Twice Round the Clock is a long-forgotten mystery by a woman whose life encompassed professional fame and personal tragedy. Although she was once extremely well-known, it was not as a crime writer. When the book was first published by Hutchinson (a company of considerable renown) in 1935, the dust jacket blurb explained:
Billie Houston, as one of the Houston Sisters, is already famous, for she and her sister Renée form what is probably the best known and most successful vaudeville sister act within living memory, and there must be few indeed who, through the music-hall and newspapers and wireless, are not acquainted with the smiling, fair-haired “boy.”
And now Billie Houston has turned novelist and here is her first novel. It is a thriller and a gripping one too. A man is murdered at a dinner party held in honour of his daughter at his lonely house. The telephone wires have been damaged, cars tampered with, and for long hours the guests are cooped together, each aware that his neighbour may be the murderer. A dramatic, exciting situation which Billie Houston develops to the full. How this novel came to be written is in itself a story which tells of many dressing-rooms all over the country in which between appearances on the stage, pages were planned and scribbled and often torn up. It tells, too, of a life-long ambition and an absorbing interest in criminology, and its success may mean to its author more than thunderous applause from a packed theatre.
The dust jacket was adorned with pictures of Billie Houston (and her sister Renée) on the front cover as well as the back, making it clear that her celebrity status—or “platform,” in the jargon of the modern publishing world—was seen as a crucial marketing advantage. I must admit, however, that when I acquired a copy (inscribed by Billie to Nancy Maitland in the year of publication) from the estate of the late Bob Adey, a true bibliophile, I had never heard of either Billie or her novel. Research uncovered a great deal of material about the Houston Sisters, but the book itself has seldom been discussed.
The undeniable truth is that sometimes forgotten books have been forgotten for a very good reason. When I started reading the novel, I was prepared to be disappointed. To my delight, however, the storyline proved to be lively and unpretentious. The real disappointment was that Billie Houston never followed up her debut in the genre.
A keen and intelligent reader of mysteries, she made the excellent decision to create a sense of pace and suspense by emphasizing the rapid passage of time. The title reflects this approach, and so do the chapter headings. This is a country house mystery, and Billie—whose second husband came from an aristocratic family—had rather more extensive personal experience of life in country houses than many writers of Golden Age detection. In a prologue, a body is discovered, but we then have a long flashback scene in which the tension mounts as it becomes evident that numerous people have good cause to commit a murder. The structure anticipates, in some respects, that of a later—and otherwise very different—novel that has justifiably earned acclaim from aficionados of detective fiction: Lonely Magdalen by Henry Wade.
Billie Houston was the stage name of Sarah McMahon Gribbin, born in Shettleston, Glasgow, in 1906. Her parents, James Gribbin and Elizabeth Houston, were music hall performers who had a song and dance act. Her older sister Renée (Caterina Rita Murphy Gribbin, 1902–80) began a stage career in 1912. Four years later, with their parents suffering from ill-health, the two girls began working together as the Houston Sisters. In the 1920s, the pair enjoyed sustained popularity, topping the bill in venues around Britain and filling the London Palladium on numerous occasions. They appeared at a Royal Variety Command performance in the days when performers really did take part as a result of a command, or request, from the King.
Typically, they pretended to be children, with Billie playing a boy. According to Frances Gray’s essay in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the secret of their success lay in meticulous attention to detail: their sets sometimes included furniture that was scaled-up in size so as to make them look like small children. Gray describes the sisters as “both sharply observational about working-class Scottish life and childhood, and sexually magnetic.” Billie became highly skilled as a male impersonator.
The sisters appeared together in a handful of films, including Happy Days are Here Again (1936), but the act broke up. As Renée explained in her autobiography Don’t Fence Me In (1974), this was due to Billie’s poor health. Renée went on to enjoy a long screen career, with film credits as varied as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac as well as A Town Like Alice and Carry on at Your Convenience. A very informative website devoted to Renée may be found at renéehoustonsite.wordpress.com.
Billie’s first marriage (to Bobby Wilton, son of the well-known comedian Rob Wilton) ended in divorce, and in 1938 her second husband, the actor Richard Cowper, died. By melancholy coincidence, he and her first husband both took their own lives. In 1939, she married again, to Paul Wills-Eve, and this marriage lasted until her death from emphysema in 1972. They had two children, Carole and Anton, and I’m indebted to Carole for providing me with fascinating background information about her mother. One favourite anecdote concerns Billie, as a very small girl, interrupting a performance of the stage version of East Lynne. When her mother declaimed those famously melodramatic lines: “Gone! Gone! And never called me mother!”, Billie cried out to reassure her that she was very much alive and kicking.
After the Second World War, Billie was much less visible in public than her sister. This was due in part to the fact that she found contentment in the domestic life but also due to continuing health problems. During one performance she fell from the stage into the orchestra pit and damaged her back severely, necessitating a major operation. Her husband Paul was a journalist who spent several years as bureau chief of United Press International; as a result, the family was based in Paris, a city Billie loved. Carole, who worked in publishing, and Anton, a journalist, both inherited their parents’ literary leanings.
From the early 1950s onwards, Billie was a semi-invalid, but she showed considerable courage in coping with her physical limitations and continued to travel extensively. Always a voracious reader of detective fiction, she was a devotee of female authors such as Sayers, Marsh, and Allingham. She also developed into a formidable chess player, reaching regional championship standard.
At one point, Billie thought about writing another crime novel, tentatively titled Whatever Happened to Aunt Jane?, but she never got beyond the stage of writing notes for an outline. Nevertheless, Twice Round the Clock evidences a genuine talent for storytelling. To this day, debates persist about whether celebrities who publish fiction have some sort of unfair advantage over fellow authors. The reality, however, is that plenty of celebrities write good novels, and even though some of them produce work that is less impressive, it is folly to underestimate an author simply because he or she is well-known in some other walk of life.
I don’t claim that Twice Round the Clock is a literary masterpiece, but I’m glad that at long last others have a chance to read the story and form their own views about it. Seven years have passed since I wrote about the book on my blog “Do You Write Under Your Own Name?” but at the time of writing, I’d never come across anyone who had read it, and until now it has remained in the shadows. A new edition as a British Library Crime Classic will change that, and I hope that others will share my view that this is a book deserving of better than total obscurity. Billie Houston was a modest woman who once said to her daughter that the novel was only published because she was a celebrity. I like to think that she would be thrilled to see it enjoying a new life, more than half a century after her death, solely on its own merits.
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