Bleeding Hooks Read online

  Harriet Rutland

  Bleeding Hooks

  They grabbed their fishing bags, and made a dive for their rods which were standing, ready for use, outside the front door.

  “Well, tight lines!” they called over their shoulders.

  “Bleeding hooks!” grinned the Major.

  Gladys ‘Ruby’ Mumsby was more interested in fishermen than fish. When her corpse is discovered near a Welsh sporting lodge that is hosting a group of fly fishing enthusiasts, it seems one of them has taken an interest in her too – of the murderous kind. For impaled in the palm of her hand is a salmon fishing fly, so deep that the barb is completely covered. Her face is blue. It is thought at first she died of natural causes, but the detective Mr. Winkley, of Scotland Yard, almost immediately suspects otherwise. And what happened to the would-be magician’s monkey that disappeared so soon after Mrs. Mumsby’s death?

  Bleeding Hooks was the second of Harriet Rutland’s sparkling mystery novels to feature the detective Mr Winkley. First published in 1940, this new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  ‘Once again a top-ranking yarn, in a story where the author introduces murder into a fishing paradise in Wales. Lots of rod and line marginalia add to incisive characterization and well hidden crime for a superior story.’ Kirkus Reviews

  ‘Murder method interesting, characters well drawn and likeable, sleuth unobtrusively slick and finish dramatic.’ Saturday Review

  ‘I sent a message to the fish:

  I told them “This is what I wish.”

  The little fishes of the sea,

  They sent an answer back to me.

  The little fishes’ answer was

  “We cannot do it, Sir, because—”’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,’ said Alice.

  ‘It gets easier further on,’ Humpty Dumpty replied.

  Through The Looking Glass

  INTRODUCTION

  Bleeding Hooks, the second detective novel by Harriet Rutland (the pen-name of Olive Shimwell (1901-1962)), was originally published in February 1940, just sixteen months after Knock, Murderer, Knock!, her acclaimed debut, which first appeared in November 1938. In the intervening year, 1939, Olive Shimwell gave birth to a son, Alan, just a few weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. Rumors of war and the reality of a pregnancy seem not to have unduly hampered Shimwell in the writing of her second detective novel, however, for it is as impressive a piece of mystery mongering as her first. Bleeding Hooks was highly praised at the time in both the United Kingdom and the United States (its US title was the prosaically literal-minded The Poison Fly Murder); yet the novel since has bafflingly remained out-of-print for seventy-five years, making its 2015 republication by Dean Street Press all the more welcome.

  Bleeding Hooks is set in Aberllyn, a Welsh fishing village, at an inn named The Fisherman’s Rest (owned, perhaps predictably, by a couple named Evans). Gathered this season at The Fisherman’s Rest are the novel’s “murderee,” Mrs. Ruby Mumsby, a vulgar, outsized woman who obviously fancies the human male rather more than the finny breed; Mrs. Partridge, her daughter Pansy and her daughter’s boyfriend, Florence Vyvyan Gunn (the aggressively modern young couple despise their given names and instead go by, respectively, Pussy and Piggy); Mr. and Mrs. Pindar; General Sir Courtney Haddox and his possessive spinster sister Ethel; Mr. Weston, his nervy son Claude and Claude’s pet performing monkey; garrulous Major Jeans, an adept in the design of fishing flies; and Mr. Winkley, a Scotland Yard man, expert at piecing together miscellaneous facts, who is enjoying a fishing holiday after having solved that unpleasant affair at Presteignton Hydro, related by Harriet Rutland in Knock, Murderer, Knock! Also on the scene are the officious Police Constable Thomas Lloyd, the snappish Dr. Rippington Roberts, and Mrs. Mumsby’s much put-upon Welsh ghillie—i.e., fisherman’s guide—John Jones, who has grown heartily tired of fending off his employer’s lascivious advances (“Every ghillie in Aberllyn knew that she was man mad.”)

