All posts tagged Ruritania

The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie (1925)

‘Oh, damn!’ cried Virginia, jamming down the receiver. It was horrible to be shut up with a dead body and to have no one to speak to.
(Virginia Revel, chapter 8)

‘I’m sorry it were a foreigner,’ said Johnson, with some regret. It made the murder seem less real. Foreigners, Johnson felt, were liable to be shot.
(Constable Johnson, chapter 10)

‘The whole thing’s horribly mysterious.’
(Virginia Revel, chapter 15)

‘I should like to tell you the story of my life,’ he remarked, ‘but it’s going to be rather a busy evening.’
(Anthony, chapter 9)

‘Do you talk?’ asked Bundle. ‘Or are you just strong and silent?’
(Bundle to Anthony, chapter 15)

‘We’ve never had a murder in the house before. Exciting, isn’t it? I’m sorry your character was so completely cleared this morning. I’ve always wanted to meet a murderer and see for myself if they’re as genial and charming as the Sunday papers always say they are.’
(Bundle to Anthony, chapter 15)

‘I find talking to foreigners particularly fatiguing. I think it’s because they’re so polite.’
(Lord Caterham, chapter 16)

Bundle looked at him with lifted eyebrows. ‘Crook stuff?’ she inquired.
(Chapter 22)

‘I never deny anything that amuses me.’
(Anthony, chapter 27)

‘Oh, Anthony,’ cried Virginia. ‘How perfectly screaming!’
(Chapter 30)

International conspiracies

I thought the ridiculous novel ‘The Big Four’ with its plot about a fiendish international crime organisation must be an aberration in Christie’s oeuvre, which I had been led to believe was all about country house murder mysteries but not a bit of it – ‘The Secret of Chimneys’ is also about international intrigue and secret organisations, centres on political events on the other side of Europe and an international criminal master of disguise, not to mention gold hunting in Africa and American undercover detectives, all leading up to an outrageous series of revelations and reversals. And it was followed by a sequel (‘The Seven Dials Mystery’) which is even more preposterous. So half her output in the 1920s has more in common with espionage fiction than sedate murder mysteries.

Synopsis

Anthony Cade’s two tasks

The story starts in faraway Rhodesia. Here a jolly good chap named Anthony Cade is making money as a tour guide for pasty Brits. He bumps into an old pal, James McGrath, who gives him two rather bizarre tasks which both require a bit of backstory.

Count Stylptitch Some time earlier, in Paris, he’d seen a man be set upon by a group of thugs and had gone to his rescue. the man turned out to be Count Stylptitch, a courtier in the court of King Nicholas IV of the fictional country of Herzoslovakia. This country is notorious for its assassinations, and seven years earlier King Nicholas had been assassinated and the country became a republic. Count Stylptitch went into exile in Paris where McGrath happened to save him from a beating.

McGrath forgot about it until a few weeks ago when he received a parcel. It contained the memoirs of this Count Stylptitch and a note to the effect that if he delivered the manuscript to a certain firm of publishers (Messrs. Balderson and Hodgkins) in London on or before October 13, he would receive £1,000. Now McGrath is just about to go on an expedition into the interior of Africa in search of fabled gold mines, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so he asks Anthony a favour. Can he travel back to London, under the name James McGrath, hand over the manuscript to the publishers, and receive the £1,000. How about if he gives him 25%, £250. Anthony is sick of being a tour guide and so says yes.

Dutch Pedro But as if that wasn’t contorted and implausible enough, McGrath gives Anthony a second task. This is also related to a Good Samaritan intervention, for some time earlier, in Uganda, McGrath saw a man drowning in a river, dived in and saved him. Once rescued, this man (derogatorily referred to throughout simply as a ‘Dago’ [‘an insulting and contemptuous term for a person of Italian or Spanish birth or descent’]), although going under the name of Dutch Pedro, gives McGrath the most valuable thing he owns which turns out to be a bundle of love letters written by a married Englishwoman to someone not her husband. The D*** had been blackmailing her and now handed over the letters to McGrath so that he could blackmail her in his turn. The letters don’t contain an address but two clues: at one point they mention a place, a country house called Chimneys.

‘Chimneys?’ [Anthony] said. ‘That’s rather extraordinary.’
‘Why, do you know it?’
‘It’s one of the stately homes of England, my dear James. A place where Kings and Queens go for weekends, and diplomatists forgather and diplome.’

And one of the letters is signed with a name, Virginia Revel.

Right. So McGrath is tasking Anthony with taking both the memoirs and the letters back to England, handing over the memoirs to the nominated publisher, and tracking down and handing the letters back to this lady, Virginia Revel. Right. OK.

International intrigue

The second element in the setup and the reason all the action converges on this country house, Chimneys, is as follows. Oil has recently (and implausibly) been discovered in Herzoslovakia. At the same time the people have become disillusioned with their republican government and many hanker for a return of the monarchy. The British government is prepared to back the return of the nearest relative to the assassinated Nicholas IV to the throne, Prince Michael, in exchange for the new king and his government signing favourable oil concessions to a syndicate of British oil companies. These are represented by a Jewish businessman, Mr Herman Isaacstein (who is described with a wealth of antisemitic tropes and stereotypes).

The current Secretary of State, the permanently anxious and stressed George Lomax, who lives at a country pile named Wyvern Abbey, persuades his friend, the easy-going Lord Caterham, to host an informal meeting of all the people involved in this international plan, at his country house, Chimneys (seven miles from Wyvern). Here’s the tone of humorous Lord Caterham and his daughter:

‘Who wants to be a peer nowadays?’
‘Nobody,’ said Bundle. ‘They’d much rather keep a prosperous public house.’

They want to conceal the meeting’s true nature from a curious world (and the press) and so George asks Lord Caterham to invite other, ‘neutral’ guests to make it look like a genuine country house party. As George explains:

GEORGE: ‘One slip over this Herzoslovakian business and we’re done. It is most important that the Oil concessions should be granted to a British company. You must see that?’
LORD CATERHAM: ‘Of course, of course.’
GEORGE: ‘Prince Michael Obolovitch arrives the end of the week, and the whole thing can be carried through at Chimneys under the guise of a shooting party.’

So all converging on this lovely stately home are:

Lord Caterham – owner of Chimneys and reluctant host
Lady Eileen ‘Bundle’ Brent – eldest daughter of Lord Caterham
The Honourable George Lomax – Foreign Office
Bill Eversleigh – Lomax’s secretary
Herman Isaacstein – financier of the British oil syndicate
Prince Michael Obolovitch of Herzoslovakia –
Captain Andrassy – his equerry
Hiram P. Fish – collector of first editions, invited to the house party by Lord Caterham
Virginia Revel – cousin of George Lomax, daughter of a peer, society beauty and young widow of…
Timothy Revel, former British envoy to Herzoslovakia i.e. is familiar with the country and its politics
Tredwell – the grey-haired old butler

More about Chimneys:

Clement Edward Alistair Brent, ninth Marquis of Caterham, was a small gentleman, shabbily dressed, and entirely unlike the popular conception of a Marquis. He had faded blue eyes, a thin melancholy nose, and a vague but courteous manner. At one time Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, he had always bulked largely in the counsels of the Empire, and his country seat, Chimneys, was famous for its hospitality. Ably seconded by his wife, a daughter of the Duke of Perth, history had been made and unmade at informal week-end parties at Chimneys, and there was hardly anyone of note in England—or indeed in Europe—who had not, at one time or another, stayed there.

In London

But before we get to Chimneys, there are some important and ‘exciting’ scenes in London, some to do with Count Stylptitch’s memoirs, some to do with the blackmail letters of Virginia Revel.

The memoirs The thing about the Count’s memoirs is they may contain compromising information or stories about the assassinated king and his court which will wreck the Royalists’ plan of getting back into power. So on his first day back in London, Anthony he is approached by two different Herzoslovakian men who both try to acquire the manuscript. The first is a Count who supports the Royalist faction and offers to outbid the publisher in order to suppress any embarrassing information it might contain. Cade politely but firmly refuses. The second is a member of a revolutionary group, the Comrades of the Red Hand (‘They’re very fond of executing traitors. It has a picturesque element which seems to appeal to them’), who demands that Anthony hand it over at gunpoint. But Anthony is not only frightfully posh (Eton and Oxford) but because of his time in Africa, is lean, fit and can handle himself. So he disarms the man and sends him away.

The publisher McGrath mentioned phones Cade the next day, telling him that a) the situation has become very dangerous, with people contacting them and threatening them against publishing it and b) promising to send their employee, Mr Holmes, to pick up the memoir, which he duly does, takes delivery of the manuscript and hands over a cheque for £1,000. So Anthony thinks he has concluded one of his two tasks successfully.

So he carries out the next stage in his plan, which is to ditch the alias of James McGrath which he has used up to this point in order to get the £1,000 from the publishers. So he checks out of the posh Blitz Hotel where’s he’s been staying (and with that ‘James’ McGrath’ disappears from public records) and gets a taxi to a much cheaper hotel where he checks in under his own name, Anthony Cade.

However, just before he left the Blitz, he received a message brought by a messenger boy. This was written by George Lomax, who says he has only just learned of McGrath’s arrival in Britain with the fateful memoirs, and was begging James McGrath not to hand them over to the publishers until he (McGrath) comes to see him (Lomax) at a country house party being held this weekend at Chimneys.

Well, thinks Anthony laconically, it’s too late to prevent the handing over of the memoirs, and he is no longer ‘James McGrath’, but all this fuss about Chimneys doesn’t half tempt him to travel down to the place and gatecrash this weekend party.

