Ask a Policeman

Ask a Policeman
Agatha Christie

Gladys Mitchell

Helen Simpson

Anthony Berkeley

Dorothy L. Sayers

This new edition, which is reproduced from a first printing of the book, is introduced by the author Martin Edwards, archivist of the Detection Club, and includes a never-before-published Preface by Agatha Christie, ‘Detective Writers in England’, in which she discusses her fellow writers in the Detection Club.Lord Comstock is a barbarous newspaper tycoon with enemies in high places. His murder in the study of his country houseposes a dilemma for the Home Secretary. In the hours before his death, Lord Comstock’s visitors included the government Chief Whip, an Archbishop, and the Assistant Commissioner for Scotland Yard. Suspicion falls upon them all and threatens the impartiality of any police investigation. Abandoning protocol, the Home Secretary invites four famous detectives to solve the case: Mrs Adela Bradley, Sir John Saumarez, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Mr Roger Sheringham. All are different, all are plausible, all are on their own – and none of them can ask a policeman…This classic whodunit adopted a completely new approach: Milward Kennedy proposed the title, John Rhode plotted the murder and provided the suspects, and four of their contemporaries were asked to lend their well-known detectives to the task of providing solutions to the crime. But there was to be another twist: the authors would swap detectives and use the characters in their sections of the book. Thus Gladys Mitchell and Helen Simpson swapped Mrs Bradley and Sir John Saumarez, and Dorothy Sayers and Anthony Berkeley swapped Lord Peter Wimsey and Roger Sheringham, enabling the authors to indulge in skilful and sly parodies of each other.The contributors to ASK A POLICEMAN are: John Rhode, Helen Simpson, Gladys Mitchell, Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Milward Kennedy with Agatha Christie and Martin Edwards.

ASK A POLICEMAN

BY

ANTHONY BERKELEY

MILWARD KENNEDY

GLADYS MITCHELL

JOHN RHODE

DOROTHY L. SAYERS

&

HELEN SIMPSON

COPYRIGHT

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

This 80th anniversary edition published in 2012

First published in Great Britain by Arthur Barker Ltd 1933

Copyright © The Detection Club 1933, 2012

The Authors asserts the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007468621

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007468652

Version: 2018-08-06

CONTENTS

Cover (#ud6a427f9-3217-56b1-8558-c1c351bcbfc9)

Title Page (#u04314e97-be06-5413-8ad5-fbded0ad2973)

Copyright (#uafffe8ea-b30e-5956-84d2-8edb21475e3a)

Map (#ufd3af23a-f1f0-53d8-ba73-36e5a740f514)

Foreword: Ask a Detective Writer by Martin Edwards (#u1bcd7b72-3b24-5160-8e12-37df9ce50ea9)

Preface: Detective Writers in England by Agatha Christie (#ua2f1eb5e-2e0e-520e-933e-88a8e4669825)

PART I (#ue014027f-b176-5342-a482-2d73badd8b0e)

DEATH AT HURSLEY LODGE BY JOHN RHODE (#ud61a564b-e918-5327-8555-997a8bc97cfe)

PART II (#u54aecbe6-9e0d-5eed-ac1d-14d77915cb37)

I. MRS. BRADLEY’S DILEMMA BY HELEN SIMPSON (#u8477741d-45ff-5a26-bfd0-3d28e5491b26)

II. SIR JOHN TAKES HIS CUE BY GLADYS MITCHELL (#u78073c1e-0e56-5353-b677-1bb288c75191)

III. LORD PETER’S PRIVY COUNSEL BY ANTHONY BERKELEY (#udfae2578-b4d1-56e0-8422-f2020da213db)

IV. THE CONCLUSIONS OF MR. ROGER SHERINGHAM. BY DOROTHY L. SAYERS (#u05f7141a-6951-5198-86ae-e7a1cdfd6363)

PART III (#ud5855141-471a-5606-861e-ee167155c812)

“IF YOU WANT TO KNOW—” BY MILWARD KENNEDY (#uc338284c-1e06-5f50-8ac5-825da95da197)

Final Note (#ub4090c11-8141-5728-8b6a-47986053d15f)

Footnotes (#u7be9d2a1-400e-5f84-9f4f-196fca4775dd)

About the Publisher (#u864e20a8-bf74-57e3-bebe-3cb9a64e6cd5)

FOREWORD

ASK A DETECTIVE WRITER

By MARTIN EDWARDS

ASK A POLICEMAN, first published in 1933, was the fourth in a sequence of collaborative mysteries produced in quick succession by members of the Detection Club. The Club was set up three years before this book was written, as an elite and rather secretive social network of leading detective novelists. It continues to flourish to this day, although current members include prominent thriller and espionage writers as well as specialists in the whodunit.

Ask a Policeman followed two radio serials, Behind the Screen and The Scoop, and a full-length detective novel, The Floating Admiral. These collective ventures generated enough revenue for the Club to rent premises in Soho, where, as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, members convened “chiefly for the purpose of eating dinners together and of talking illimitable shop.”

In the early Thirties, detective fiction was hugely popular, and many writers treated the detective story as a game in which they pitted their wits against their readers’. It was supposed to be important to “play fair”. Father Ronald Knox, a founder member of the Club, went so far as to devise a jokey Decalogue of ten commandments for the genre (“not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, for instance)—which he and his colleagues were happy to break whenever it suited them.

Anthony Berkeley, who organized the dinner meetings that led to the foundation of the Club, and Dorothy L. Sayers, a towering presence in its ranks, headed a group of talented crime writers who became increasingly determined to explore criminal psychology and write novels of literary merit. Yet they too relished the intellectual exercise of creating elaborate puzzles.

Writing a round-robin mystery presents a variety of challenges for any team of authors, and Club members had to decide how to top the success of The Floating Admiral. Their answer was to come up with a fresh concept—they would write a story in which they exchanged detectives with each other. This gimmick afforded contributors the chance to poke fun at the genre, and at the quirks of their colleagues’ most famous sleuths. But transforming the idea into a readable story was bound to prove complex, with each contributor in turn needing plenty of space to develop the narrative in a distinctive way. This explains why, although 13 members provided ingredients for the mix in The Floating Admiral, just half a dozen created Ask a Policeman.

The original dust jacket blurb captured the gleeful spirit of the enterprise:

“Here is something delightfully new in ‘thrills’—a story which combines the interest of detection with the fun of parody. A problem is propounded; ingenious, and, for the solvers, malicious, and in itself a parody of a thousand and one detective stories. A great newspaper proprietor dies in his study, and suspicion falls upon an Archbishop, a Secretary, a Police Commissioner, and the Chief Whip of the political party in power. There is, too, a Mysterious Lady. What, then, can the Home Secretary do but call in the Amateur Experts? There are four of them; each takes a hand and each produces a different solution.”

The industrious and prolific John Rhode set the scene in a long introductory section. Rhode was the main pen-name of Cecil John Street (1884–1965), a former army officer who had won the Military Cross. His most famous detective was Dr. Lancelot Priestley, a rather severe intellectual who featured in a long line of novels but is absent here. Rhode was an efficient plot-builder, and created the perfect victim, a tyrannical media mogul whom every other character in the story seemed to have a possible motive to kill. In keeping with the fashion of the time, a plan of the scene of the crime was included.