopped by J&E Bumpus, Booksellers, on Oxford Street. It took him about twenty minutes of searching the store to find what he was looking for. It was a slim brown volume in limp leather called Op. I. —Dorothy L. Sayers’s first book of poetry. Hale wasn’t sure whether calling it “first work” in Latin was condemnably presumptuous or admirably ambitious. Since there had been a second work, he leaned toward the latter interpretation.

Hale had never bought a book of poetry until now, but he found himself intensely curious as to what sort of poems Dorothy would write. Back at his flat, he paged through the book, looking for something to catch his non-poetical eye. He counted fourteen poems, some of them rather long, with themes drawing on mythology, Arthurian legend, Sacred Scripture, and the writer’s own experiences of love and college days at Oxford. They actually had rhythm and rhyme. Eliot probably would have been appalled at this conventionality, but Hale liked his poetry to be, well, poetic.

The first poem, after the dedication and even before the table of contents, seemed a rather bold announcement of the author’s intentions:

I WILL build up my house from the stark foundations,

If God will give me time enough,

And search unwearying over the seas and nations

For stones or better stuff.

Though here be only the mortar and rough-hewn granite,

I

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