By the end of the 1950s, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Golden Age of classic British mystery fiction was completely done. The breezy puzzles of Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh had been overtaken by hardboiled detectives, psychological thrillers, mean streets, twisted characters, and plots that examined the underbelly of human behavior.
Ah, but then there was Patricia Moyes. I’m exceedingly fond of dark and twisty, but sometimes you just want to sit back with a book that’s engaging, ingeniously plotted, and populated by memorable characters. In nineteen novels from 1959 to 1993, Moyes gave you exactly that.
Mind you, she also had an edge, the ability to stick in a stiletto so casually that you might miss it till you noticed you were bleeding. In Murder a la Mode (1963), a fashion editor is described in passing as “lovely and blonde and a semi-illiterate product of the best English private schooling.” In Black Widower (1975), the wife of a Caribbean ambassador’s counselor utters an appalling statement and then, “having packed the maximum possible snobbery, bigotry and lack of tact into one short sentence, she ran out of the room.” Earlier in that book, pickets have little effect on a Washington, D.C. reception: “Most of the guests were perfectly accustomed to making their way into the White House through ranks of political demonstrators, and would have felt the occasion to be slightly lacking in style if none had been there.” In Death and the Dutch Uncle (1968), our detective asks an indignant question about a foreign government’s actions and is smiled at indulgently: “That is a silly question, to which you can only expect a silly answer….Really, Superintendent, you look like a small child who has just been told a tale by the Brothers Grimm. You’ve lived in England far too long.” Moyes had a keen eye for social ridiculousness, class inequality, and political naïveté, and wasn’t afraid to show it.
Her heroes are a strong part of her appeal. Her novels feature one of the most delightful crime-fighting duos in mystery fiction in C.I.D. Chief Superintendent Henry Tibbett and his wife, Emmy. The two have been married for a long time, and have the easy give-and-take—and occasional storms—of two people who know each other very well, collaborate naturally, yet aren’t afraid to put their foot down if one or the other is speaking drivel.
Exasperatingly to them, they never seem to be able to have a decent vacation. They may be skiing or sailing or off to the Caribbean, and then something happens, and Henry—and, by extension, Emmy—gets sucked in. “Can’t we have a single holiday in peace?” Emmy protests in Down Among the Dead Men (1961). “I’m only going to meet people and talk to them a bit,” Henry replies mildly. Yeah, right. Later on in that book, he groans, “Oh, God, why do these things always have to happen to me? I don’t want trouble.” “You never do,” says Emmy, “but you always seem to walk into it. Can’t you see, darling, that you go out of your way to look for it?” “I don’t,” he replies. “I’m a quiet-living man.” Emmy smiles. “I seem to have heard that somewhere before.”
Henry Tibbett begins the series in Dead Men Don’t Ski (1959) as a Chief Inspector, but gets promoted as time goes on. He is not a prepossessing figure. A Chief Constable in Murder Fantastical (1967) describes his first meeting with him this way:
“Sir John looked forward to the meeting with the same sort of curiosity that he would have felt at the prospect of encountering a movie star or a political personality; and, when the meeting actually took place, he could not help feeling just a little disappointed. Surely a celebrated criminal-hunter should be a – well – more of a character. This undistinguished, sandy-haired, middle-aged man – pleasant enough, certainly, and those dark blue eyes didn’t miss much – but this was not Sir John’s idea of the Yard’s top man.”
That may not have been an accident. “Henry had always denied strenuously that he cultivated this harmless air as a pose,” notes Death and the Dutch Uncle, “but to himself he admitted that it had been useful on more than one occasion. For a man in Henry Tibbett’s position, it could be an advantage not to be taken too seriously by the opposition.”
Tibbett’s greatest talent lies in what he thinks of as his “nose”:
“By it, he meant that strange mixture of intuition and deduction which had led him to the solution of many difficult cases. Although he always maintained that he was the most unimaginative of men, Henry undoubtedly possessed a flair. Tiny inconsistencies of fact and, more important, of character, mounted up as an investigation proceeded until, taken together, they roused this constantly strengthening certainty of the direction in which truth lay hidden.” (Down Among the Dead Men)
Henry’s always a little embarrassed when the expression is brought up, though, claiming it’s a complete illusion, “and that the cases he had solved had been by logic, luck, or the intervention of his wife” (Twice in a Blue Moon, 1993), but when you watch him in action, you can see that it’s true nonetheless.