  Death disturbs The Fisherman’s Rest when the objectionable Mrs. Mumsby is discovered lifeless by the lake, a salmon fly embedded in her hand. Dr. Roberts pronounces that the woman must have died accidentally from the shock of this vicious wound, but the ever-curious Mr. Winkley has his doubts, as do Pussy and Piggy, who are bored with the routine at The Fisherman’s Rest and accordingly are eager to play, in the classic manner of Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence before them, amateur detectives, though Pussy demurs when Mr. Winkley refers to her and Piggy as Bright Young Things. “To her, Bright Young Things were antiquated,” wryly notes the author, who herself was of the Roaring Twenties generation. “Most of those whom she knew had already become ‘hags,’ and by this time had acquired several babies or divorces, or both.” Addressing both Mr. Winkley and Piggy Gunn, Pussy, echoing the bravado of Christie’s Tuppence in The Secret Adversary (1922) and Partners in Crime (1929), pronounces that she is determined to detect, whatever Mr. Winkley may say about it: “This is the first bit of excitement I’ve had in three weeks, and I’m going to enjoy it properly. Of course I’d rather sleuth with you two, but if you don’t want to go on with it, I shall ask in the hotel for volunteers. I should think they’d jump at it. But whatever happens, I shall sleuth.”

  While Pussy and Piggy attempt surreptitiously to interrogate suspects at The Fisherman’s Rest, Mr. Winkley determines to his satisfaction that Mrs. Mumsby expired not from the shock of inadvertently grasping a wickedly barbed salmon fly, but from prussic acid poisoning, the fly having been coated in the deadly stuff. Mrs. Mumsby was heartily disliked by almost everyone staying at the inn, but who could have so despised her as to want to kill her? Or is there some other motive in the offing? Mr. Winkley finds himself not only having to deal with the enthusiastic amateur sleuthing of Pussy and Piggy but a mystery problem that proves even more barbed that he initially thought.

  Bleeding Hooks was as well-received as its predecessor, garnering critical praise, like Knock, Murderer, Knock!, for its humor and sophistication. In the magazine Saturday Review, Harriet Rutland’s American publisher placed an illustrated ad extolling the virtues of novel, under the punning headline, “Hook on to a good mystery!” “Good sport—especially for angler-philes,” pronounced the celebrated humorist (and mystery critic) Will Cuppy in the New York Herald Tribune, continuing the fishing puns. In fact Bleeding Hooks is one of the finest classic British mysteries of which I am aware that incorporates a fly fishing background--this subgenre includes Josephine Tey’s The Singing Sands, Ngaio Marsh’s Scales of Justice, Cyril Hare’s Death Is No Sportsman, Ronald Knox’s Double Cross Purposes, Nigel Orde-Powlett’s The Cast to Death and John Haslette Vahey’s Death by the Gaff—yet it also offers readers a superb example of the English “manners” mystery, with incisive and amusing social observation of well-conveyed characters in an interesting setting. No wonder Bleeding Hooks charmed British and American readers alike, the latter presumably willing to overlook this slur on one of their greatest (and greatest selling) native fictional sleuths:

  “You know that American criminal lawyer, Perry Mason…?”

  “That gas-bag!” exclaimed Mr. Winkley.

  Will Mr. Winkley emulate Mr. Mason and land a clever criminal in Bleeding Hooks? Read on and see.

  Curtis Evans

  Chapter 1

  General Sir Courtney Haddox, wearing a discoloured trench coat over innumerable out-at-elbow woollen cardigans, and a deflated fishing bag slung over this, entered the front door of The Fisherman’s Rest, walking a little stiffly in his heavy rubber waders. He stood for a moment, his tight skinned, purplish-tinged face thrust forward like an ill-tempered vulture’s, as he peered at the other end-of-season visitors who were already gro
uped round the catches of fish arranged on the floor in the centre of the hall.

  He heard his sister’s voice raised above the murmured conversation of them all. It had the croaking harshness of a corncrake’s, and, like a corncrake’s, seemed capable of going on for ever.

  “...because ‘Tight Lines!’ always seems to be such a silly expression,” she was saying, “and I do think that ‘Happy Landings’ would be much more suitable, because the line might be tight for a minute but you still might lose the fish, but if it were landed safely in the boat, you’d be sure to bring it in with you, but perhaps the Air Force thought of it first...”

  The General winced.