The letters As to the blackmail letters, to go back a bit, the night before he checked out of the Blitz, Anthony awakens to discover one of the hotel waiters he recognises, Giuseppe, has broken into his room and is rummaging through his luggage. They have a fight, which is long enough for Anthony to see his face and hear his Italian accent, but the waiter breaks away and escapes and Anthony then discovers he has taken the packet of letters with him. Anthony suspects the man had been hired by one of the Herzoslovakian factions and took the letters by mistake, imagining a bunch of documents tied up in a bundle must be the famous memoirs.

So on one level this is a tale of two manuscripts, which get mixed up.

Virginia Revel

During these exciting two days Anthony had been trying to track down the ‘Virginia Revel’ mentioned in the letters. He had discovered from the telephone directory that there were six Virginia Revels in the London area and had begun the process of visiting them to identify the correct one.

Now we cut to the experiences of the Virginia Revel who the story is going to increasingly feature. But the important thing to bear in mind is that she is not the Virginia Revel of the letters. She never wrote the letters, she’s got nothing to do with them. She is the wrong Virginia Revel.

But the Italian waiter who stole the bundle from Anthony’s hotel room, having realised their blackmail potential, makes the same mistake as everyone else and approaches her, the wrong Virginia Revel, with a sample letter. He turns up at Virginia’s home and, unaware that she did not write the letters and that her husband is dead, he attempts to blackmail her.

Now here’s the thing about this book, its characters, plot and tone: Virginia immediately realises that she is not the Virginia Revel who wrote the letters but she decides to humour the blackmailer and pretend that she is! Why? For the lolz. For the gagz. To see what it feels like to be blackmailed.

Exactly like Anthony Cade, this Virginia Revel is so confident of her place in English society and the English class system (cousin of George Lomax, daughter of a peer, society beauty and widow of an ambassador) that she treats everything that happens in her life with droll, upper-class confidence, as endless sources of potential amusement. Later, it is said of her that:

Her position was so assured and unassailable that anyone for whom she vouched was accepted as a matter of course. (Chapter 13)

To use the modern phrase, both Virginia and Anthony positively reek of upper class privilege, and it is their cheerful, indomitable, ironic handling of all the aspects of a traditional murder mystery (international intrigue, disguises, dead bodies) which make the book such fun to read.

So on this frivolous impulse Virginia plays the part of a blackmail victim, hands over the petty cash she has in the house and promises to pay him more tomorrow at 6 o’clock. But when she arrives home the next day, after playing tennis (one of the new 1920s sporting fads, along with golf – see The Murder on the Links) she finds this same blackmailer shot dead in her house.

Virginia has a maid, Élise, who she tells to go out on a chore while she ponders what to do next, just as who turns up on her doorstep? The tall confident hero of the book, Anthony Wade. At this point he hasn’t revealed his name and is posing as a member of the unemployed because he’s still sussing out whether Virginia is the Virginia. But she pulls him inside and says she’s got a job for him. Immediately they hit it off with a shared sense of upper class savoir faire and a certain amount of physical attraction, too.

‘This isn’t regular work you’re offering me, I hope?’
A smile hovered for a moment on her lips.
‘It’s very irregular.’
‘Good,’ said the young man in a tone of satisfaction.
(Chapter 8)

Virginia tells him about the body which they both treat with upper-class confidence.

‘There’s a dead man in the next room,’ said Virginia. ‘He’s been murdered, and I don’t know what to do about it.’
She blurted out the words as simply as a child might have done. The young man went up enormously in her estimation by the way he accepted her statement. He might have been used to hearing a similar announcement made every day of his life.
‘Excellent,’ he said, with a trace of enthusiasm. ‘I’ve always wanted to do a bit of amateur detective work.’
(Chapter 8)

When he inspects the corpse, Anthony realises it’s the same waiter who broke into his room at the Blitz and stole the letters. He promises to get rid of the corpse. After all, he’s never disposed of a dead body before and is quite thrilled at the idea, just as Virginia had never been blackmailed before and was up for the lolz.

‘I’ve always wanted to see if I couldn’t conceal a crime with the necessary cunning, but have had a squeamish objection to shedding blood.’
(Chapter 9)

And:

Virginia: ‘It’s really dreadful of me saddling a perfect stranger with a dead body like this.’
‘I like it,’ returned Anthony nonchalantly. ‘If one of my friends, Jimmy McGrath, were here, he’d tell you that anything of this kind suits me down to the ground.’
(Chapter 9)

So Anthony puts the body into one of Virginia’s trunk, then there’s a lot of fol-de-rol about her taking it to a train station and leaving it in left luggage, Anthony collecting it, putting it in his car and driving out of London. Way out in the sticks he dumps the body along a stretch of empty road (on ‘the long stretch of road mid-way between Hounslow and Staines’, not so quiet and unfrequented now!).

Oh yes, there’s an aspect of the murder which puzzled our two posh amateur sleuths which is that the gun which shot the blackmailer was left by his body. Why? And a bigger question: the little gun was engraved with the name of ‘Virginia’!! Had she seen it before? No, she insists. Then what? Why? And of course the bigger question, Who shot him in the first place, and why?

Something else I haven’t mentioned yet, which is that when Virginia first got home from tennis, she discovered that all her servants including the devoted butler, all except Élise the maid, had gone down to Datchet (a small town outside Windsor). What? Turns out she owns a little country place there and from time to time asks her servants to go there and prepare it for her. But not today. Someone else sent the household a telegram to be out, someone who knows all about her household arrangements and habits. But who? And why?

And I also haven’t had space to explain yet, but all this happens on the very afternoon of the day she’s due to go down to Chimneys, for what she thinks, at this stage, will be a jolly country house party. Now when Anthony read the blackmail letters back in Africa, one of the few clues in them was mention of this same country house, Chimneys. And when Anthony rifled through the dead man’s pockets, in the lining of his coat he found a scrap of paper with a fragment of text on it, reading ‘Chimneys 11.45 Thursday.’

The letters mention Chimneys. This scrap of paper mentions Chimneys. Virginia has been invited to Chimneys. So as the pair confer they become increasingly certain that something is going to happen at this place, Chimneys, and during this supposed country house party. But what?

So after disposing of the corpse, as described, Anthony gets back in his ‘battered second-hand Morris Cowley’ and drives north till he comes to the wall surrounding the Chimneys estate. A wall isn’t going to stop out hero, so he climbs over it, walks across the wet grounds, and is just approaching the house itself when he hears a short ring out!

Oh no! Is he too late? Has someone been murdered? Who? And Why? Is Virginia safe? Will Anthony find himself suspected of the murder?

I’ve summarised about the first third of the story. At this point I think that, in the spirit of the thing, I’ll stop my summary. If you want to enjoy the further complications, red herrings and improbable explanations which Christie cooks up in profusion, the entire novel is freely available to read online. Clue:

‘How frightfully exciting,’ commented Bundle. ‘You don’t usually get a murder and a burglary crowded into one week-end.’

The only thing I will say is that, when there is trouble at Chimneys on the fateful weekend (as the reader, by now, strongly expects there will be) it triggers the introduction of the bluff, imperturbable Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard:

… a squarely built middle-aged man with a face so singularly devoid of expression as to be quite remarkable.
(Chapter 11)

who was to go on and become a recurring character in Christie’s work, appearing in a further four novels. Everyone realises how canny he is in his quiet unassuming way:

But at that moment, the moment when Battle apparently admitted Anthony’s complete absence of complicity in the crime, Anthony felt more than ever the need of being upon his guard. Superintendent Battle was a very astute officer. It would not do to make any slip with Superintendent Battle about.
(Chapter 12)

Antisemitism

I’ve noticed the presence of antisemitic animus on a number of authors of this period, including Saki, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In this novel the antisemitic tropes gather around the figure of the Jewish financier, Mr Herman Isaacstein.

There was one other person in the room, a big man sitting in a chair by the fireplace. He was dressed in very correct English shooting clothes which nevertheless sat strangely upon him. He had a fat yellow face, and black eyes, as impenetrable as those of a cobra. There was a generous curve to the big nose and power in the square lines of the vast jaw.

Earlier Lord Caterham, otherwise a genial old cove, refers to Isaacstein as ‘Mr Ikey Hermanstein’ and then as ‘Nosystein’ (with reference to his big hooked pantomime Jew’s nose) and later to ‘Fat Iky’.

The cobra simile stated in the passage above is repeated later:

His [Isaacstein’s] black eyes were bent upon the detective. More than ever, he reminded Battle of a hooded cobra.

Later:

VIRGINIA: ‘Isaacstein looks foreign enough, Heaven knows.’

The lazy antisemitic tropes surrounding him are unpleasant.

Black

If we’re pointing out slurs, there’s a race-related moment right at the novel’s conclusion when, for a moment, his friends panic that Anthony might have married a black woman!

The Baron retreated a step or two. Dismay overspread his countenance. ‘Something wrong I knew there would be,’ he boomed. ‘Merciful God in Heaven! He has married a black woman in Africa!’
‘Come, come, it’s not so bad as all that,’ said Anthony, laughing. ‘She’s white enough—white all through, bless her.’

The more you reflect on this little exchange, the worse it becomes.

Balkans business

To a very large extent the text is made up of clichés, I think Christie’s claim to novelty at the time must surely have been not so much the subject matter or behaviour of the characters so much as the extraordinary complexity of the twists and turns of the narrative, the laying of countless false clues, and then the dazzling revelations at the end which come as a complete surprise (as they do in this novel).