He’s not wrong about the part his wife plays, however. Emmy, short for Emmeline, is fortyish; plump; with short, dark, curly hair, a strong, merry face, and “fine, honey-colored skin [with] the clean-scrubbed, peach-bloom look that Henry had loved for years” (Death and the Dutch Uncle). Emmy is the perfect sounding-board for Henry, her observations often leading him in useful directions, and she knows him like the back of her hand. In A Six-Letter Word for Death (1983), Henry declares a death has no suggestion of foul play, then pauses and says, “But – .“ Emmy says, “I knew there was a ‘but.’” “How did you know?” “Just watching you, darling. I can always tell.”
But Emmy is much more than a sounding-board. When she has an idea, she acts upon it, sometimes with Henry’s knowledge, sometimes not. Her demeanor is one that makes people want to open up to her, and her eye for nuance and detail is exacting. Here she is at a fancy party in Geneva in Murder on the Agenda (1962):
“It was, she reflected, exactly like an episode from a film: an early Orson Welles or a middle-period Fellini, where in a setting of great opulence, the camera moves leisurely, but with deadly observation, picking up a gesture here, a snatch of conversation there, a smile, a moment of anger. Pleased with this conceit, Emmy set her own eye to roving at random, like a searchlight beam. It was rewarding.”
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It is her ability to detect discrepancies in such things as a hired car, a hotel register, a broken conch shell, a dead cat, and a missing knitting needle that provides critical clues in many of the books, and more than once, her sleuthing puts herself in extremely dangerous situations: knocked unconscious or chloroformed, tied hand and foot, with death imminent – and at one point she is even offered as bait, like a tethered goat. Her only remark: “I hope I was a successful goat” (Night Ferry to Death, 1985).
You disregard Emmy at your peril. As she reminds Henry at one point, “You’re not the only person in the family with a nose.” Such equality was not common in the 1960s and 1970s. As Moyes commented pointedly in a piece she wrote in 1979 called “The Lot of the Policeman’s Wife”:
“Think of a famous detective’s wife, and who springs to mind? Lady Peter Wimsey (nee Harriet Vane); Amanda Campion…Agatha Troy Alleyn…All, you notice, creations of women writers.
“Detectives favored by male writers tend to be misogynists or lone wolves. If married, their wives are cozy and domesticated, keeping their noses out of their husbands’ business….It has been predominantly women writers who have endowed their detectives’ wives with real depth.”
***
Moyes herself was a woman of depth. She was born in Dublin in 1923, and when World War II came, she added a year to her age so she could join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, where she became a radar operator and flight officer. While there, she wrote revue sketches for barracks concerts, and one night, the Air Ministry sent a signal asking for names of people with film script-writing experience and knowledge of radar. She had the latter, of course, but certainly none of the former, so it was with some surprise that she learned that her commanding officer had submitted her name.
“Sir, you’re crazy,” she said—but she got the job. An up-and-coming actor and director named Peter Ustinov, who would later go on to considerable fame in movies, TV, and the stage, winning Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes, and a Grammy, was making a movie about the search for and discovery of radar, and needed a technical assistant. She was it. The School for Secrets came out in 1946, and there in the credits is “Flight Officer P. Pakenham-Walsh” (her birth name).
She and Ustinov became friends, and she spent the next eight years as his personal assistant. In his autobiography, Ustinov wrote, “I like to think that she discovered her ability while heroically dealing with the many problems of my own creation.”
She went on from there to be an assistant editor and columnist for British Vogue; to translate a Jean Anouilh play from the French which became a great hit both in the West End and on Broadway; and to write the screenplay for one of my all-time favorite British comedies, School for Scoundrels (see the Bonus section below for more details about the play and the movie).
It was at about that time that she went through two important life changes. An avid skier, she was holed up at home from a skiing accident in France when she decided on a whim to try a novel—the result was Dead Men Don’t Ski, which introduced the Tibbetts. She also got divorced. Her first husband was photographer John Moyes, and her second, a few years later, was James Haszard, a lawyer and interpreter at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which caused her to move to the Netherlands. The two of them traveled widely throughout Europe and the Caribbean and then, in the early 1970s, Haszard was offered a post in Washington, D.C., by the International Monetary Fund. Their acceptance was conditional upon the Fund transporting not only them, but their boat, wine cellar, and cats to the United States.