  For the hundredth time he regretted the impulse which had induced him to bring Ethel with him on his annual holiday to the little fishing hotel in the Welsh village of Aberllyn. From the first, her behaviour had proved almost unbearably embarrassing. Every morning she insisted on walking with him to the boat at the head of the lake, and waved him off with a red silk parasol. She inquired, in the ghillie’s hearing, whether he was wearing enough underclothing, and had once made him retire behind a wall to put on the ribbed bodybelt he had forgotten. And every evening she was waiting for his return to greet him with false gaiety, or to overwhelm him with undeserved praise.

  As soon as she saw him now, she broke off her conversation, a proceeding which entailed no difficulty since it was always so pointless, and bustled towards him.

  Her grey hair was cut in a thin fringe across a low forehead, and she wore a girlishly colourful Viennese frock singularly ill-suited to her horsy features and forty-eight years.

  “Any luck, dear?” she gushed, then, without appearing to notice the impatient shake of his head: “Mr. Gunn and I have been having a most interesting talk about huntin’ and fishin’ and shootin’ – at least, we hadn’t got to the shootin’ yet, had we?”

  General Haddox glanced at the loose-limbed, tousle-haired young man whose expression seemed clearly to indicate that where she was concerned he infinitely regretted the omission, and asked the inevitable question of the day.

  “Do any good today?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir,” replied Gunn. “Just a few brownies that the ghillie made me put back because they were under the pound. That ghillie has very large ideas, I can tell you. But Mr. Pindar hooked a salmon, and I shot a few hundred yards of film when he was playing it, so the day wasn’t entirely wasted.”

  “Did he, by Jove?” The General was suitably impressed. “I’ve been looking for salmon all day and never even saw one. Where did you get him?” he asked, turning to the bronzed, good-looking man who was standing with his arm linked through his wife’s.

  “Well, I didn’t get him at all as it happens.” he replied. “I hooked him by accident off the black rocks at the end of the lake on a ten-foot-six trout rod – Hardy’s ‘Perfection’, if you know the type – and a 3x cast.”

  “That would give you a bit of fun,” nodded the General.

  “It did. He made a swirl as big as a clothes-basket, and led me a hell of a dance for an hour and twenty minutes, then he broke me. I’m not feeling too pleased with myself, I can tell you. But we had no gaff, so I had to try and play him to a standstill.”

  “Hard luck!” said the General. “If your cast had been heavier you might have brought him in. I remember once –”

  They were interrupted by a squeal from Miss Haddox.

  “Oh, Courtney! Are these your fish? Why, they’re four beauties, and all speckled. They’re quite the nicest fish I’ve seen this evening. The others have such ugly jaws and look so black, but these are a lovely colour, all golden brown. And you said you hadn’t caught any. You naughty boy! My brother’s so modest,” she said, as she beamed at the little circle of people.

  The purplish tinge on the General’s face became almost royal in tone as she thus drew attention to the four brown trout which he, as a man who fished exclusively for salmon, should, by all the unwritten laws of fishing, have left in the lake.

  “Had to kill ’em. Swallowed the hook,” he murmured brokenly. “Don’t put them down here; give them to the cat,” he said sharply to the ghillie, who touched his cap with one sympathetic hand while he removed the offending brown trout with the other.

  The uncomfortable silence which followed was broken as the hall door swung open to admit Claude Weston, the youngest of all the visitors at present in the hotel. He threw his fishing bag on to the floor, regardless of a protesting rattle from his reel, flung his young, graceful body into a chair, and puffed out a weary sigh.

  “God, I’m tired!” he exclaimed, running a slender hand over his copper-coloured hair.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Gunn. “No fish?”

  Claude’s gesture indicated despairing assent.

  “My father is bringing in a few miserable corpses,” he said. “He is also,” he added as an afterthought, “bringing in Mrs. Mumsby. She seems to have had all the luck.”

  “Did Major Jeans do any good on the upper lake?” asked General Haddox, addressing no one in particular.

  “I don’t think he’s in yet,” replied Mr. Pindar, “but I should call it a miracle if he brought much out of that little mountain lake today. The light was too bright.”