History of Ruritania

The fictional country of Ruritania is first mentioned in The Prisoner of Zenda. According to the Wikipedia article ‘Nowadays, the term connotes a quaint minor European country’ associated with kings and princes with preposterous names, colourful costumes, in a state of permanent political unrest. The same idea – of the Balkans as the home of a particular type of comic political intrigue – is found all over early 20th century fiction, in various Sherlock Holmes stories, Arnold Bennett’s preposterous comedy thriller the Grand Hotel Babylon, in John Buchan thrillers, through to Tintin whose 1938 adventure ‘King Ottokar’s Sceptre’ is set in the fictional Balkan (i.e. Ruritanian) country of Syldavia, complete with fragile kings and plotting courtiers etc etc.

My point is that The Secret of Chimneys can be added to the list of fictions which use the clichés and tropes of the embattled royal family of a fictional Balkan state to manufacture a popular thriller narrative.

Christie’s bookishness

Not literary references, the opposite: I’m referring to her compulsive need to have the narrator or characters make regular comparisons to the clichés and stereotypes of the cheap thrillers and thousands of other detective novels which clearly infested the world, even by the early 1920s.

About the same height as Mr. Cade, but thickset and not nearly so good-looking. The sort of man one read about in books, who probably kept a saloon.
(Narrator)

‘As they say in books. Guile, George, lots of guile.’
(Virginia)

‘First a blackmailer, and then George in diplomatic difficulties. Will he tell all to the beautiful woman who asks for his confidence so pathetically? No, he will reveal nothing until the last chapter.’
(Virginia)

‘Good heavens!’ cried Virginia. ‘Is this Sherlock Holmes?’
‘No,’ said Anthony regretfully. ‘I’m afraid it’s just plain or garden cheating.’

‘And whatever you may imagine from reading detective stories, doctors aren’t such magicians that they can tell you exactly how many hours a man has been dead.’
(Anthony)

‘I take it that you didn’t meet the murdered man?’
‘No. To put it like a book, he “retired to his own apartments immediately on arrival.”‘
(Anthony and Virginia)

‘Why did you seem so surprised when I mentioned the name of Jimmy McGrath to you yesterday at Pont Street? Had you heard it before?’
‘I had, Sherlock Holmes.’
(Anthony and Virginia, chapter 15)

‘I suspected the French governess, Battle. A: Upon the grounds of her being the most unlikely person, according to the canons of the best fiction…
(Anthony, chapter 18)

‘Do you really think this Arsène Lupin fellow is actually among the household now?’ asked Bill, his eyes sparkling. [a reference to the fictional gentleman thief and master of disguise created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc.] (Chapter 18)

And Christie has Battle deliver a little lecture on the subject.

‘In the meantime,’ said Anthony, ‘I am still the amateur assistant?’
‘That’s it, Mr. Cade.’
‘Watson to your Sherlock, in fact?’
‘Detective stories are mostly bunkum,’ said Battle unemotionally. ‘But they amuse people,’ he added, as an afterthought. ‘And they’re useful sometimes.’
‘In what way?’ asked Anthony curiously.
‘They encourage the universal idea that the police are stupid. When we get an amateur crime, such as a murder, that’s very useful indeed.’

As I’ve said elsewhere, keeping on mentioning how your story is different from cheap thrillers doesn’t really differentiate it, but only signposts the similarities.

That said, maybe I’m missing the point and all these references are in fact just a type of joke – it’s a comedy stopgap to have the characters constantly referring to the clichés of crime novels and detective movies, self consciously mocking their own bravery or actions.

He wriggled into a lurid silk dressing-gown, and picked up a poker. ‘The orthodox weapon,’ he observed. (Bill Eversleigh, chapter 17)

And:

‘What’s this I hear about Virginia bolting off in the middle of the night? She’s not been kidnapped, has she?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Bundle. ‘She left a note pinned to the pincushion in the orthodox fashion.’ (Chapter 27)

And:

‘And don’t scream or faint or anything. I won’t let anyone hurt you.’
‘My hero!’ murmured Virginia.

And:

‘The plot thickens,’ said Anthony lightly.

Comedy

Or just jokes:

‘There’s an extraordinary lot of character in ears, Mr. Cade.’
‘Don’t look so hard at mine, Battle,’ complained Anthony. ‘You make me quite nervous.’

The book is stuffed with comic repartee:

‘I say, Virginia, I do love you so awfully—’
‘Not this morning, Bill. I’m not strong enough. Anyway, I’ve always told you the best people don’t propose before lunch.’

Or:

‘I can’t think,’ said Lord Caterham, ‘why nobody nowadays ever sits still after a meal. It’s a lost art.’

Agatha Christie is by far a more comic writer than Noel Coward ever was. Coward’s plays overflow with rancorous bickering but contain pitifully few really funny bits of repartee. Whereas Christie’s novels overflow with good-humoured comedy everywhere.

‘Half a second,’ said Anthony. “I’ve got a confession to make to you, Virginia. Something that everyone else knows, but that I haven’t yet told you.’
‘I don’t mind how many strange women you’ve loved so long as you don’t tell me about them.’
‘Women!’ said Anthony, with a virtuous air. ‘Women indeed? You ask James here what kind of women I was going about with last time he saw me.’
‘Frumps,’ said Jimmy solemnly. ‘Utter frumps. Not one a day under forty-five.’
‘Thank you, Jimmy,’ said Anthony, ‘you’re a true friend.’

‘I’m taking the Panhard up to town after lunch,’ she remarked. ‘Anyone want a lift? Wouldn’t you like to come, Mr. Cade? We’ll be back by dinner-time.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Anthony. ‘I’m quite happy and busy down here.’
‘The man fears me,’ said Bundle. ‘Either my driving or my fatal fascination! Which is it?’
‘The latter,’ said Anthony. ‘Every time.’

Women’s roles

Besides beauty, she possessed courage and brains.

Noel Coward gets credit for the unabashed modernity of his women characters, who have short hair, wear short skirts, smoke and drink and openly talk about shocking subjects – yet I find exactly the same behaviour in Christie’s young 1920s women. Both Virginia and Bundle are no-nonsense, go-for-it young women who regard old chauvinist attitudes of the fuddy-duddy men around them as ludicrous.

‘Listen to me, Virginia,’ said Bill. ‘This is man’s work—’
‘Don’t be an idiot, Bill.’

They have to put up with no end of sexist generalisations which justify Virginia Woolf’s accusations in her feminist masterpiece Three Guineas.

MCGRATH: ‘Like all women, she’d put no date and no address on most of the letters.’
LOMAX: ‘Not that I approve of women in politics—St. Stephen’s is ruined, absolutely ruined, nowadays. But woman in her own sphere can do wonders…’

Even that nice Mr Anthony:

‘You’re a very unusual woman,’ said Anthony suddenly, turning and looking at her.
‘Why?’
‘You can refrain from asking questions.’

And are aware that the world they operate in, the culture they move in, is drenched with sexist put-downs:

VIRGINIA: ‘We women are usually supposed to be cats, but at any rate I’d done another woman a good turn this afternoon.’

‘I know,’ said Virginia. ‘Women are so indiscreet! I’ve often heard George say so.’

And Virginia is asked by Lomax to ‘Delilah’ the memoirs out of this man McGrath i.e. to sweet-talk or seduce them out of him – a suggestion she rejects with disgust.

Thus Christie depicts the world of sexist assumptions which her independent women have to operate in. And yet they not only reject sexist generalisations or suggestions to the speaker’s face, more importantly they act with a fearlessness and freedom which completely contradicts the sexist slurs. And they drive like demons, witness Bundle’s crazy driving which sometimes hits the reckless speed of fifty miles an hour!

‘I shouldn’t recommend driving with you as a tonic for nervous old ladies, but personally I’ve enjoyed it. The last time I was in equal danger was when I was charged by a herd of wild elephants.’

‘Tim Revel was bowled over by Virginia—he was Irish, you know, and most attractive, with a genius for expressing himself well. Virginia was quite young—eighteen. She couldn’t go anywhere without seeing Tim in a state of picturesque misery, vowing he’d shoot himself or take to drink if she didn’t marry him. Girls believe these things—or used to—we’ve advanced a lot in the last eight years.’

Class

Of course the fearlessness of the two posh young women, Virginia and Bundle, stems in large part because of their upper-class provenance. Their superb confidence derives from their fearless upbringing. At one point Christie has Superintendent Battle give this definitive formulation:

‘Well, you see, Mr. Cade, most of my work has lain amongst these people. What they call the upper classes, I mean. You see, the majority of people are always wondering what the neighbours will think. But tramps and aristocrats don’t—they just do the first thing that comes into their heads, and they don’t bother to think what anyone thinks of them. I’m not meaning just the idle rich, the people who give big parties, and so on, I mean those that have had it born and bred in them for generations that nobody else’s opinion counts but their own. I’ve always found the upper classes the same—fearless, truthful and sometimes extraordinarily foolish.’

Battle’s methods

Battle’s procedure:

‘It’s rather too soon to have ideas, Mr Isaacstein. I’ve not got beyond asking myself the first question.’
‘What is that?’
‘Oh, it’s always the same. Motive. Who benefits by the death of Prince Michael?’
(Chapter 15)

And:

‘I’m glad of that,’ said Anthony. ‘I’ve a feeling that ever since I met you you’ve been laying little traps for me. On the whole I’ve managed to avoid falling into them, but the strain has been acute.’
Battle smiled grimly.
‘That’s how you get a crook in the end, sir. Keep him on the run, to and fro, turning and twisting. Sooner or later, his nerve goes, and you’ve got him.’

And humour:

‘You’ve got a plan, eh?’
‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ve got a plan. But I’ve got an idea. It’s a very useful thing sometimes, an idea.’

Heightism

A symptom of the pulpy, silly, tongue-in-cheek feel of the whole thing is how many people are commandingly tall:

The hero:

They all admired Mr Cade so much, his tall lean figure, his sun-tanned face, the light-hearted manner with which he settled disputes and cajoled them all into good temper.