Moyes drew upon all these life experiences for her books. She made Emmy Tibbett a WAAF veteran, and Emmy’s radar expertise provides the key to two murders decades apart in Johnny Under Ground (1965). Moyes’ years at Vogue were put to brilliant (and often hilarious) use in Murder a la Mode; her time with Ustinov provided the technical knowledge for the movie sets in Falling Star (1964); and Haszard’s jobs supplied the background for Murder on the Agenda and Black Widower. Sailing played a prominent part in several books, most notably Down Among the Dead Men; Holland was key to Death and the Dutch Uncle and Night Ferry to Death and provided a vital plot element in Many Deadly Returns; and the fictional Caribbean islands of Tampica, St. Mark’s, and St. Matthews were the extremely vivid settings for The Coconut Killings (1977), Angel Death (1980), Black Girl, White Girl (1989), and parts of Black Widower.
As to where she got all the wonderful characters who inhabited her books, though, I have to credit them just to her wonderful imagination and powers of observation. There are so many examples that could be quoted, but I’ll give just two short excerpts and one long one (that one could be longer still, but, well, you’ve just got to stop somewhere):
“Just inside the door was an antique walnut table, at which sat an impossibly blonde girl, painting her fingernails silver. She got up when Henry came in, and swayed languorously towards him.
“’Cain Ay help yew?’ she inquired, in an accent so affected as to be almost incomprehensible. She looked at Henry’s elderly raincoat as a keen gardener might look at a slug.
“’I’d like to see Mr. Knight, please,” said Henry and gave the girl his card.
“’Just tayk a seat,’ said the blonde. ‘Ay’ll see if he’s free.’”
(Murder a la Mode)
“Conversation for anybody else in the bar became difficult, if not impossible, as Tom hailed Harry to ask what he and Bert were drinking – ‘No, no, old man, my turn’ – and George shouted over to Herbert to ask how he’d made out last night with the smashing little blonde from the cellar bar. Thick wallets showered ten-pound notes across the counter, and balancing feats were performed with various degrees of success as purchasers made their unsteady way to their tables with cargoes of glasses in which the gin, whiskey, and brandy sloshed dangerously as the ship’s engines revved up. At a few tables, the talk was low-pitched and earnest, punctuated by sudden bursts of laughter. Henry conjectured that these men were either making business deals or telling dirty stories. Perhaps, he thought, it comes to much the same thing.” (Night Ferry to Death)
[The set-up for the third: Henry Tibbett is investigating the shooting death of a man named Mason in the drive leading to Cregwell Grange. It is his introduction to a family of wild eccentrics called the Manciples, all of whom you really must meet for yourself, but the crowning glory of the lot is the retired Bishop of Bugolaland, who maintains Mason was as mad as a hatter. The first time he met Mason, “All I did was ring his front doorbell and ask him perfectly civilly for the loan of half a pound of margarine, and he shouted some gibberish at me and slammed the door in my face!”
It turns out that the Bishop was carrying a floral Japanese sunshade (he’s always been liable to sunstroke) and a clarinet (“My great hobby. Violet does not like me to practice in the house”) and a string bag (“to carry the margarine”) and wearing an old-fashioned bathing costume (“a dip before lunch”) and Wellington boots (“You have to cross some marshy land to get to the river”).]
“’An old-fashioned bathing costume,’ said Henry, ‘and Wellington boots. You were carrying a flowered Japanese sunshade, a clarinet, and a string bag. You rang Mason’s doorbell. He had no idea who you were….’
“’ But I announced my identity at once. As soon as he opened the door, I said, “I am the Bishop of Bugolaland, and I want half a pound of margarine…”
“’And what,’ Henry asked faintly, ‘did he say?’
“’That’s the whole point, my dear fellow. He looked at me in a distinctly unbalanced way for a moment and then he made a most extraordinary remark. I shall never forget it. “And I’m a poached egg,” he said, “and I want a piece of toast.” And with that he slammed the door and I heard the key turning in the lock. Well, now, I happen to know,’ went on the Bishop triumphantly, ‘that it is a recognized delusion of the mentally deranged to fancy themselves to be poached eggs. A curious fact, but true.’”
(Murder Fantastical)
It does not stop there, only gets even funnier, but I don’t want to spoil it, so go find a copy of the book. Moyes loved the Manciples so much she brought them back two more times as supporting characters, just so she could tell more stories about them, such as the time Violet finally learned to drive at the age of 55 and promptly drove “straight through the side door of the local grocery store, saying, “But I always come in this way” (Twice in a Blue Moon).