  “I like it a bit bright myself,” returned the General, “but then I only fish for salmon. The trouble today was that there wasn’t enough wind.”

  A tall, thin man, wearing the dark pin-stripe suit which betokened a recent arrival to the hotel, joined them.

  His skin was pink, his hair and moustache fair, the latter stained brown at the straight-clipped edge with nicotine, and matched by the skin between the first and second fingers of his left hand. His eyes, of a mild blue, regarded the fish with an interested and experienced look as he bent down to examine them more closely. In return, the eyes of the visitors expressed the curiosity which the fish were past feeling.

  “What did you do today?”

  It was Mr. Pindar who asked the superfluous question.

  The stranger straightened himself, drew a contemplative stream of smoke from his cigarette, and replied with the self-assurance of a regular visitor.

  “Oh, I’ve only just arrived. I hope to get a few tomorrow though, if you people have left any in the lake. What’s the fishing been like lately?”

  “Rotten,” replied Mr. Pindar.

  “Damned bad as usual,” said General Haddox.

  “Hopeless,” said Gunn.

  A ghillie who had just come into the hall was adding a string of small sea-trout to the fish already on the floor, and finally laid a large, fat brown trout beneath.

  Claude Weston got up, regarded it affectionately.

  “An ill-favoured thing, but mine own,” he quoted.

  “Why, that’s a lovely fish!” exclaimed Miss Haddox. “Did you catch it all by yourself, Claude?”

  “Oh no,” he replied. “It committed suicide on the end of the hook. I swam out to rescue it, but it was too late. But don’t spare a thought for it, lady, it’s only a brown trout – of no value, commercial or otherwise, in these parts!”

  A man of average height, with dark, sparse hair, his face rather grey and drawn as if he had had a tiring day, joined them, and put an affectionate arm round Claude’s shoulders.

  “More nonsense, Claude?” he asked.

  Claude turned.

  “Oh, there you are, Dad. What an age you’ve been. Have you been trying to drown old Mother Mumsby in the lake?”

  “No, she’s safe so far,” replied his father in the same bantering tones. “She went straight upstairs.”

  “She always does,” said Miss Haddox spitefully. “It’s because she’s so annoyed at not catching any fish, though I must say that she ought to be used to the idea by now, for she hasn’t caught more than once since we’ve been here. It just proves what I’ve always said, that the only reason she goes fishing at all is because it’s the only chance she gets of being alone with a man!”

  “Whose fis
h are those?” asked General Haddox hastily as a sturdily built, dark-haired ghillie pulled five fair-sized sea-trout out of his creel, and knelt down to arrange them.

  “Mrs. Mumsby’s, sir,” he replied, looking up.

  “Yes, we know,” said Miss Haddox. “But how many of them did she really catch?”

  “Four,” replied the ghillie. “It was a good day for her indeed.”

  “Four?” Miss Haddox was incredulous. “But you don’t mean to say that she’s missed the opportunity of telling us all about them? Why, she –”

  “Here’s the Major,” said her brother rather unnecessarily, as Major Jeans trumpeted himself into the hall.

  “Hallo, hallo! What ho within, what ho without! But not without fish, I hope. What’s anyone done today? Such a nice, bright, happy day with trout all over the lake and all under the lake and everywhere except out of the lake! Did you have a pleasant picnic, boys and girls? By Jove! I bet those fish are pulling their little whiskers and slapping their fins in glee at being left in peace for another day. What did I get? Gather round me while I tell you. Ten little brownies. Herrings! Sprats! ‘Calloo callay, he chortled in his joy.’ I’m a bloomin’ murderer!”

  He slapped his hands together and rubbed the palms against each other as if he were a brewer sampling hops, and his lean, wind-chapped face beamed at them all.

  “Major Jeans.”

  The stranger moved forward.

  “Eh? Who? Why, God bless my fishy soul, if it isn’t Winkley!” He clapped him on the shoulder, and shook the proffered hand. “Come down to tickle the trout, have you, eh? You won’t find them so ticklish this year. Well, well, you’re as welcome as the mayfly in May. Come and have –”

  He bustled Mr. Winkley down the corridor leading to the bar.