And the heroine:

Virginia Revel was just twenty-seven. She was tall and of an exquisite slimness—indeed, a poem might have been written to her slimness, it was so exquisitely proportioned.

And the other heroine:

The door opened and a girl came into the room. She was tall, slim and dark, with an attractive boyish face, and a very determined manner. This was Lady Eileen Brent, commonly known as Bundle, Lord Caterham’s eldest daughter.

The blackmailer:

Anthony observed him more closely. He was a tall man, supple like all waiters, with a clean-shaven, mobile face. An Italian, Anthony thought, not a Frenchman.

The police inspector:

A tall portly man, Inspector Badgworthy, with a heavy regulation tread. Inclined to breathe hard in moments of professional strain.

The American:

On the threshold stood a tall man with black hair neatly parted in the middle, china blue eyes with a particularly innocent expression, and a large placid face.

The dead prince’s aide-de-camp:

He returned shortly accompanied by a tall fair man with high cheek-bones, and very deep-set blue eyes, and an impassivity of countenance which almost rivalled Battle’s.

It is a Photoshopped world of fine physical specimens.

Phrases

revenons à nos moutons = French for ‘Let’s get back to the subject at hand’

A ‘cat’ is, from the context, a gossipy bitch.

Even women like her because she isn’t a bit of a cat.

I think characters in Coward use the word in the same sense and, as we will see, Christie uses it freely in virtually all her early novels.

Marrows

When Anthony talks about retiring the first image that comes into his mind is retiring to a nice place in the country and ‘growing vegetable marrows’. Now this was precisely Poirot’s activity in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd where he threw one of his marrows over the fence of his rented cottage and accidentally hit his neighbour, Dr Sheppard, the extremely unreliable narrator of that story.

The Tube

Couldn’t help laughing out loud when Anthony has a little speech explaining why the single thing which undermined his lifelong belief in equality and democracy was getting on the London Tube.

‘You see, when I was very young, I had democratic ideas. Believed in the purity of ideals, and the equality of all men. I especially disbelieved in Kings and Princes.’
‘And since then?’ asked Battle shrewdly.
‘Oh, since then, I’ve travelled and seen the world. There’s damned little equality going about. Mind you, I still believe in democracy. But you’ve got to force it on people with a strong hand—ram it down their throats. Men don’t want to be brothers—they may some day, but they don’t now. My final belief in the Brotherhood of Man died the day I arrived in London last week, when I observed the people standing in a Tube train resolutely refuse to move up and make room for those who entered. You won’t turn people into angels by appealing to their better natures just yet awhile—but by judicious force you can coerce them into behaving more or less decently to one another to go on with. I still believe in the Brotherhood of Man, but it’s not coming yet awhile. Say another ten thousand years or so. It’s no good being impatient. Evolution is a slow process.’

Well, it’s a hundred years later and the situation is, if anything, worse. The company I work for are forcing us to come back to the office because they apparently think that spending an hour with your face in someone else’s armpit, in hundred degree heat on the Northern Line, twice a day, will miraculously increase their employees’ productivity and creativity.

Credit

‘The Secret of Chimneys’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1925 by William Collins and Son.

Related reviews

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1920s reviews

The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett (1902)

Thinking the matter out in the calmness of solitude, all seemed strange, unreal, uncertain to her. Were conspiracies actually possible nowadays? Did queer things actually happen in Europe? And did they happen in London hotels?
(Nella, pondering how the plot is thickening, The Grand Hotel Babylon page 62)

‘Perhaps you haven’t grasped the fact, Nella, that we’re in the middle of a rather queer business.’
(Nella’s dad, explaining, p.54)

I don’t know, Mr Babylon, whether you have ever tried to creep through a small hole with a skirt on. Have you?’
‘I have not had that pleasure,’ said little Felix, bowing again.
(An example of the book’s charming surrealism)

‘This isn’t a burglary, my dear. I calculate it’s something far worse than a burglary.’
‘What?’ she cried. ‘Murder? Arson? Dynamite plot? How perfectly splendid!’
(Nella’s character in a nutshell, p.172)

This is a preposterous farrago, a ridiculously entertaining, over-the-top, mystery thriller from the earliest days of the genre, and quite a surprise coming from the Edwardian novelist Arnold Bennett, who’s mainly remembered for his long earnest novels about life in the Potteries district of the Midlands.

Here’s a brief biog of Arnold pinched from Wikipedia:

Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 to 27 March 1931) was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboration with other writers), and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.

His first novel was a fairly serious effort, ‘A Man from the North’. ‘Hotel Babylon’ was the second, published in instalments in a magazine called the Golden Penny during 1901.

It’s a frolic, an entertainment, Bennett’s attempt at a mystery thriller, capitalising on the popularity of shortish mystery novels being written by loads of contemporaries, not least the Sherlock Holmes novels and all their copyists (The Hound of the Baskervilles was published the same year). It’s not a mature work, it doesn’t speak with the voice he would find to write his many serious novels about the Potteries region of the Midlands.

To begin with it reminded me of the not very good early work of Robert Louis Stevenson, the New Arabian Nights, specifically the way each new development in the silly plot feels random and forced. The Sherlock Holmes stories have lasted so long because Doyle put a lot of effort into making his plots carefully crafted puzzles, with a modicum of plausibility. As you work through them you realise there is a plan, there is a secret, and it’s worth trying to work it out.

By contrast, the story of ‘The Grand Hotel Babylon’ gives the strong impression of having no plan at all and of Bennett more or less making it up as he went along. The introduction to the Penguin Classics edition praises it for ending every chapter on a cliffhanger but there’s quite a difference between giving the reader a steady sequence of clues to work out the puzzle (Holmes) and just serving up a series of sensational surprises! Thus ‘The Grand Hotel Babylon’ is packed with mysterious disappearances, secret passages, kidnappings and passings out, with a whole litany of sudden wilful events which feel completely implausible and, as a result, childishly enjoyable.

Part of this can be explained by, or derives from, the personality of the central character, the wilful American heiress, Nella Racksole, 23-year-old daughter of the famous American millionaire, Theodore Racksole, a ‘tall spare man, with the iron-grey hair and the thin, firm, resolute face’ (p.156).

Nella knows what she wants and always gets it, simple as that. There’s absolutely no subtlety or maturity about her character – Nella wants it, Nella gets it. She talks to men of all types of classes with utterly fearless candour which sometimes amazes herself and always astonishes them.

He was astonished at her coolness, her firmness of assertion, her air of complete acquaintance with the world. (p.62)

She was tremendously surprised at her own coolness, and somewhat pleased with it.

The foursquare frankness with which she faces every situation and keeps surprising all the male characters by her fearlessness, reminded me of a children’s story based round a fearless girl character, something like Pollyanna or Annie or Pippy Longstocking.

When I described the centrality of Nella not only as a character but also somehow embodying the spirit of the book my daughter said, ‘It sounds like a nellodrama.’

The critics compare it more with Anthony Hope’s 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequels, because it involves a minor European princeling from a made-up eastern European country (Ruritania) and probably that is a more apt comparison / source for Bennett’s story.

But this is all to take it far too seriously. It’s a sixpenny murder mystery, written for the lolz and the entertainment. You’re meant to be amused and entertained and marvel as one preposterous development follows another in quick succession…

Plot summary

Nella is staying at the Grand Babylon Hotel with her American millionaire father, Theodore Racksole, ‘the third richest man in the United States’, worth some 40 million dollars.

Theodore has already irked the fantastically superior head waiter, Jules, by asking for an American cocktail, an Angel Kiss (‘equal quantities of maraschino, cream, and crême de menthe. Don’t stir it; don’t shake it’).

In the dining room Nella surveys the posh menu, throws it away and declares she wants a dinner of steak and a bottle of Bass beer. When Theodore instructs Jules, he replies that this is impossible, the world famous chef Rocco, would never stoop to such a thing.

So Theodore gets up, walks through the hotel to the office of the owner, short dapper Félix Babylon, and buys the hotel off him, lock stock and barrel for £400,000. Félix is happy to sell as he’d been thinking about retiring anyway although he warns Theodore that any major hotel is a hotbed of crime.

‘Do you not perceive that the roof which habitually shelters all the force, all the authority of the world, must necessarily also shelter nameless and numberless plotters, schemers, evil-doers, and workers of mischief?’ (p.26)

Theodore then calls in the chef, Rocco, and, as the new owner, gives him a pay rise (to £3,000 a year) and orders him to prepare the steak.

During this meal a friend of Nella’s shows up, a charming young man named Reginald Dimmock. As he serves the steak, Theodore notices Jules winking at Dimmock. Why?

Dimmock explains he works for Prince Aribert of Posen. His nephew is Grand Duke Eugen of Posen and that the Grand Duke is scheduled to marry a wealthy relation soon. During the conversation Jules brings Prince Aribert a succession of notes.

After dinner Theodore goes to see Félix again, in his private office, and they talk about hotel management till the early hours when Theodore decides to go roaming round his new possession.

After getting lost he finds himself on the second floor when he hears footsteps. He hides in a niche and observes Jules approaching a door with a white ribbon on it, silently opening the door and letting himself in, only to emerge a few minutes later and walk away.

When Theodore goes up to the door he sees it is room 111, the room his daughter is occupying. He runs off to his own room, collects his American revolvers then runs after Jules and grabs him. Waving his gun around he demands to know what Jules was doing breaking into his daughter’s apartment.