Patricia Moyes died in 2000 at her home in Virgin Gorda, in the British Virgin Islands, to which she and James had moved following his retirement. She won an Edgar nomination for Many Deadly Returns, and in 1999, the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement.
“In the top echelon of mystery writers,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, “no name is more admirable than that of Patricia Moyes.
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The Essential Moyes
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With any prolific author, readers are likely to have their own particular favorites, which may not be the same as anyone else’s. Your list is likely to be just as good as mine – but here are the ones I recommend.
Down Among the Dead Men (British title: The Sunken Sailor) (1961)
“It is often interesting, in retrospect, to consider the trifling causes that lead to great events. A chance encounter, a thoughtless remark – and the torturous chain reaction of coincidence is set in motion, leading with devious inevitability to some resounding climax.
“For instance, it is virtually certain that if Emmy Tibbett had not broken her shoulder strap in a small, smoky restaurant just off King’s Road, Chelsea, one spring evening, the Berrybridge murderer would have got clean away.”
That’s how this book opens. Not that anyone thought it was murder for quite some time. A well-liked man named Pete Rawnsley apparently ran aground in his boat in the fog, stepped out to check things over, the boom snapped around, knocked him unconscious, and he drowned when the tide came in. Or at least that’s the story the Tibbetts hear a few months later when they go to Berrybridge Haven for a sailing holiday with friends. It isn’t long before Henry says, “It seems to me that there are some very odd things in the story you’ve just told us.”
“’Odd,’ said Alistair. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Henry, don’t try to make a mystery out of poor old Pete’s death. It’s perfectly clear what happened.’
“’I don’t think it is,’ said Henry, with a sort of sad stubbornness.”
He is right, of course. The more he pokes around, the more it seems that there are an awful lot of people with an awful lot of reasons to lie. Which they do. Copiously. And then there’s another death, and another. Henry can’t help feeling that it is his poking around that is causing the mayhem, and there he is right again. By the book’s end, both he and Emmy are inches away from being down among the dead men themselves.
Besides being an excellent mystery, there is a good deal of evocative writing in this book, particularly when it comes to the small town and its inhabitants and all the “delights, hazards, and small misfortunes” of the sailing life that Moyes loved so much—even though sometimes that life could mask something ugly:
“It was a lovely day. The tide was full, and the river was a sheet of frosted blue glass, ruffled by tiny wavelets. Once again, Henry experienced a sense of wonder at the subtle intensity of color. But what had seemed to Henry a week ago to be the essence of calm, uncomplicated beauty, now created an atmosphere at once unspeakably sinister and sad, like the painted face of a corpse in an American mortuary parlor. He was briefly surprised at himself for conceiving such an analogy: he had never been to America, let alone into a mortician’s den. Perhaps they weren’t like that at all, in spite of all one read.”
Murder a la Mode (1963)
“There are few objects more compelling to the attention than a dead body in the center of a small room.”
It is a night of complete chaos at the offices of Style magazine in London. The last Paris shows have just ended, the photographs are still wet, and they have mere hours to put out one of their most important issues of the year amidst an “overnight shambles.” It certainly doesn’t help that, as the editor admits to Henry Tibbett, “the world of fashion, for some reason, always seems to attract people of emotional temperament.”
Which is putting it mildly. Henry is there because the morning after the chaos, an assistant editor has been found dead in her office. “We’re in trouble here, and no mistake,” the sergeant on duty tells Henry when he arrives. “How do you mean?” “Women,” says the sergeant pessimistically. “Hysterics. Models and the like.”
For some reason, everybody is trying to convince Henry that the poor assistant editor cracked under personal pressures and committed suicide, but the more he pursues it, the more he is convinced that “some sort of disorganized conspiracy was at work to conceal some inconvenient fact from his knowledge.” Be careful, an insider warns him, “they are adept at making people believe what they want them to believe. You’re not dealing with amateurs, Inspector. You’re dealing with professionals.”
Further complicating the matter, Tibbet’s own niece, Veronica, a rising star in the modeling world, is smack in the middle of it all, and eager to pursue her own surreptitious sleuthing. “I won’t have you playing at being a detective,” Emmy tells her firmly. “Murder isn’t glamorous, you know. It’s a nasty, sordid, dangerous business.”
