FFB: Fatal Friday - Francis Gerard

THE STORY: What at first appears to be a straightforward shooting followed by a confession by the confused gun toting Lord Colchester turns into a puzzling murder. When the autopsy proves that the bullet in the victim does not match the gun that Lord Colchester fired at him the police are baffled. Sir John Meredith is coaxed into helping the local police uncover the surprising truth behind the murder of Gerald Fairfax on that Fatal Friday (1937).

THE CHARACTERS: I should have found this book tiresome and routine.  It is after all yet another of the myriad English  country house weekends gone wrong that serve as the background for hundreds of Golden Age mystery novels.  True, this familiar story is chock-full of stock characters like the annoying twit aristocrat Geoffrey Tracy who talks like a parody of Lord Peter Wimsey combined with Bertie Wooster peppering his inane sentences with "Eh whats?" and "I say ol' chaps".  We also have a hard of hearing Dowager Countess with a wicked sense of humor and a barely competent Chief Constable in the person of Colonel Merryweather-Winter, a recurring character in Gerard's early detective novels.  Even the blackmail plot that seems to be the motive behind the shooting of Fairfax was far from original.  It all should have bored me.  But it didn't. 

Gerard's lively sense of humor, his love of wordplay and farce are turned on full force in Fatal Friday.  In later books his love of farce is sharpened and becomes increasingly absurd the more outrageous his stories become. Though the characters seem to be carbon copies of the usual gang of suspects that populate these country house type whodunits Gerard has a knack for throwing in reversals of character traits and personalities.  For example, the Dowager's hearing loss is not used as stupid comic relief but rather as a ploy to manipulate the rest of the characters and to make fun of them.  She is well aware that people will talk too loudly and her supposed deafness comes and goes on a whim.  She hears nearly everything and plays at being deaf only to humiliate and embarrass the guests in her son's home.  I was hoping that she would turn out to be the villain and literally have the last laugh on the whole lot of them as well as the reader.  But the Dowager is present merely as a comic figure. Her scenes, not at all crucial to the multiple crime plots, are some of the best in the book. The story would have been a thousand times more entertaining had she been a pistol packing mama as well a trickster who pretends to be deaf.

Fairfax, too, comes from a long line of familiar murder victims you love to hate and who come to a well deserved violent end.  He's a cad of the worst sort who was rumored to have been having an affair with Lady Prunella Colchester, the Earl's much younger wife, when they were spotted at the same French hotel.  Fairfax who has desired Lady C from afar never bothered to deny the rumors choosing instead to play them up and enhance the rumors with suggestive comments to the press.  When he shows up again at another hotel that Lady C is staying at the press goes wild. Again, Fairfax does not deny what is clearly gossip and allows the papers to spread the story of Lady Colchester spending time not only with him but having a string of lovers.

Meredith enters the story when Geoffrey Tracy and his wife Stella learn that Prue is being blackmailed.  Someone has gotten hold of steamy sexually explicit letters she wrote to a boyfriend in her past. He travelled to Malaysia to take a job on a rubber plantation and while he was gone she became engaged Lord Colchester.  But all the time she carried a torch for this other man, who oddly enough is also named Gerald -- Gerald Fawcett to be specific, though he goes by the ridiculous nickname of Pussy.  [What the hell is that about?  This is the fourth book I've read since doing this blog where a British man is nicknamed Pussy. Beyond strange!]   And why would any writer choose to give two of his male characters the same name, I hear you ask?  You best not be asking that of a mystery writer. I knew immediately there was a secret purpose behind that apparent lack of imagination.

A pair of identical leather suitcases with engraved initial plates turn up. What are those initials?  G.F.!   Of course the suitcases are mistakenly switched and... Ta-da!  The reason for the two Geralds is made clear.  Or is it?  Turns out those two suitcases and their contents are extremely important to the plot and the ultimate explanation of who owned them is one of the many surprises Meredith exposes in the finale.