All suavity and self control Jules insists that 111 is not his daughter’s room so they both go back to check. On knocking and entering they discover the current occupant of the room is Reginald Dimmock. He explains that for some reason a stone was thrown through the window of the room and this so upset Nella that she asked the hotel servants to change rooms, a discussion Dimmock stumbled upon and immediately offered to switch rooms with her. At that moment Nella’s maid appears who confirms the whole story. Theodore is humiliated in front of Jules and Dimmock.

He goes to bed disturbed by ‘the wink’, puzzled by the business with the white ribbon, worried about the stone being thrown which broke the window, but with no specific accusation to make of anyone.

Next morning Theodore visits Félix who is preparing to pack and leave. The latter informs Miss Theodore that the long-serving hotel secretary, Miss Spencer, has packed her bags and disappeared.

Theodore installs himself in Félix’s office. First thing he does is call for Jules and sacks him. He makes it clear he’ll put every other hotel in London off hiring him. With dreamlike imperturbability Jules isn’t at all fazed and announces he will retire to an apartment somewhere and become a man about town.

That afternoon Theodore and Félix go to a banker then a stockbroker to seal the purchase of the hotel. Theodore tells Félix he intends to settle in England: there’s more to buy here than back in the States. Maybe he’ll buy a grand place in the country, too.

When he returns to the hotel he discovers his cheeky daughter Nella has installed herself in the hotel booth to replace Miss Spencer. he tells her off but she refuses to budge. They’re in the middle of this when appears His Serene Highness Prince Aribert of Posen.

Turns out Nella met the Prince last year in Paris when he was going under the name Count Steenbock, which he hurriedly asks her not to mention again. Mystery…

Aribert is surprised to learn that Theodore has bought the hotel. He explains that he is late arriving for his room because he was waiting for his assistant, Reginald Dimmock, to meet him at Charing Cross but Dimmock didn’t show up which is most unlike him.

Nella invites Aribert along to her father’s private office (previously Félix’s office) for a private chat, tea is served by servants. He reminisces about Paris, how they were both guests in a quiet, out of the way hotel, how they spent a rainy afternoon together in the Museum of the Trocadéro. He is, in other words, attracted by her nubile form and beauty and beginning to flirt. He tells her quite a bit more about the royal family of Posen and we learn that, should anything happen to Prince Eugen, Aribert would be next in line to the throne, when…

The door opens and Theodore enters accompanied by two staff who are carrying a figure on a stretcher. It is the body of Reginald Dimmock. He is dead! Collapsed walking across the quad of the hotel according to bystanders. Theodore speculates it was a heart attack.

Aribert asks the men to take the body of his assistant to his rooms and a little later they’re joined by a doctor who makes an examination and says he doesn’t think it was a heart attack but will need to do a closer examination.

That night a big ball is given in the Gold Room by the financier Mr Sampson Levi and his wife. Theodore has discovered the hotel has a secret room with a spyhole to look out over the Gold Room. To his surprise he spots Jukes mingling among the guests and runs out to confront him. But on the dancefloor he can’t find him and comes back to the cubby hole to find…Jules in it, using the spyhole!

The confrontation is not as fiery as you might expect. Theodore simply asks Jules to leave the hotel and he does. Theodore stays up all night, watching food arrive at the hotel from Covent Garden, happens to watch a big bundle of luggage going down in the lift and being loaded into a delivery van.

A little later Theodore is summoned to the Prince’s ante-room where a police inspector is, they indicate an empty coffin, and explain that the corpse of Mr Dimmock which has been deposited there has disappeared!

Theodore is left with the nagging feeling that he is being outwitted by some conspiracy centred on Jules but what it’s about is anyone’s guess.

Nella wants to make more of her acquaintance with Aribert and, three days later, contrives for her carriage to bump into his carriage as it trundles along the Embankment. She invites him to lunch in her father’s office.

Here Aribert reveals the big thing that’s been bothering him: he was scheduled to meet Prince Eugen but Prince Eugen has vanished! Somewhere between Brussels, where he was last seen, and the quay at Ostend where he was due to catch a ferry but never did.

Nella is instantly convinced that Eugen has been kidnapped! On what basis? On the basis of the secret wink between Dimmock and Jules and then the mysterious death of Dimmock. She tells Aribert to go back to Berlin to check that Eugen left. He kisses her hand as she leaves and she cherishes that kiss.

Next morning a plump old white-haired lady claiming to be Baroness Zerlinski arrives at the hotel. Nella watches her closely, convinced she’s seen her somewhere before. At lunch she sees her scoop the cream out of a cream puff and extract a piece of paper from it – a secret message! Could it be from Rocco the chef? Saying what?

Back in her bureau Nella has a flash of insight and realises ‘Baroness Zerlinski’ is Miss Spencer in disguise. She runs down to the office to ask if the Baroness has made any plans for dinner, where she can confront her, but discovers the Baroness left half an hour ago. Her luggage was addressed to Ostend – Ostend where Prince Eugen has gone missing! Without telling her father, Nella books herself on the 11pm ferry from Dover to Ostend.

In Ostend

Leaving the ship and walking onto Ostend quay at 2am Nella wonders what on earth she’s doing. How on earth is she going to track down Miss Spencer? Bennet enjoys bigging Ostend up:

The town was silent and almost deserted. It had a false and sinister aspect. She remembered tales which she had heard of this glittering resort, which in the season holds more scoundrels than any place in Europe, save only Monte Carlo. She remembered that the gilded adventurers of every nation under the sun forgathered there either for business or pleasure, and that some of the most wonderful crimes of the latter half of the century had been schemed and matured in that haunt of cosmopolitan iniquity.

Then, in one of the book’s most howling coincidences, she sees steam and is told it’s the 8am ferry from Dover which broke down and is arriving very late. Nella watches the gangway and the fist passenger to walk down it is…none other than Miss Spencer!

Miss S gets into a carriage so Nella immediately gets into the one behind in the queue and tells it to follow that carriage! It brings her to an anonymous looking house. Nella goes up to the door, demands to see Miss Spencer and to be let in.

‘I guess so,’ said Nella, and she walked past him into the house. She was astonished at her own audacity.

Nella confronts Miss Spencer, asking what she knows about Jules, the death of Reginald Dimmock and the disappearance of Prince Eugen. Miss Spencer gets up and pulls a bell rope as Nella pulls out an American revolver!

Nella now extracts a lot of backstory from Miss Spencer. Miss Spencer is married to Jules except his real name is Tom Jackson. She is terrified of him and does what he tells her to. It was Tom ordered her to get the job at the Babylon Hotel and then Tom who told her to up sticks and come to Ostend. She doesn’t know anything about Dimmock’s death. She was told to come to Ostend to guard Eugen. So he’s here? In this house??

Miss Spencer keeps wailing that she can’t say any more or it’ll be death for her and pretends to faint. When Nella goes to see if she’s alright, Miss Spencer leaps up, grabs the gun and throws it out the window (why? why not keep it in her hand?). Now Nella is at her mercy and feels suddenly weak and vulnerable. She hears footsteps coming along the hall, the door opening, a rush of cold air and then she, too, faints.

When she regains consciousness she is on a yacht out at sea. it is being steered by an imperturbably captain. A man comes up on deck and it is Jules. He is super suave and confident. He claims to know nothing about Dimmock’s death or any conspiracy. He is attracted to her bravery, in fact when she says she would rather starve than touch the breakfast he offers her, he replies:

‘Gallant creature!’ he murmured, and his eyes roved over her face. Her superb, supercilious beauty overcame him. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘what a wife you would make!’ He approached nearer to her. ‘You and I, Miss Racksole, your beauty and wealth and my brains—we could conquer the world. Few men are worthy of you, but I am one of the few. Listen! You might do worse. Marry me. I am a great man; I shall be greater. I adore you. Marry me, and I will save your life. All shall be well. I will begin again. The past shall be as though there had been no past.’

And Jules/Tom pushes closer to her to take a kiss. When with a cry a male figure leaps up out of the lifeboat and whacks Jules with a revolver knocking him unconscious. It is none other than Prince Aribert!

Back in London

Cut back to London where Theodore has invited Mr Sampson Levi to a meeting. After some preliminary sparring, Levi explains a big bit of the picture. He, Levi, is known as ‘The Court Pawnbroker’ because he arranges loans for the minor, second-class Princes of Europe. Prince Eugen was coming to London to meet him, Levi. Levi has promised to loan the prince £1 million to clear the Prince’s vast debts, run up by gambling and fast living. The Prince needs to clear his debts because it’s only by being able to show a clean sheet that he will be allowed to marry an heiress, Princess Anna of Eckstein-Schwartzburg, who’ll bring more than enough money to pay off the loan. Eugen hasn’t shown up. As to Dimmock, Levi explains that Dimmock is actually a distant part of the Posen princely family. But as to why Dimmock died and Eugen has disappeared, Levi hasn’t a clue. But Theodore does. What if some other European pauper prince wants to marry Princess Anna? Then they would want to keep Eugen out of the way till the possibility of a loan from Levi has fallen through…

Levi departs and Theodore goes to see Rocco. The great chef is so suave and confident that Theodore immediately sees he must be in on the conspiracy. But his aim in going to see him is to tell Rocco (falsely) that the police are coming to turn the hotel upside down looking for Dimmock’s body – with a view to flushing Rocco out.

Because Theodore has had a revelation. What was so significant about room 111 that Jules came sniffing round it that first evening only to discover his daughter had been replaced in it by Dimmock? Theodore’s revelation is that room 111 is directly above the hotel’s premise State Rooms. So that night Theodore lets himself into room 111 and goes poking around in it. Eventually he discovers a secret panel under the bath which gives way, which gives onto a hole, which has a rope ladder hanging down.

Theodore lights a match, goes carefully down the rope ladder and finds himself in a secret alcove behind one of the walls of the State Rooms. There’s a spyhole and through this he spies someone working at a huge marble-topped washstand. It is Rocco!

