Narrowing Circle (Inspector Crambo) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright & Information

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Symons' Series Bibliography

  Inspector Bland Titles

  Inspector Crambo Titles

  Joan Kahn-Harper Titles

  Sheridan Haynes

  Standalone Novels

  Non-Fiction

  Synopses of Symons' Titles

  Copyright & Information

  The Narrowing Circle

  First published in 1954

  © Estate of Julian Symons; House of Stratus 1954-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Julian Symons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN EAN Edition

  1842329170 9781842329177 Print

  0755129601 9780755129607 Kindle

  0755129660 9780755129669 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Julian Symons was born in 1912 in London. He was the younger brother, and later biographer, of the writer A.J.A. Symons.

  Aged twenty five, he founded a poetry magazine which he edited for a short time, before turning to crime writing. This was not to be his only interest, however, as in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and held a distinguished reputation in each field. Nonetheless, it is primarily for his crime writing that he is remembered. His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day.

  Symons commenced World War II as a recognised conscientious objector, but nevertheless ended up serving in the Royal Armoured Corps from 1942 until 1944, when he was invalided out. A period as an advertising copywriter followed, but was soon abandoned in favour of full time writing. Many prizes came his way as a result, including two Edgar Awards and in 1982 he received the accolade of being named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America – an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. Symons then succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain’s Detection Club, a position he held from 1976 to 1985, and in 1990 he was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers for his lifetime’s achievement in crime fiction.

  He published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994; with the works combining different elements of the classic detective story and modern crime novel, but with a clear leaning toward the latter, especially situations where ordinary people get drawn into extraordinary series of events – a trait he shared with Eric Ambler. He also wrote two modern-day Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In A Three Pipe Problem the detective was ‘...a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character’. Several of Julian Symons' works have been filmed for television.

  Julian Symons died in 1994.

  Introduction

  The French call a typewriter une machine á ècrire. It is a description that could well be applied to Julian Symons, except the writing he produced had nothing about it smelling of the mechanical. The greater part of his life was devoted to putting pen to paper. Appearing in 1938, his first book was a volume of poetry, Confusions About X. In 1996, after his death, there came his final crime novel, A Sort of Virtue (written even though he knew he was under sentence from an inoperable cancer) beautifully embodying the painful come-by lesson that it is possible to achieve at least a degree of good in life.

  His crime fiction put him most noticeably into the public eye, but he wrote in many forms: biographies, a memorable piece of autobiography (Notes from Another Country), poetry, social history, literary criticism coupled with year-on-year reviewing and two volumes of military history, and one string thread runs through it all. Everywhere there is a hatred of hypocrisy, hatred even when it aroused the delighted fascination with which he chronicled the siren schemes of that notorious jingoist swindler, Horatio Bottomley, both in his biography of the man and fictionally in The Paper Chase and The Killing of Francie Lake.

  That hatred, however, was not a spew but a well-spring. It lay behind what he wrote and gave it force, yet it was always tempered by a need to speak the truth. Whether he was writing about people as fiction or as fact, if he had a low opinion of them he simply told the truth as he saw it, no more and no less.

  This adherence to truth fills his novels with images of the mask. Often it is the mask of hypocrisy. When, as in Death’s Darkest Face or Something Like a Love Affair, he chose to use a plot of dazzling legerdemain, the masks of cunning are startlingly ripped away.

  The masks he ripped off most effectively were perhaps those which people put on their true faces when sex was in the air or under the exterior. ‘Lift the stone, and sex crawls out from under,’ says a character in that relentless hunt for truth, The Progress of a Crime, a book that achieved the rare feat for a British author, winning Symons the US Edgar Allen Poe Award.

  Julian was indeed something of a pioneer in the fifties and sixties bringing into the almost sexless world of the detective story the truths of sexual situations. ‘To exclude realism of description and language from the crime novel’ he writes in Critical Occasions, ‘is almost to prevent its practitioners from attempting any serious work.’ And then the need to unmask deep-hidden secrecies of every sort was almost as necessary at the end of his crime-writin
g life as it had been at the beginning. Not for nothing was his last book subtitled A Political Thriller.