The mystery of who shot Fairfax is also deviously plotted.  Though Lord C has confessed to the crime the bullet fired from his gun is not found in Fairfax's body.  A .35 caliber bullet is extracted from the body and the .35 caliber gun that fired that bullet belongs to Gerald Fawcett.  He told a tale of what he did with that gun in Malaysia and how he unconsciously packed the gun out of habit and brought it with him to the house party. Everyone who heard that story the night before Fairfax was killed knows that Gerald had a gun in his room. But all events surrounding the night before and the day of the shooting keep coming back to Fawcett. His gun killed the man, his footprints were found in mud outside the open window of the library where Fairfax was shot, and Fawcett himself lies repeatedly about his whereabouts because he wants to protect Prue from further damaging her reputation.  Meredith is sure that Fawcett is the murderer and arrests him. 

At the inquest even the jurors return a verdict that specifically names Fawcett as the murderer.  And then we read of two trials - one for Lord Colchester charged with manslaughter and one for Fawcett charged with premeditated murder.  Things turn out well for one man, but not for the other.  Is the story over at that point?  Is it all anticlimactic and all too easily solved?

Juanita Meredith refuses to believe that Fawcett is guilty of the murder.  She insists that her husband investigate further.  Many a man has been hanged on circumstantial evidence she reminds her policeman husband. Don't let it happen to Gerald Fawcett. He is innocent, she protests, and her husband are responsible for that mistaken arrest and conviction. After looking into a few troubling aspects of the crime Meredith begins to see his wife's side of the story.  Ultimately he finds the truth behind the blackmail scheme and Fairfax's murder. When he reveals the truth it comes as a shock to all involved.

INNOVATIONS:  Gerard loves the kind of absurd misinterpretation of words in conversations and interrogation scenes that Abbot and Costello did so well in the routines like "Who's on First?" and the Monty Python troupe reveled in for so many years.  The inquest and courtroom sequences when Geoffrey Tracy must testify are like something you'd find from either of those comic geniuses.  Readers of Henry Cecil's satirical courtroom mysteries might also enjoy these scenes that Gerard does so well. The humor threatens to become a bit too silly but I always welcome silliness in detective novels that might otherwise become ponderous in these all to frequent dull Q&A rehashes during inquests and courtroom scenes.

Gerard engages in some clever plot machinations with the manner in which the murder was pulled off. It's sort of a reversal of an impossible crime or locked room mystery. Rather than a room in which all doors and windows were sealed when Gerald Fairfax was killed in a room in which all the doors and windows were open. When the bullet from Lord Colchester's gun is found embedded in the brick wall of the garden outside the police then look for where another bullet could have been fired. Lord C talks about a "echo" that followed shortly after he shot Fairfax and how Fairfax didn't fall immediately after he fired his gun.  That echo Meredith determines was the sound of the second gun being fired. But from where was it fired?  From the gallery above the library?  From outside through the window in the corner?  From within the library in a cleverly hidden gizmo of some sort?  The nicely drawn floor plans (included here as illustrations)  come in very handy when Meredith and his police team began to look for all possibilities for the origin of that second shot.

The more I read of the John Meredith books the more I realize that Francis Gerard was a genuine fan of detective novels.  Often he makes allusions to the genre itself and it happens here again when the contents of one of those suitcases reveals, among many other items, a handful of mystery novels by Sayers, Carr, Christie and Charteris.  He enjoyed playing with conventions, upending expectations of stock characters and their cliched personalities, and devised some clever criminal plot twists.  As the series went on the books become more fantastical as he added aspects of fantastic adventures, supernatural and occult, and even elements of the lost race subgenre.  One thing is for sure with their offbeat sense of humor and an outrage for amorality and wickedness these books are never dull.

FFB: Golden Guilt – Francis Gerard

THE STORY: Sir John Meredith is off on another adventure involving kidnapping, revenge and another bizarre cult that hints at supernatural origins. In the prologue of Golden Guilt (1938) two men and one girl are “anointed” and banished to the Place of Fire “never to return until such a time as [they] have restored that which is lost and have avenged the sacrilege.” This outlandish thriller with a smidgen of a detective novel plot is populated with Aztec descendants, Russian gangsters, Mexican terrorists, a gang sporting tattoos of Three Clasped Hands, and a group of zealots from a lost kingdom in search of the legendary Golden Fleece.