Rocco is bending over and working on something and slowly it becomes clear it’s a body! Theodore goes to climb up the rope ladder but it snaps tumbling him back down and accidentally opening a secret door into the State Room. So he confronts Rocco.

But as in previous confrontations it all goes with a weird dreamlike calmness. Rocco just says ‘Oh well’, sits down and admits that his name is Elihu P. Rucker and he’s from West Orange, New Jersey, New York State. Theodore now confirms the body he was working on was that of Dummock, and Rocco explains he was simply embalming Dummock’s body so it wouldn’t start to rot. As to whether he was murdered, Rocco says ‘not exactly’ and that he disapproved of bumping off Dimmock. He confesses that Dimmock was part of the scheme but then changed his mind. Rocco confirms that Jules is the mastermind of the whole plot and formerly his boss but that he started to disagree with him a week or so back.

Rocco is so quiet casual and disarming that Theodore guides him along to the nearest lift, intending to hand him over to the police, when Rocco suddenly bursts into life, pushing Theodore into the lift, slamming home the metal grille and locking him in. He is then politeness and suavity itself, apologises for the inconvenience and calmly strolls away.

Fuming and disgusted at his own gullibility Theodore spends the entire night in the lift till staff find him the next morning and unlock it. The detective in charge of the Dimmock case turns up and wants to take Theodore to a particular location when a messenger arrives with an urgent telegram from Nella: ‘Please come instantly. Nella. Hôtel Wellington, Ostend.’ So, leaving the detective in the lurch, within ten minutes Theodore is on his way to Victorian Station.

Back in Ostend

We left Nella on the steam yacht just after Prince Aribert had leaped out of the dinghy to rescue Nella just before Jules leaned over and kissed her. He ties Jules up. Meanwhile the captain of the yacht continues to steer away from Ostend. When Aribert points his gun at him he explains he is under orders to sail for England absolutely whatever happens on deck and won’t be persuaded to turn round. Reluctantly our guys realise their only option is to get into the dinghy, have it lowers into the water, and row back to Ostend. So that’s what they do.

On the way Aribert explains what happened: he had meant to go to Berlin as agreed but in the end changed his mind and instead happened to see her get in the carriage and follow Miss Spencer to the house, so he followed her. He climbed round the house and managed to overhear her whole conversation with Miss Spencer. When Miss Spencer grabbed the revolver and threw it out the window, Aribert picked it up. Then the silence when Nella fainted. He didn’t see who came into the room but was aware that she was carried out the house into a carriage.

He followed in his carriage down to the harbour where, in the general loading he managed to smuggle himself aboard and hide in the dinghy (just the latest in a series of heroic improbabilities). Thrown together like this, and building on the earlier conversations and the moment when he kissed her hand, it’s clear they’re falling in love:

They were both young; they both had superb health, and all the ardour of youth; and—they were together. The boat was very small indeed; her face was scarcely a yard from his. She, in his eyes, surrounded by the glamour of beauty and vast wealth; he, in her eyes, surrounded by the glamour of masculine intrepidity and the brilliance of a throne. (p.115)

Fit young Aribert rows strongly and they make it back to the harbour by 6am the next morning. Suddenly she’s shattered. He takes her to the hotel he’s staying in, they have chocolate on the terrace and that’s when Nella sends the telegram to her father that he received in the previous chapter.

Chapters are funny things. The mere existence of chapters tells you how utterly fake and artificial fictions are. The idea that texts come anything close to ‘reality’ is shot to pieces by the way chapters allow authors to divide their texts and carve up events or experiences into boxes and bite-sized chunks.

And now we cut to when Theodore arrives on the afternoon of the same day. Theodore, Nell and Aribert hold a conference in a private room and catch up with each other’s news. They decide two things: 1) Theodore sends Nella bed, this isn’t woman’s work (as if that’ll stop her); and 2) Theodore and Aribert decide to return to the house.

They’re still not certain what’s going on but Theodore shares what he learned from his interview with Levi, namely that Eugen was coming to borrow £1 million to pay off his debts. He thinks Eugen was put out of the way because another European princeling wants to marry the heiress and names the King of Bosnia.

It’s only 9.30 so to kill time before they go to The House, Theodore and Aribert go the famous (?) Ostend casino. Here they come across a glamorous lady wearing a red hat, she’s a bit solid so the narrator nicknames her the Juno of the red hat. Aribert says he has seen her before, in Berlin. She is glamorous but intimidating. Theodore is lucky (he just is) and wins a series of hands against the house and the Juno.

After her final loss she gets up and angrily exists. Our heroes follow. She gets into a carriage, they get into one that follows her. Inevitably she is heading for The House. When she gets out and enters, our chaps go round the back, climb over the fence and go close to a window where they hear a feverish conversation between red hat and Miss Spencer. They hear just the most incriminating piece of conversation they need to, namely red hat demanding more money, saying she’s lost everything at the casino, demanding to be paid more because she’s done her job of luring him to Ostend. Of course she must be referring to Eugen.

And, indeed, when our boys step back from the window they realise there’s a grating at the their feet and peering down through it they see the figure of Prince Eugen slumped in a chair!

So they break in through the window to the room the two women have vacated, open the door into the hall to see the front door ajar, presumably where red hat has left. There are stairs downwards and a corridor and at the end they encounter Miss Spencer with a knife. Her ferocity is driven by panic fear of Jules, she fiercely says they shall not pass and when Theodore walks forward she stabs him in the arm.

Shocked he takes off his coat and is in the middle of reasoning with her when he throws it over her head, grabs her arms and Aribert disarms her. They carry her to an upstairs bedroom and lock her in. They break down the door and confront Eugen.

Eugen is, of course, delirious, babbling about the woman with the red hat, saying he can’t go with them, till he passes out and they carry him to the sofa upstairs. They’re just wondering what to do when there’s a scrabbling at the window and guess who’s turned up but Nella! Of course she turns out to have attended New York medical school and so after a quick examination concludes that Eugen has ‘brain fever’.

With this diagnosis and her grasp of the situation, Nella assumes an air of command. She orders her father to go and get a doctor (who diagnoses brain fever and prescribes some medicines) and meanwhile supervises Aribert making his nephew comfortable. The trio settle in to occupy the houses and days pass as the get food, cook, and supervise Eugen. To begin with the patient gets worse.

One evening Aribert realises how thin and exhausted Nella looks and sends her to bed. He worries what will happen if Eugen dies, how the devil will he explain it to the emperor. He hears a sound and goes out into the hall to discover Nella has fainted there. He carries her ‘slender figure’ to a sofa, whispers to her and kisses her. When she comes to she swears she saw Jules at the foot of her bed, he laughed and left her room and she came running downstairs.

But then she remembers he kissed her and the conversation takes a serious turn as Aribert asks Nella to marry him. But scarcely are the words out of his lips than they hear a crash of glass. When Aribert goes to the back window he sees a ladder leaned against the wall and a figure at the end of the garden. When they go upstairs to the bedroom they locked Miss Spencer in, she has gone!

London

Cut to London a few days later where Prince Eugen is occupying the State Rooms at the Babylon, attended by his old servant Hans. He is cleaned and well dressed but he is not the man he used to be. He seems nervous and has a haunted look. When he and Aribert talk, the latter wonders if he’s mad. Slyly Eugen points out he saw Aribert kiss Nella but tells him it can come to nothing, the Emperor will not permit them to marry.

Aribert runs past him his understanding of the situation: Eugen needs a loan from Sampson Levi in order to pay off his debts and present a clean sheet to the parents of Princess Anna of Eckstein-Schwartzburg who will bring with her a dowry big enough to pay off the loan. He is relying on borrowing this £1 million from Sampson Levi who set a deadline for his loan to be taken out. But Eugen has a rival for the hand of the princess, the King of Bosnia. And he commissioned Jules and his gang to lure Eugen into a trap using the Juno with the red hat as bait. Eugen thinks they kidnapped him in order to get a ransom but Aribert counters with the simpler idea that Jules’s people just needed him out of the way till the deadline for the loan expires.

And this turns out to be the case for in the next scene Mr Sampson Levi visits prince Eugen and regrets to tell him the deadline for the loan expired and he has lent the money in South America (to the Chilean government). Eugen begs, says Levi made a promise etc but Levi says no it was Eugen who made the promise and broke it so…no loan. He bows and goes out.

The narrator moralises, invoking one of the oldest tropes of all writing, the tragic lament for the fallen and degraded times we live in – except that, in line with the tenor of the this preposterous book, it is cast in a comic mode:

It was a scene characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century – an overfed, commonplace, pursy little man who had been born in a Brixton semi-detached villa, and whose highest idea of pleasure was a Sunday up the river in an expensive electric launch, confronting and utterly routing, in a hotel belonging to an American millionaire, the representative of a race of men who had fingered every page of European history for centuries, and who still, in their native castles, were surrounded with every outward circumstance of pomp and power. (p.153)

After Levi has gone Eugen melodramatically (or should that be ‘nellodramatically’) announces he has only one option: to kill himself.

Meanwhile Theodore has gone for a stroll out into the city, along the Strand and who should he bump into but Félix Babylon. Félix explains that he got bored of Switzerland (where he was planning to retire) and missed the excitement of London. Félix gives Theodore an expensive cigar and they stroll arm-in-arm back towards the Babylon, like the comfortable plutocrats they are.

Here, over grilled chicken and champagne, Theodore briefs Félix on the extraordinary events which have taken place since the original owner left. When Theodore describes coming across Rocco embalming a corpse in the State Room Félix lets out a little scream of outrage.