As Veronica is about to found out for herself all too soon.
This is a splendid book, filled with the kind of over-the-top characters and intimate details that only someone who’s spent considerable time in that milieu could portray. As Henry continues his investigation, we learn a great deal not only about fashion magazines, but fashion itself and all the designers, manufacturers, models, and entrepreneurs who work there.
Here is Henry, for instance, entering the very elegant waiting room of a haute couture designer and then being led up a twisting staircase to the atelier:
“He noticed an abrupt change of décor once across the borderline between the public façade and the working quarters. The staircase was shabby, its dingy white paint peeling, and worn brown linoleum had replaced the plushy white carpet of the salon….
“Once inside, Henry’s first instinct was to bolt straight out again. He found himself in a huge, fantastically untidy room, full of people. Bales of fabrics, bobbins of thread, pins, discarded scraps of material, tape measures, fashion sketches, feathers, lengths of veiling, artificial flowers, dressmakers’ dummies, and ropes of beads were just some of the things that contributed to the heady confusion. From the far end of the room came a perpetual whirring of sewing machines, as half a dozen pale girls in brown overalls pedaled and wheeled and guided the precious cloth under the needles with deft hands….
“Nicholas Knight was engaged in draping a swathe of green satin round the slim hips of a model – a brunette with a head like Nefertiti, who stood like a resigned statue, regarding her purple fingernails with more interest than pleasure. She was naked from the waist up, except for a scrap of white bra.
“’Do come in,’ said Knight indistinctly, through a mouthful of pins.
“’Perhaps I’d better…’ began Henry, nervously preparing to retreat.
“’Shan’t be a moment. Get Mr. Tibbett a chair, somebody.’”
Who is Simon Warwick? (1978)
The search for a long-lost missing heir, and the claimants who pop up out of the woodwork, is a subject much loved by mystery writers, Josephine Tey and Julian Symons among them. But no one ever handled it the way Moyes did.
Lord Charlton, with only months to live, has had an attack of conscience. Nearly 35 years before, his brother and daughter-in-law were killed in an air attack during the war, leaving a baby, whom Charlton wanted nothing to do with: “I was the only person the little fellow had in the world – and I refused him.” The baby was adopted by an American army officer and his English bride, and they moved to the States. Now, Charlton is changing his will to give it all to the boy, now man, Simon Warwick.
Advertisements are placed, and a week after Charlton’s death, Simon Warwick steps forward, and then another Simon Warwick, both with plausible stories and documentation, and soon one of them is murdered. Was the murderer the other “Simon Warwick?” Was it one of the many people not overjoyed to see any Simon Warwick? Was the victim killed because he actually was Warwick, or because the killer thought he was Warwick?
Tibbett has his own conclusions. “Well, I’ll be damned,” says Charlton’s lawyer. “This’ll stir up a hornet’s nest.” But it stirs up considerably more than that. Tibbett nails the killer, but that isn’t the interesting question, the one that will obsess not only Tibbett but the reader. That question is embodied in the title. Who is Simon Warwick, really?
I promise you, you’ll never guess.
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Show Biz Bonus
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The Jean Anouilh play Moyes translated was Leocadia, presented as Time Remembered in the West End of London in 1955, with an extraordinary cast featuring Paul Scofield, Margaret Rutherford, and Mary Ure. The 1957 Broadway production was no less starry—Richard Burton, Helen Hayes, and Susan Strasberg—and it received several Tony nominations, winning two. It was the success of the play that enabled Moyes to leave Vogue and strike out on her own.
The script for the movie School for Scoundrels was based on the work of Stephen Potter, who wrote a memorable series of satirical books about how to secure an unfair advantage through psychological tricks. He called them “ploys,” an old term which subsequently entered the wider English lexicon, along with “gamesmanship” and “one-upmanship,” from the titles of two of his books.
The movie, released in 1960, starred the incomparable trio of Terry-Thomas, Alastair Sim, and Ian Carmichael, three of the most brilliant comic actors to grace British films. Not only should you seek out School for Scoundrels (the original, not the 2006 remake), you should hunt up any of the films these people made. You won’t be sorry.
