an unqualified tour de force, has an interesting and revealing history. Lord Dunsany was amused to notice that people were reading gruesome stories of murder in preference to his own more delicate tales. He wondered if he could write a story ‘gruesome enough for them’. So, with ’tec tongue in cheek but writing with grim seriousness, Lord Dunsany fashioned ‘The Two Bottles of Relish’.
The story proved ‘gruesome enough’—indeed, it far exceeded Lord Dunsany’s original intent. Editors were fascinated by the tale, but they frankly confessed that it made them ill. As a matter of fact, no male editor in England or America would publish the story. Finally, a woman dared—Lady Rhondda, who printed it in Time and Tide, November 12-19, 1932. Lord Dunsany has always thought that Lady Rhondda, a militant feminist, published the story as an example of sheer realism, saying to herself, ‘That is just how men do treat women.’ Gradually the widespread nausea (to use Lord Dunsany’s own phrase) seems to have worn off …
Lord Dunsany informs us that there are seven other tales about detective Linley, and that he hopes to include all eight in his 1951 volume of short stories. Needless to say, this book, when published, will be selected for Queen’s Quorum, for if Lord Dunsany had written only the very first tale of detective Linley, without the seven ‘sequels’, this single achievement would have earned Mr Linley’s creator a permanent seat at King Edgar’s Round Table.
ELLERY QUEEN
1948
SMETHERS is my name. I’m what you might call a small man, and in a small way of business. I travel for Numnumo, a relish for meats and savouries; the world-famous relish I ought to say. It’s really quite good, no deleterious acids in it, and does not affect the heart; so it is quite easy to push. I wouldn’t have got the job if it weren’t. But I hope some day to get something that’s harder to push, as of course the harder they are to push, the better the pay. At present I can just make my way, with nothing at all over; but then I live in a very expensive flat. It happened like this, and that brings me to my story. And it isn’t the story you’d expect from a small man like me, yet there’s nobody else to tell it. Those that know anything of it besides me, are all for hushing it up. Well, I was looking for a room to live in in London when first I got my job; it had to be in London, to be central; and I went to a block of buildings, very gloomy they looked, and saw the man that ran them and asked him for what I wanted; flats they called them; just a bedroom and a sort of a cupboard. Well, he was showing a man round at the time who was a gent, in fact more than that, so he didn’t take much notice of me, the man that ran all those flats didn’t, I mean. So I just ran behind for a bit, seeing all sorts of rooms, and waiting till I could be shown my class of thing. We came to a very nice flat, a sitting-room, bedroom and bathroom, and a sort of little place that they called a hall. And that’s how I came to know Linley. He was the bloke that was being shown round.
‘Bit expensive,’ he said.
And the man that ran the flats turned away to the window and picked his teeth. It’s funny how much you can show by a simple thing like that. What he meant to say was that he’d hundreds of flats like that, and thousands of people looking for them, and he didn’t care who had them or whether they all went on looking. There was no mistaking him, somehow. And yet he never said a word, only looked away out of the window and picked his teeth. And I ventured to speak to Mr Linley then; and I said, ‘How about it, sir, if I paid half, and shared it? I wouldn’t be in the way, and I’m out all day, and whatever you said would go, and really I wouldn’t be no more in your way than a cat.’
You may be surprised at my doing it; and you’ll be much more surprised at him accepting it; at least, you would if you knew me, just a small man in a small way of business; and yet I could see at once that he was taking to me more than he was taking to the man at the window.
‘But there’s only one bedroom,’ he said.
‘I could make up my bed easy in that little room there,’ I said.
‘The hall,’ said the man looking round from the window, without taking his tooth-pick out.
‘And I’d have the bed out of the way and hid in the cupboard by any hour you like,’ I said.
He looked thoughtful, and the other man looked out over London; and in the end, do you know, he accepted.
‘Friend of yours?’ said the flat man.
‘Yes,’ answered Mr Linley.
It was really very nice of him.
I’ll tell you why I did it. Able to afford it? Of course not. But I heard him tell the flat man that he had just come down from Oxford and wanted to live for a few months in London. It turned out he wanted just to be comfortable and do nothing for a bit while he looked things over and chose a job, or probably just as long as he could afford it. Well, I said to myself, what’s the Oxford manner worth in business, especially a business like mine? Why, simply everything you’ve got. If I picked up only a quarter of it from this Mr Linley I’d be able to double my sales, and that would soon mean I’d be given something a lot harder to push, with perhaps treble the pay. Worth it every time. And you can make a quarter of an education go twice as far again, if you’re careful with it. I mean you don’t have to quote the whole of the Inferno to show that you’ve read Milton; half a line may do it.
Well, about that story I have to tell. And you mightn’t think that a little man like me could make you shudder. I soon forgot about the Oxford manner when we settled down in our flat. I forgot it in the sheer wonder of the man himself. He had a mind like an acrobat’s body, like a bird’s body. It didn’t want education. You didn’t notice whether he was educated or not. Ideas were always leaping up in him, things you’d never have thought of. And not only that, but if any ideas were about, he’d sort of catch them. Time and again I’ve found him knowing just what I was going to say. Not thought-reading, but what they call intuition. I used to try to learn a bit about chess, just to take my thoughts off Numnumo in the evening, when I’d done with it. But problems I never could do. Yet he’d come along and glance at my problem and say, ‘You probably move that piece first,’ and I’d say, ‘But where?’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, one of those three squares.’ And I’d say, ‘But it will be taken on all of them.’ And the piece a queen all the time, mind you. And he’d say, ‘Yes, it’s doing no good there: you’re probably meant to lose it.’
And, do you know, he’d be right.
You see, he’d been following out what the other man had been thinking. That’s what he’d been doing.
Well, one day there was that ghastly murder at Unge. I don’t know if you remember it. But Steeger had gone down to live with a girl in a bungalow on the North Downs, and that was the first we had heard of him.
The girl had £200, and he got every penny of it and she utterly disappeared. And Scotland Yard couldn’t find her.
Well I’d happened to read that Steeger had bought two bottles of Numnumo; for the Otherthorpe police had found out everything about him, except what he did with the girl; and that of course attracted my attention, or I should have never thought again about the case or said a word of it to Linley. Numnumo was always on my mind, as I always spent every day pushing it, and that kept me from forgetting the other thing. And so one day I said to Linley, ‘I wonder with all that knack you have for seeing through a chess problem, and thinking of one thing and another, that you don’t have a go at that Otherthorpe mystery. It’s a problem as much as chess,’ I said.
‘There’s not the mystery in ten murders that there is in one game of chess,’ he answered.
‘It’s beaten Scotland Yard,’ I said.
‘Has it?’ he asked.
‘Knocked them endwise,’ I said.
‘It shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. And almost immediately after he