Once he has heard the full story Félix says he isn’t surprised. He always knew there was a lot of skullduggery going on at the hotel but didn’t see it as his job to stop it. He goes on to say that he bumped into Jules himself that morning at a station in Paris (there are so many improbable coincidences it’s barely worth worrying about them). Jules was unfazed and declared he was off to Constantinople. Which turned out to be a lie because half an hour ago Félix spotted him at Charing Cross. The Baddie is back in town!

They fall to discussing how the baddie may be thinking of disposing of Prince Eugen and this leads to speculation about the death of Dimmock. Theodore thinks he was poisoned and puts forward his theory that it was done by poisoning his drink, his wine. This leads into a lengthy digression on the vast wine cellars lying beneath the hotel and prompts Félix to offer to give Theodore a tour. So they go and collect the keys of Mr Hubbard the wine cellar man and there are pages describing the labyrinth of cellars and the glorious wines that repose there.

En route Félix explains that prince Eugen’s favourite wine is the Romanee-Conti.

Eventually they come to the stone cellar where is stored the finest champagne. There is a faint light from a barred window and Theodore suddenly realises it has been broken into. next second he hears a sound coming from behind a wine rack and leaps upon a crouching figure and it turns out to be… his daughter, Nella!

She explains that she was in her room reading when she heard a funny noise. Looking vertically down she realised there was a sunken area by the side of the hotel and as she watched saw a shrouded figure climb down into it and then 15 minutes of sawing noise followed by the same man climbing back out of the area and walking down to the Embankment. She got dressed, went downstairs, round the side of the hotel, found a ladder down into the area, climbed down, crossed it to find a small skylight-type window with metal bars, gave it a tug and wasn’t surprised to find it came away in her hands, and wriggled through it to find herself in this wine cellar. Which is where Félix and her father have just found her.

They make a quick plan. It was almost certainly Jules and he’s almost certainly on his way back. So Theodore will leave Félix and Nella here, in the cellar, hidden outside the door to the champagne store while he, Theodore, will rush back through the cellars, up into the hotel, round the side, and catch Jules red-handed.

He leaves and hardly a minute has gone by when Félix and Nella hear the glass being removed, a body wriggling through the gap, standing, turning on the electric light and being revealed as Jules. They watch in silence as Jules finds the crate of Romanee-Conti – ‘Prince Eugen’s favourite wine,’ gasps Félix – undoes the seal, smears a black cream of some sort round the cork, then reseals it, puts it back in its crate, turns off the light and wriggles back through the window, replacing the skylight. So it was to be murder and it was to be via poisoned wine!!

Meanwhile Theodore had hurried as fast as he could but the wine cellars really were a labyrinth, extending wider than the base of the hotel, and once he’d managed to find his way out, he was waylaid by an importunate guest in the lobby; and then he was quizzed by a policeman who thought him suspicious and, when he saw him climbing down into the area, promptly arrested him.

It was only after he’d insisted on being taken back to the hotel to prove who he was that Theodore was able to return to the area and discovered that he’d just missed Jules who was fifty yards ahead of him. He followed at speed but Jules made it down to the Embankment and jumped over, into the river. Theodore was astonished at this apparent suicide attempt till he saw a steam funnel pulling away and realised Jules had jumped into a steam yacht which had soon pulled out into the river and was lost in the fog. Damn!

Next day Theodore informs Prince Aribert of what happened the night before. Aribert is due to dine with his nephew again this evening. Theodore proposes that he lets the wine be served in order to be served who among the servants are accomplices. This is just the author’s pretext to set up a tense scene in which dinner is served, and Eugen requests the Romanee-Conti as usual, and his manservant Hans prepares it, removing the seal, pulling the cork, wiping the rim of the bottle, pouring a glass and handing it to Eugen only for Aribert to blurt out that it is poisoned! Poisoned? Hans is scandalised and asks whether Aribert is calling him a poisoner and puts the glass to his lips to drink it himself, but Aribert leaps up and knocks the glass to the floor where it shatters. Well, at least that confirms Hans is not in on the conspiracy. End of Dramatic Scene!

Next morning Theodore ventures along to the Custom House where, for some ready money, he acquires the services of a Mr George Hazell, 30 and the acknowledged expert of all the ships in the Port of London to help him find the steam yacht Jules escaped on.

That night they set off in a black-painted wherry with two of Hazell’s assistants. Theodore finds life out on river strange and mysterious at night, all those spars and masts and funnels projecting up into the moonlight. The Port of London, which evokes such atmospheric writing in authors like Wilde, Doyle or Arthur Morrison. All of them trace back to the phenomenal descriptions of the Portside slums in Dickens, in Oliver Twist, Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend:

Down towards the east and the Pool of London a forest of funnels and masts was dimly outlined against the sinister sky. Huge barges, each steered by a single man at the end of a pair of giant oars, lumbered and swirled down-stream at all angles. Occasionally a tug snorted busily past, flashing its red and green signals and dragging an unwieldy tail of barges in its wake. Then a Margate passenger steamer, its electric lights gleaming from every porthole, swerved round to anchor, with its load of two thousand fatigued excursionists. Over everything brooded an air of mystery — a spirit and feeling of strangeness, remoteness, and the inexplicable. As the broad flat little boat bobbed its way under the shadow of enormous hulks, beneath stretched hawsers, and past buoys covered with green slime, Racksole could scarcely believe that he was in the very heart of London—the most prosaic city in the world. He had a queer idea that almost anything might happen in this seeming waste of waters at this weird hour of ten o’clock. It appeared incredible to him that only a mile or two away people were sitting in theatres applauding farces, and that at Cannon Street Station, a few yards off, other people were calmly taking the train to various highly respectable suburbs whose names he was gradually learning. He had the uplifting sensation of being in another world which comes to us sometimes amid surroundings violently different from our usual surroundings. The most ordinary noises — of men calling, of a chain running through a slot, of a distant siren — translated themselves to his ears into terrible and haunting sounds, full of portentous significance. He looked over the side of the boat into the brown water, and asked himself what frightful secrets lay hidden in its depths… (p.185)

When Racksole remembers that the beat of the steam yacht had a funny offbeat sound, the three experts laugh and all tell him that’s ‘The Squirm’, a steamer with one propeller half broken off, which belongs to the crook Jack Everett. they saw it anchored earlier in the day off Cherry Pier, and here they find it, tucked in snugly behind a Norwegian ship.

Hazell goes aboard the Screw calling out that he’s the Customs and wants to search it but finds only a woman who tells him to get it over with and bugger off. He’s getting back aboard the wherry to report no show when they see a dinghy shoot out from the lee of the Norwegian. Jules was hiding. There follows an exciting midnight chase in and out the anchored ships and barges of the Pool of London. Long story short, Jules scrambles aboard a high barge and looks down on Theodore in the wherry, brandishing a dagger in his hand and teasing him to come on up.

It looks like a standoff until, with lovely comic timing, some random kid, some mudlark, outraged at this intruder on his barge, comes up out of nowhere and simply pushes Jules off. He lands in the river with a splosh and turns out he can’t swim so our guys have to haul him aboard, tie him up and row back to the landing steps in front of the Grand Babylon.

They escort wet Jules into the hotel and up to his former room, a small space under the eaves and leave him bound hand and foot and tied to the bed and guarded by a massive member of staff, ex-army, no-nonsense.

Next morning bright and early Theodore comes to interrogate Jules. Jules makes the sally that Theodore will never turn him in to the police as it would prompt too many embarrassing questions. Theodore says he wouldn’t bother, he’d just take Jules out to sea in the hotel steam yacht and dump him over the side.

Jules comes clean and it is the story as we thought. He had been running a tidy little crime operation at the hotel for years. he was approached via a middle man from eminent people in Bosnia who offered to pay Jules £50,000 (about £2 million in modern money) if he ensured Eugen missed the appointment with Levi. He had planned to arrange this in the hotel itself but Theodore unexpectedly buying it ruined his plans. Instead he decided to intercept Eugen in Ostend and hired the Juno woman with the red hat to lure him to some rendezvous where he was abducted and held in the mystery house. Where Theodore, Aribert and Nella rescued him.

Nonetheless it took Eugen weeks to recover and by the time he had the deadline from Levi had passed. But then his contacts in Bosnia got restless and decided they wanted Eugen put out of the way permanently and offered a cool £100,000, not caring about the details. And so Jules arranged the wine bottle poisoning which didn’t come off.

Theodore asks the name of the middle man which Jules tells him but it won’t do him any good, he recently heard the man is dead. And it’s at this point that Nella enters to tell Theodore that Eugen is unwell…

Cut back to the evening before. You remember how Theodore had encouraged Aribert to go ahead with dining with Eugen in order to watch who proffered the poisoned wine, and Aribert swiping the poison glass out of Hans’s hands at the last minute? Well, that was the same evening that Theodore went out on the river with Hazell and caught Jules.

What we didn’t know until this moment is that, in the poison wine scene, although the glass was dashed out of Hans’s hands, Eugen slumped in his chair anyway, and now we learn that the others smell laudanum on his breath. Eugen has poisoned himself!

They carry him to his room, fetch a doctor then a specialist who all wash their hands of him. Nella and Aribert hold hands and talk about what kind of future they’ll have. Suddenly Eugen calls and Aribert is relieved that he is rallying… this means he will be king and Nella and Aribert can be married.

However, Eugen has regained consciousness only to tell Aribert that he is doomed. He can feel it in his heart. He is dying. It’s then that a servant tells Nella finally gets someone to tell her where her father is. He’d been missing all night and then his whereabouts were unknown this morning (since he went to Jule’s room at first light). Now rumour spreads that he’s up in the old head waiter’s room so Nella leaps out of her chair and goes bounding up the stairs.