  H R F Keating

  London, 2001

  Chapter One

  That Monday morning began like any other day. Waking, eyes crusted with unsatisfying sleep. A bad taste in the mouth behind the spurious freshness of the foaming toothpaste. A small nick when shaving. It was while I was having difficulty with a collar stud that I remembered that this was not a day like any other, that there was a reason for whistling this morning. I began to whistle. From the kitchen there came a sizzling sound and a smell of toast and bacon. Thinking about what was going to happen I began to feel positively hungry.

  Rose called out something. I knotted my tie carefully and went into the cubicle we called a dining-room. There was egg and bacon on the table for me. Rose had cooked herself nothing and she was smoking a cigarette, a bad sign at that time of the day.

  “You’ve cut yourself.”

  “Nothing.” I poured coffee and began to eat, my mind playing round the pleasant thing that was going to happen.

  She puffed smoke. “Why so cheerful?”

  “Don’t you remember? Today comes promotion, new job, that vital step out of one wage bracket into another.”

  “Counting your chickens.”

  “It’s in the bag, Rose. George Pacey told me so. Put it another way, today means a new fur coat, a holiday in Paris this summer, maybe even money in the bank. Isn’t that something to cheer about?”

  “Willie Strayte didn’t seem too much worried last night.”

  “He’s accepted the inevitable.” I soaked up the last of the egg with toast and pushed away the plate. I had been eating too fast, as always.

  Rose was enveloped now in a cloud of smoke. “Why did you really ask Willie round last night?”

  I began to feel irritated. The smell of smoke was neutralising the smell of toast and bacon. “I’ve told you before. Willie and I have been working together as executive editors. When I step up he’s bound to feel sore. He can make things pretty sticky for me or he can help to keep them smooth. Asking him round to dinner seemed a good idea, though the way you behaved didn’t help.”

  “There always has to be a commercial reason for everything.” I made no answer to that one. “I’m surprised you even noticed the way I behaved.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” I got up from the table, picked up my hat and overcoat from the bedroom and called goodbye from the door of the flat.

  “Goodbye.” She was sitting hunched over the breakfast table with her hair in curlers and the top button of her dressing gown missing. Just before I closed the door she blew a perfect smoke ring. She was good at blowing smoke rings.

  Chapter Two

  It was a fine spring morning and I was early. I decided to walk to the office. I didn’t often walk, because walking more than a quarter of a mile made my leg ache. I had fractured it when I was a child and the bonesetting job had been bungled so that one leg was a couple of inches shorter than the other. A surgical boot had evened things up, but it left me with a slight limp and when I’d walked the length of a street I usually began to think about it.

  Today I thought about our eight-year-old marriage instead, and wondered what had gone wrong with it. No children, of course, that was one obvious reason. At first I hadn’t wanted them, and then Rose said she was too old, although that was ridiculous. She was only thirty-two now, and lots of women have a first child in their late thirties. But still no children was the obvious reason, too obvious. I shied away from it, and began to consider others.

  The simple truth was that you married one person, and three or five or eight years later found yourself living with another. At the time we married Rose had been a typist in the news agency where I was an up and coming reporter. She was very pretty, fresh looking, laughed a lot at my jokes, always seemed interested in what I was doing. That was the girl I had contracted to marry, and she no longer existed. Instead a stranger looked at me across the breakfast table, hollow-eyed and nervous, a woman who lit one cigarette after another, trying to dissipate in a smoke cloud her fear of approaching middle age. She was right to be worried, for although she could still look decorative in the evening it was now a kind of hard gloss put on at the dressing table.

  All right, I told myself, that’s enough about Rose, what about yourself? If she’s changed that much, you must have changed a bit too. I stopped and looked in a shop window, and the result was pretty satisfactory. A bit paunchy perhaps, but then you might say that the paunchiness made me look imposing, distinctive. A good fresh face and a fine head of hair. I took off my hat and inspected the head to assure myself that there were no grey hairs in it. Then I clapped on the hat again, thinking that perhaps I looked a little foolish. Age isn’t the same for a man as for a woman, I thought profoundly. A man at thirty-seven is still maturing, a woman at thirty-two is overripe. I memorised the phrase as one that might be useful some day. It was also a phrase that made me feel sorry for Rose. Perhaps I neglected her, in fact I knew I had neglected her. I decided to ring her up from the office. A celebration this evening would be in order.