THE CHARACTERS: Meredith does his best to prevent the kidnapping of Lord Allingham’s son Bobby with the help of his wife Juanita, Sgt Beef (who is remarkably related to Leo Bruce’s Sgt Beef!), Bradford and Col. Merryweather-Winter. Along the way two characters from previous books turn up, Sir Hector MacAllister and Clifford Craigworth, and assist our heroes in the complicated plot.

Add this title to the ever growing list of mystery novels and thrillers with a burial vault break-in. (I swear I need to do a post on this topic soon). After a funeral the Allingham family vault is discovered broken into and smashed coffins littering the interior of the chamber. Evidence points to the M.O. of “Soup” Smith, a notorious safecracker and burglar who preferred dynamite over picking locks to gain entry. Smith was recently released from prison and the search is on to track him down.

Some of the supporting characters were my favorite people in the heavily populated story and Gerard enjoys taking advantage of their eccentricity to indulge in his ever-present ribald and vulgar sense of humor. Lord Marshington, for example, is an aristocrat obsessed with growing roses. Meredith apologizes for interrupting him while in his garden and Sgt Beef is appalled when he hears his lordship mention he was planning on putting muck into Dorothy Perkins bed. Beef thinks the worst of this “supposed gentleman” who would throw horse manure into a woman’s bed chamber. The scene turns into an Abbot and Costello routine of wordplay and misunderstanding thankfully lasting only a few lines. But even in its brevity it made me laugh out loud.

INNOVATIONS: Like Secret Sceptre Gerard peppers his story with frequent allusions to Golden Age detective fiction writing and characters which supports my theory that these books are meant to be a send-up of the entire genre. See the QUOTES section for some of the better references.

This was my second favorite of the weirder entries in Francis Gerard’s series featuring Meredith, a British Foreign Office agent turned policeman. Brimming with action and eccentric characters Golden Guilt is another is Gerard’s near parodies of the ultra-heroic adventure thriller which originated with H. Rider Haggard and his books about Alan Quatermain and Leo Vincey then carried into the often self-parodying adventures of pulp magazine heroes. As for the capture and reveal of the villains of the piece all is not as obvious as it first appears. Gerard does a fine job of misdirecting the reader into believing that one character is the brains of the kidnapping then performs a nifty reversal in the final pages. In doing so he simultaneously supplies the requisite twist to the crime plot making this more than satisfying as a detective cum adventure novel.

THINGS I LEARNED: One of the women characters is wearing a “…really complicated, though apparently severe black Hartnell dress.” Ignorance of early 20th century designers led me to look up Norman Bishop Hartnell (1901-1979). Probably much better known in the UK than in the US Hartnell was a fashion designer who did most of his work for the Royal Family. He was given the honor of Royal Warrant as Dressmaker to the Queen Mother in 1940 and the same for Elizabeth II in 1957.

QUOTES: “We found everybody’s finger-prints there…!” He snorted “You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, with all this damn silly rubbishy detective-fiction stuff that’s written nowadays that everybody, down to a three-year-old, would know not to handle a thing like that.”

“I’m not really trying to behave like a detective in a book, but you know the more I read detective fiction the more I realize that the detective heroes are quite right to behave as they do and keep their mouths shut until the denouement. After all, nobody likes to look a fool…”

“And you’re equally certain that there’s no pointer anywhere?” suggested Meredith. “No nice bloody thumb-marks left on a clean piece of white paint, for instance? No scented or monogrammed handkerchiefs dropped outside the window? No uneven footprints clearly indicating the presence of a red-haired French sailor off a Dutch boat with a bad limp in his right foot, and no butts of cigarettes of a tobacco only smoked by members of the Egyptian Embassy”? . . . No, I suppose not.” John sighed. “I always think those fellows in fiction have the easier job of the two.”

There had always been an amicable feeling of rivalry between Matthew Beef and his more famous cousin Sergeant William Beef, who has so signally put the amateur detectives in their place in the case which had made his name, and which had been chronicled by Mr. Leo Bruce under the heading The Case for Three Detectives. Moreover, Beef, who rather fancied himself at darts, could never quite beat his cousin William […] who was apt to be a little superior with Matthew over his recent successes.