Which explains her bursting in on the interrogation of Jules. She is taken aback for a moment then begs her father to come with her.

And so the novel builds up to a clever comic climax. Nella realises her Dad is the only one who can 1) save Eugen’s life and 2) ensure her and Aribert’s happiness. She asks him how soon he could raise a million pounds. Well, it would take a bit of doing but then his darling daughter explains it’s the only thing she wants in her life, to be allowed to marry the man she loves.

Long story short: she succeeds, she persuades him. Later that morning Theodore arranges for the payment of Hazell and his assistants, then has breakfast with Félix and brings him up to speed with the latest goss. Then strolls along to the City and arranges access to £1 million.

The doctors return and despair of Eugen’s condition which is when Nella takes Aribert aside and tells him to tell Eugen that the loan is arranged, his debts will be paid off, he can marry Princess Anna. Eugen sits up in bed he is so amazed. Everyone makes him sit back down but the change is effected. From this point onwards he wants to live and gets better.

Aribert and Nella are celebrating their good news when Theodore sneaks in and beckons Aribert to go with him. He takes Aribert to his office and pulls back a sheet to reveal the corpse of Jules. Miraculously he had managed to escape from his bindings, wriggled through the small window, used a cornice to get up onto the hotel roof, scampered along it to a fire escape and was merrily climbing down it when a rung snapped and he plunged to his death. The baddie is dead. the plot has ended.

A concluding chapter ties up a few loose ends: Miss Spencer is never heard of again. Rocco is heard of some years later making a name for himself at a hotel in South America. After a few weeks a fully recovered Prince Eugen and his entourage leave to travel back to Posen and propose to Princess Anna.

Aribert comes to ask for the Nella’s hand in marriage. He announces he is renouncing all his royal titles and reverting to plain Count of Harzen. He has an annual income of £10,000. Theodore grants his permission and then, rather breath-takingly, bestows on the couple £50 million, half his fortune.

That night, after dinner, the friends Theodore and Félix take the air on the hotel terrace and Félix confesses that he’s rather bored. He misses running the hotel. Is there any chance he could have it back? Theodore says maybe. How much? The same as he paid for it. Félix pretends to say be outraged, saying he sold him a hotel with three outstanding members of staff, being Jules, Rocco and Miss Spencer and Theodore managed to lose all three of them! But, yes, alright, the same price as he received for it, and they shake.

And so was brought to a close the complex chain of events which had begun when Theodore Racksole ordered a steak and a bottle of Bass at the table d’hôte of the Grand Babylon Hôtel. (p.219)

Thoughts

Although she’s in many respects a male-conceived stereotype, still Nella Racksole is a strong independent woman, a notable figure to be starring so prominently in a late-Victorian thriller.

Miss Racksole,’ he said, ‘if you will permit me to say it, I have never in my life met a woman like you.’ (p.63)

I really liked the character of Jules the superior head waiter and his sniffy comments about guests to Miss Spencer in the first chapter. Shame they both had to turn out to be criminals. I’d have liked to read a lot more about the snooty waiter. In fact at the end we learn that Jules had undertaken various other crimes and scams while at the hotel, which could have set Bennett nicely up for a prequel, if he’d cared to…

Quotes

Very enjoyable popcorn prose from the turn of the nineteenth century. Murder mystery intrigue:

The thin veneer of civilisation

This is a perennial topic in these kinds of thrillers, the thought that ‘civilisation’ is only skin deep, a flimsy veneer on top of dark and sinister men and activities. The same sentiment is expressed in every one of John Buchan’s thrillers and is given vivid expression here several times:

Twenty-four hours ago she would have declared it impossible that such an experience as she had suffered could happen to anyone; she would have talked airily about civilization and the nineteenth century, and progress and the police. But her experience was teaching her that human nature remains always the same, and that beneath the thin crust of security on which we good citizens exist the dark and secret forces of crime continue to move, just as they did in the days when you couldn’t go from Cheapside to Chelsea without being set upon by thieves. Her experience was in a fair way to teach her this lesson better than she could have learnt it even in the bureaux of the detective police of Paris, London, and St Petersburg. (p.80)

And:

Could this be a West End hotel, Racksole’s own hotel, in the very heart of London, the best-policed city in the world? It seemed incredible, impossible; yet so it was. Once more he remembered what Felix Babylon had said to him and realized the truth of the saying anew. The proprietor of a vast and complicated establishment like the Grand Babylon could never know a tithe of the extraordinary and queer occurrences which happened daily under his very nose; the atmosphere of such a caravanserai must necessarily be an atmosphere of mystery and problems apparently inexplicable. (p.99)

Fear

It was a curious psychological effect, this terrorizing (for it amounted to that) of two courageous full-grown men by the mere apparition of a helpless creature in a cellar. Gradually they both recovered from it. The next moment they were out in the passage which led to the front door of the house. The front door stood open. They looked into the street, up and down, but there was not a soul in sight. The street, lighted by three gas-lamps only, seemed strangely sinister and mysterious.

The narrative portrays the emotion of fear in persuasive detail because it is, of course, an echo of the emotion the book itself is trying to generate in the reader’s bosom.

The eternal enemy

The best baddies never die but eerily survive every catastrophe. This is because they are psychological projections of our worst fears which, by definition, can never be killed.

Men like Jules are incapable of being defeated. It was characteristic of his luck that now, in the very hour when he had been caught red-handed in a serious crime against society, he should be effecting a leisurely escape — an escape which left no clue behind.

Credit

‘The Grand Hotel Babylon’ by Arnold Bennett was serialised in Golden Penny magazine in 1901, for which Bennett received £100. It was then published as a novel by London publisher Chatto and Windus in 1902. References are to the 1972 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

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The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope (1894)

Anthony Hope (1863 to 1933 ) was posh – son of a public school headmaster, Marlborough, First in Classics at Oxford, called to the Bar in 1887, the year Sherlock Holmes made his debut. For fictions was Hope’s real interest – in his spare time he was writing scores of tales, novels and essays. (Project Gutenberg hosts an impressive number of his works including Zenda.)

The idea of The Prisoner of Zenda came to Hope as he walked back from Westminster Count Court in 28 November 1893, a month before Conan Doyle flung Holmes off the Reichenbach Falls. A month later the first draft was completed and the book was published in April 1894. Its spectacular success persuaded Hope to abandon his legal career and become a professional author but none of the reams of novels, essays, stories and plays he produced in the next 40 years recaptured Zenda’s success.

That success comes from a wonderful combination of themes which produce a short, fast-moving text full of excitement and sensation.

Gothic location

By locating in Eastern Europe the book takes advantage of our vague sense that the area is full of the wild forests, romantic courts, medieval towns and castles set on crags which our own boring country lacks. He invented the name Ruritania for this relic of an earlier, more decorous and chivalrous age, and the name has endured to describe a backward mid-European fictional setting for swashbuckling adventures. I think of the kingdom of Syldavia in the Tintin adventure, King Ottakar’s Sceptre.

Ancient and Modern

Yet in some magical way, this backward kingdom is also plugged into the modern age. In the various fight scenes hero and baddy wield swords for medieval duels, but also have revolvers tucked into their belts. They telegraph the capital city and catch trains to destinations. It is a strange, beguiling blending of past and present which adds to the fairy tale ambience.

Dashing hero

The first person narrator is sometimes a problem for novelists but here it perfectly suits the rather lazy but brave and earnest hero, Rudolf Rassendyll, distant cousin of the king of Ruritania, who suddenly finds himself called upon to impersonate the king who has been kidnapped by his wicked cousin, Black Duke Michael.

Wish-fulfilment

Who wouldn’t wish to be the hero who shows such pluck and dash – or the beautiful Princess Flavia who he falls in love with – both of them with so little time together before she nobly submits to her duty and he nobly walks away from their love. Millions of female readers have burst into tears at the novel’s moving conclusion or male readers stifled a tear and fantasised that, yes, they too would have done the noble thing!

Movies

Cedric Watts in his introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition of the novel describes its immense influence: Three black-and-white movies were made in the 1910s and 1920s, before the classic 1937 talkie version with Ronald Colman, a 1952 remake with Stewart Grainger, a 1979 spoof starring Peter Sellers, as well as countless versions on TV, radio, as straight drama and musical.

Stock scenes

But it was as a fashioner of stock scenes that the book has had most impact: the fake coronation, the chase through the woods, the stealthy crossing of the moat under cover of dark, breaking into the dungeon just in time to rescue the captive, the duel in the forest, the passionate duet of doomed hero and self-denying heroine, the scene at the inn where the hero flirts with the sexy barmaid, the scene where the wicked uncle corners the blonde heroine, the hero getting cornered by three toughs and escaping by the skin of his teeth – on and on it goes, a wonderful sourcebook of swashbuckling stereotypes.

I like Watts’s lineage of the ‘sardonic, cynical but dashingly handsome villain, epitomised by Rupert of Hentzau: his mocking tones re-echo in the voices of countless screen villains, from Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Orson Welles and Vincent Price, to Alan Rickman, John Malkovich’ and beyond.

Watts suggests the heyday of costume drama was the 30s until the 1970s, and there was certainly a lot of it about, but I’d say the genre lives on in movies like the Pirates of the Caribbean series. Wherever a goody and a baddy brandish swords and a beautiful heroine is in danger, some element of Zenda is present.

Movies

The Prisoner of Zenda 1937 starring Ronald Colman.

The Prisoner of Zenda 1952 starring Stewart Grainger.

P.S. I’m not completely sure this is the source for the well-known phrase, but the novel does include the words; ‘My work here is done,’ chapter 21.

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The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett (1902)

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In Ostend

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Back in Ostend

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