As for Peter Ustinov, as I indicated above, he went on to extraordinary success as an actor, director, playwright, and essayist. He also wrote novels. I have the hardcover of one of them on my shelf, published in 1971. Called Krumnagel, it is about an American police chief who inadvertently shoots a man in England and goes on trial, and Publishers Weekly called it “a devastatingly funny satire on contrasting American and British ways of life, death, and legality.” That it is, and unless I’m very mistaken, that’s my jacket copy on the flaps. That’s how I made my living in those days.
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Book Bonus
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I am pleased to say that the entire Tibbett series is in the process of being re-released in handsome uniform editions by Felony & Mayhem Press. You can read them all!
Moyes also wrote a mystery for children, Helter-Skelter; a collection of short stories, Who Killed Father Christmas? And Other Unseasonable Demises; and being very much a cat person, two books about cats. If that’s your cup of tea, you can bet they’re charming.
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Meta Bonus
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“’It’s bad enough the woman being murdered, actually in the presence of one of my senior officers. Now you want me to tell everybody that she died of natural causes, with all the symptoms of acute poisoning, and in a house fairly stuffed with toxic insecticide. It’s just not possible.’ The A.C. looked up from his coffee, full into Henry’s eyes. ‘What killed that woman, Tibbett?’
“Henry shrugged. ‘An oriental poison unknown to science,’ he said. ‘As in all the best detective stories.’
“’Are you trying to be funny?’”
(Many Deadly Returns)
“’This whole thing will have to be handled with extraordinary tact….Surely you see that?’
“’Certainly I do. And for that reason, I suggest, Sam, that you make a personal request for an individual, by name. I ate my dinners in Gray’s Inn, in the company of one Michael Barker, who is an eminent Queen’s Counsel specializing in police prosecutions. It was through him that I made the acquaintance of a C.I.D. Inspector who is altogether out of the usual run. A very…’ he hesitated, ‘a very superior person.’
“’Oh, God,’ said Michael. ‘Spare us Lord Peter Wimsey.’”
(Black Widower)
[The Guess Who club is comprised of five successful crime fiction writers, all of whom write under pen names. Tibbett will be invited to speak to them at the next meeting. We encounter them at dinner.]
“Each of the five members of the Guess Who club had a different reason for using a nom de plume and keeping his or her true identity strictly under wraps. For instance, admirers of Tex Lawrie, that tough and casually amorous private eye of fiction, would undoubtedly have been disillusioned to know that his creator, Jack Harvey…was actually Mrs. Myrtle Waterford…
“Quite different was the perspective of Harold Vandike, a brilliant lawyer, athlete, Oxford don, writer of literary criticism, and compiler of the most erudite crosswords for a Sunday newspaper….In Harold’s case, it was the writing of sentimental Gothic mysteries about heroines in chiffon nighties, gaunt houses looming out of the mist, and enigmatic lovers with haunted faces and strong, sensitive hands. This he did, with great success, under the name of Elaine Summerfield….
“The case of Dr. William Cartwright and Professor Fred Coe [a respected physician and lefty economist, respectively] was something else again….Only a handful of people, apart from their wives, knew that Bill and Fred were jointly Freda Wright, whose lovable, myopic, silver-haired Miss Twinkley was the favorite private detective of countless ladies in countless public libraries.
“Barbara Oppenshaw [the daughter of the publishing house’s owner] wrote as Lydia Drake, and Oppenshaw and Trilby was much gratified by the success of her bluff, pipe-smoking Scotland Yard detective, Superintendent Burrows….
“Inevitably, the table talk turned to the differences between real-life policemen of the C.I.D. and the heroes and heroines created by the diners.
“Cartwright and Coe maintained that Miss Twinkley’s great strength lay in the fact that she was an amateur, unhampered by police procedure. This, they said—quoting Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, and others—was the reason that most great fictional detectives were not policemen. Myrtle pointed out that Tex Lawrie was not really a detective at all, but an adventurer whose career inevitably involved him in criminal circles. Harold Vandike said sardonically that none of his featherbrained heroines would be able to detect a fox in a chicken coop, let alone a murderer.
“’You, my dear Barbara,’ he went on, ‘are the only one of us who purports to portray an actual Scotland Yard detective. And I cannot remember that Chief Superintendent Tibbett’s cases have ever remotely resembled those so brilliantly solved by Superintendent Burrows.
“’There’s no need to be sarcastic, Harry,’ said Barbara. ‘I write in what is known as the great classic tradition, and my books sell better than yours.’
“’That may or may not be true,’ said Harry, who knew very well that it was.”
