Stop Press
STOP PRESS
First published in 1939
© Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1939-2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 0755121155 EAN: 9780755121151
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
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Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.
After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of
Florio’s
translation of
Montaigne’s Essays
and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.
By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel,
Death at the President’s Lodging
. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.
After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the
Oxford History of English Literature
.
Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.
His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.
The Spider began his career as a common criminal. Or perhaps as almost a common criminal, for it is arguable that from the first the scale of his operations lifted him slightly out of the rut. He did little practical work himself and into the normal haunts of his kind – pot-houses, thieves’ kitchens, shady pawnshops – he was never recorded to have strayed. He lived, much as a morally blameless
rentier
might live, in a largish house in the country, with an establishment running to a butler, two footmen, and a secretary. The secretary it is true was blind, which is unusual and slightly sinister in secretaries: the tap-tap of his stick as he went about his employer’s confidential commissions was one of the most effective strokes in the
décor
of the Spider. But the servants were wholly normal and wholly unsuspicious of their master’s real profession. Sitting in a library of old books the Spider controlled from afar a nefarious organization of surprising complexity. This, presumably, is why he was called the Spider. He was fond of quoting from the poet Pope of whose tangled bibliography he had a connoisseur’s knowledge – and to unruly lieutenants he would point out in a coldly terrifying way that
his touch, infinitely fine, felt at each thread and lived along the line
. He kept a private wireless transmitter concealed in a cocktail cabinet.
About halfway through his career the Spider underwent a change of character. Hitherto businesslike and almost conscientiously diabolical, he now became intermittently chivalrous. More than once he was known to free a beautiful girl from the embraces of a brutalized accomplice and deliver her unscathed to an opponent – an opponent who, although boneheaded, was bronzed, gentlemanlike, and himself much too chivalrous to enlist against the Spider’s organization the prosaic assistance of the police. About the same time the Spider developed a philosophy of property. He would compare himself now to Robin Hood and now to the oil and steel kings of the United States. He took from the rich and gave to such people and causes as a really wise and nice man would give to. This went on for some years.
Then came a further change. It seems to have been the result of a confused period of gang-warfare in the course of which the Spider acquired a machine-gun and an armoured car. They proved unsuccessful investments – England was too small for them – and for a time the Spider appeared to be getting nowhere. This check precipitated the crisis. There is no record of it, but the struggle was doubtless severe. The Spider emerged with moral perceptions which were wholly orthodox. His passion for the perpetration of crime became a passion for its detection. His old way of life ceased to exist except in so far as it gave him useful insight into the minds of his new quarry. The rich now came to him fearlessly and he solved their strangest perplexities with unfailing success. Those who had not known him for long wondered why he was called the Spider at all, and one or two who had read Swift thought he might better have been called the Bee. He was no wholly on the side of sweetness and light.
He began to keep bees. He improved himself in the art of music and became a finished executant on the clarinet. And in other ways his domestic life was modified. His house, though still in the country, was smaller. The books were even more in evidence and to Pope had been added Shakespeare, Wordsworth, St John of the Cross, Hegel, Emerson, and Donne. The Spider had grown remarkably literary: sometimes more literary than anything else. The wireless transmitter had disappeared. In its place the Spider had found a bosom friend, a retired engineer who accompanied him everywhere and wrote down everything he said, always without any inconvenient penetration into why he was saying it. But the engineer, though not clever, was literary too. He had the Spider were never so hot on a trail that they would not stop to bandy a little poetry by the way. The poetry was delightful in itself. And its served to distinguish the Spider in what was becoming a seriously overcrowded profession.
Mr Richard Eliot, the creator of the Spider, had not meant to do it. Or not as much of it as he eventually found himself doing. The first Spider story, he would say in that allusive literary way which was growing on him, had come into the world with the same apology as the baby in
Mr Midshipman Easy
: it was only a very little one. And, curiously enough, it had been the product of unnecessary fastidiousness.
Some twenty years before this chronicle opens Mr Eliot had inherited a largish house in the country and here he lived as any morally blameless
rentier
might live. He superintended unremunerative agricultural operations in an amateurish but competent way. Occasionally he ran up to town for the opera, the exhibitions of the Royal Academy, interviews with his stockbroker, and the Eton and Harrow match. It was the Eton and Harrow match of 1919 that was critical in his history.
This match took place three days after the birth of Mr Eliot’s second child. For the first time Mr Eliot entered his club in St James’s as the father of a son. And he there found a number of his contemporaries who were already the fathers of Etonians and Harrovians – for Mr Eliot had married somewhat late in life. It at once became clear to Mr Eliot that Timothy must go to Eton. The decision was, it has been hinted, unnecessarily fastidious, for the education of a gentleman may be received at a number of less expensive schools. But every Englishman will understand Mr Eliot’s processes of mind.
Mr Eliot, then, put the infant Timothy down for Eton and went home to count the cost. It promised to be considerable: moreover there was the possibility of further sons being born to him, and it would hardly be fair to send Timothy to Eton and his younger brothers to lesser schools. And this was the point at which Mr Eliot remembered that he was by way of being a literary man. Years before, and during his short service in the Indian army, he had printed a couple of sketches in a regimental magazine. His friends had liked them and he had been encouraged to send a short story, full of careful local colour and the correct reactions to physical danger, to a London editor. The story was published; others succeeded it; and in those severely unillustrated magazines that lie about in clubs for the recreation of the elderly, Mr Eliot’s name was for a time frequently to be remarked. But when he retired to the English countryside he dropped this habit of authorship. He was no longer in contact with the tigers and fakirs he had been in the way of writing of, and he found that he remembered surprisingly little about them. Moreover he was becoming rather too bookish greatly to enjoy writing; he had a fondness for Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and others of whom there is singularly little to be said. On his favourite poet Pope he became quite an authority; and he sometimes dared to wonder if there might not be room for a monograph, of an unassumingly scholarly sort, to be called ‘Pope’s Use of the Terms
Nature, Reason
, and
Common Sense
: a Study in Denotation and Connotation.’ Rough notes for this
opusculum
, together with a neatly typed title-page, lay about on Mr Eliot’s desk for years.