“A stone jar which contains vitriol contains an evil thing, but the jar isn’t responsible for its contents. Madness is an evil, there’s no getting away from that; but does that necessarily make the madman, the vessel housing this horrible ill-balance, an evil thing?”

EASY TO FIND? Much to my surprise I found several very affordable used copies of Golden Guilt. There are couple of the Thriller Book Club edition (some with dust jackets) as well as the Cherry Tree paperback offered for sale from various online sellers. But be warned – the later Cherry Tree paperback reprints tend to be considerably abridged from the original text. Even more remarkable I also found six copies of the US first edition and two of the UK edition (later printings each) all of them were under $20. One of the UK edition comes with a DJ in better condition that the one I picture here. The remaining of the hardcover copies (with and without DJs) range in prices from $30 for the UK ed in DJ to $100 for a US first edition in “about fine” condition with a “very good or better” dust jacket. As far as I know none of the Francis Gerard books have been reprinted since the 1950s. Happy hunting and reading!

FFB: Secret Sceptre - Francis Gerard

THE STORY: The preposterous plot of Secret Sceptre (1937) reads like a matinee cliffhanger serial overloaded with harrowing incidents, gruesome murders, hairsbreadth escapes and eleventh hour rescues. Sir John Meredith investigates a murder by decapitation carried out by men in armor and eventually uncovers an ancient secret society made up of men entrusted with protecting the Holy Grail.

THE CHARACTERS: Our hero is the inscrutable Sir John Meredith, a Foreign Office agent who becomes a policeman almost by accident. In this seventh book in sixteen book series he is aided by Sergeant Beef (who is nothing like his namesake created by Leo Bruce) and some other associates from both Scotland Yard and both Foreign and Home Offices. Meredith is not at all a likable man in this book. He comes off as arrogant, classist, and racist. Surprised? I'm not. He has little patience for anyone, insults people to their faces passing it off as wry wit, is constantly telling his colleagues to shut up and is generally one of the worst examples of the ubermacho self-styled aristocrats found in pre-WW2 era fiction written by British men. Took a while for me to warm up to him, but even then I didn't' think him the ideal candidate for the protagonist of a sixteen book series. Maybe he becomes less haughty and sarcastic as the series progresses.

Thankfully the book is filled with interesting and colorful characters along the way like Dermot O'Derg an Irish mercenary "born several centuries too late" whose "out of time persona" makes him the stand out in the very large cast. O'Derg is a powerful red haired man who might have been descended from Vikings despite his obvious Irish speech and heritage. He falls hard for the requisite "pale beauty" of the novel -- Daphne Birrell, sister of sculptor Nicholas Birrell, of one the many handsome young men who met a grisly end over the course of the book.  (For some reason Gerard likes to kill off "handsome young men" with an almost gleeful sadism.  No sooner has an HYM appeared within the story he is almost immediately dispatched with callous cruelty. Wonder what that's about!)

Apart from O'Derg it's the villains who steal the show. There is the sadistic American who speaks with an indeterminate foreign accent Al Cartell-Ardew, the master criminal of the novel who is constantly slapping the face of his Asian-Jewish servant Li-Fu Isaacs. There is a Russian secret agent who join forces with Cartell-Ardew. And let me not forget the motley crew of oddball criminals Cartell-Ardew hires in order to free a prisoner who he needs for his master plan. In one of the more hilarious portions of this very odd book Cartell-Ardew engineers a prison break that seems like a Mission: Impossible episode as written by John Cleese and Graham Chapman. The group of crooks masquerade as French prison experts and demand a tour of Broadhurst prison then manage to ferret out their targeted inmate all without once resorting to violence.

INNOVATIONS:  Secret Sceptre is a strange mix of straightforward adventure with hard edged violence and loopy farce. I'm convinced that Gerard was in fact parodying all of the superhero protagonists of British pulp fiction. The prison break sequence alone is evidence enough. Gerard's irreverent humor mixes groaning puns, Abbott & Costello wordplay, a couple of dirty jokes (one about "Lord Hereford's Knob" amazingly escaped the blue pencil of McDonald's 1937 editor), and low farce clearly are all signs of high spirited fun. Nothing is meant to be taken too seriously here. Witness this pointless and ridiculous exchange between Daphne and Nicholas as they snack on pieces of melon while lounging in their pajamas and dressing gowns:

"Why must you make those disgusting sucking noises, Nick?"
"Can't help it," he replied, "the damn thing drips so and I haven't got a bib."