  I thought about the cause for celebration, and about Willie Strayte. Three years ago I had come from a job as crime reporter on a provincial paper to join Willie Strayte as crime editor of Gross Enterprises. I got more money, but at first I didn’t like the work. That was before I saw that Gross Enterprises was something new, a kind of logical development in modern publishing. We published books in four categories, Romance, Westerns, Crime and Science Fiction. The characters, plot and general style of a book would be decided at an editorial conference. This material would be passed on to staff writers, who talked the story into a tape recorder. An experienced staff writer working at high pressure could average twenty thousand words a day, thus finishing a novel in four days. Anyone who couldn’t manage ten thousand words a day was no good to the organisation.

  The dictabook, as we called the recording, then came up to an editor who souped it up as necessary. Souping it up meant, in the case of Crime, adding the characteristic flavour – sex and violence for thick-ear books, atmospheric touches to superior Eric Ambler style thrillers, pseudo-authentic background for adventure stories. In the case of Romance it meant mostly putting in details about clothes, often lifted from the fashion magazines – at least that’s the way it seemed to me, but I never handled Romance. With Westerns it meant chiefly checking for accuracy, making sure that the writers hadn’t got the sheriff using the wrong kind of gun or introduced some Indians in a part of America they never inhabited. Readers of Westerns are very finicky about accuracy, and they have no use at all for sex. Cowboys and sex don’t mix, crime and sex do. There’s a moral in that somewhere. Finally the books went up to the Section Editor, in the case of Crime, George Pacey, who checked again for errors or risky material, and maybe added a bit here and took out a bit there.

  The finished products were cheaply printed and bound at our own works, and published by a dozen different firms, all of them subsidiaries of Gross Enterprises. They sold in big quantities to the lower-class subscription libraries, and in stationers’, chemists’ and all sorts of other shops which got special terms when they agreed to stock only Gross publications. We’d pretty well driven all other publishers out of these fields, because when you come down to it Romance, Western, Crime and Science Fiction books don’t sell in hard-back editions. People borrow them from libraries and buy them as paper-backs from shops. By cornering this market we’d made publication of these books unprofitable for other people. It was good hard modern business. When I’d got used to it I liked it.

  What were the books like? Well, we turned out over three hundred a year, and I didn’t read a quarter of them, but in the Crime Section we had writers who could turn out a reasonable facsimile of Eric Ambler, Agatha Christie or Mickey Spillane. I don’t say they were just the same as the originals, but they were pretty efficient jobs for all that. The authors’ names of course w
ere all fictitious, but we developed individual styles for each author so that anybody reading a book with Thorby Larsen’s name on the cover knew that there was practically nothing the hero wouldn’t do, while readers of George Hendry could feel sure that his stories would be no tougher than those of, say, Hammond Innes.

  Recently, however, there had been some new developments in the firm. It was in connection with these that I was making my step up.

  Chapter Three

  Gross Enterprises occupied a square, ugly office block near Holborn. On the ground floor was Reception, Dispatch and the Research Section. First floor was Crime, second Romance, third Western and fourth Science Fiction. Administration was on the fifth and top floor, and so was Sir Henry Gross’ office and flat. I passed old Sir Henry as I went in, teetering uncertainly across the Reception hall to his private lift. Who’s Who didn’t give his age but he must have been in the seventies, although his lined face and generally papery appearance made him look older. Nobody I knew had much contact with him, not even the Section Editors. I hadn’t spoken to him more than half a dozen times in the three years I’d been with the firm. I was never quite sure whether he knew who I was. He said good morning to me politely enough. At least he knew I worked there.

  I watched the lift doors close behind him and thought how queer it was that Sir Henry, who was a teetotaller, vegetarian and non-smoker, should be at the top of something like Gross Enterprises. It was a fine example of circumstances taking charge of men, for he had started out with cheap Self Help and How to Do It books. Probably the change to what you might call rational publishing had been imperceptible even to Gross himself. Now he might think that he ran the machine, but really the machine ran Sir Henry. No doubt he had paid for his knighthood like an honest man. It had been awarded for “services to publishing”, which was one of the best jokes on publishing that I had ever heard.