En route to the Welsh coast in order to get to Fishguard where Slim Shardoc, an American crook is being held for questioning Meredith has a car accident. While speeding down the foggy road a boy on a bicycle appears seemingly out of nowhere and he swerves and skids to avoid hitting the boy. He gets of out of the wrecked car and swears up a storm in Hindustani which Gerard graciously translates for us: "Now may Shaitan gather thee to his bosom in the nethermost pit which is seven times heated."  And then -- "John put his head back, raised his fists to the sky, opened his mouth and howled like a wolf, at which the small boy, hastily remounting his bicycle, peddled frantically into the darkness."

As the outrageous story progresses, the bodies pile up, the offbeat sense of humor becomes increasingly ludicrous and the climax seems like something out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail four decades before that comedy troupe ever thought up their King Arthur saga parody. Even if Gerard's description of the Knights of the Holy Grail is presented as deadly serious, the mix of nationalism and sanctimonious dogma in which the secret society members espouse their mission "to keep England English and Christian," the scene and group ultimately come off as absurdly risible while simultaneously being scarily resonant in our isolationist narrow-minded age. The Knights exploit the local superstition about a haunted abbey where they are headquartered by dressing as white robed monks thereby hoping to be seen as ghosts if anyone might accidentally encounter them in their nightly vigils. Typical of Gerard's eccentric humor the Grand Master of the Knights of the Holy Grail is an ornithologist whose keen observational skills aided by his high powered binoculars prove very helpful at a key moment.

I'll leave it at that. You must read the book to discover the rest on your own.

THINGS I LEARNED: Arabic lessons! Meredith suspects that Al Cartell-Ardew is not American at all. Using his knowledge of Arabic and Muslim culture Meredith tells his police colleagues that the man's name is an Anglicization of al kātil adū which translates as "deadly enemy." The actual 21st century transliteration of the Arabic for deadly enemy is alqatil aleaduu.

QUOTES:  John Meredith had the reputation of a complete lack of scruple, but this applied only to his methods, not to the end in view. He was one of those men who believe that if you have to fight at all, every weapon is justifiable.

THE AUTHOR: The most complete and interesting biographical information written about Francis Gerard appears on the rear flap of the Tom Stacey reissue of Secret Sceptre, the edition I own. Most of the bio blurb is quoted verbatim below with some additional trivia in brackets added by me:

"Francis Gerard was born in London in 1905. His father was French and much of his childhood was spent in France. He began to write while working in London as a dealer in precious stones. His first stories appeared in The Thriller [a weekly magazine that published the work of several well-known and prolific crime fiction writers like Gerald Verner, Berkeley Gray, Leslie Charteris and James Ronald].

"During the war he served as Major in the Essex Regiment, while his wife worked at the foreign Office. In 1946 he moved, with his family and aging parents, to Natal where he became a South African citizen. Gradually he wrote less and less, devoting much of his time to politics instead. Springbok Rampant, a semi-autobiographical account of his reasons for leaving Britain, was published in 1951. [The title is a heraldic reference pointing out Gerard’s lifelong interest in heraldry and coats of arms, an interest which featured prominently in Secret Sceptre and frequently turns up in his other fiction.]

"He married twice and had three children by his second wife. He died in 1966."

Sir John Meredith Adventure & Crime Novels
Number 1-2-3 (1936) (US title: The 1-2-3 Murders)
Concrete Castle (1936) (US title: The Concrete Castle Murders)
The Black Emperor (1936)
The Dictatorship of the Dove (1936)
Fatal Friday (1937)
Red Rope (1937)
Secret Sceptre (1937)
The Prince of Paradise (1938)
Golden Guilt (1938)
Emerald Embassy (1939)
The Mind of John Meredith (1946)
Sorcerer's Shaft (1947) - only in a minor role
Flight into Fear (1948)
The Prisoner of the Pyramid (1948)
The Promise of the Phoenix (1950)
Transparent Traitor (1950)
Bare Bodkin (1951)