The Belting Inheritance (British Library Crime Classics) - Softcover

Symons, Julian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 146421087X ISBN 13: 9781464210877

Verlag: POISONED PEN PR, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder

'Cleverly told ... brilliant character work and plotting up to the usual Symons standard.' —Observer
'An intriguing puzzle centered on identity...' —Publishers Weekly

Lady Wainwright presides over the gothic gloom at Belting, in mourning for her two sons lost in the Second World War. Long afterwards a stranger arrives at Belting, claiming to be the missing David Wainwright—who was not killed after all, but held captive for years in a Russian prison camp. With Lady Wainwright's health fading, her inheritance is at stake, and the family is torn apart by doubts over its mysterious long-lost son. Belting is shadowed by suspicion and intrigue—and then the first body is found.

This atmospheric novel of family secrets, first published in 1964, is by a winner of the CWA Diamond Dagger.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JULIAN SYMONS (1912?1994) was a notable writer of British crime fiction from the 1950s until his death, publishing more than thirty novels. He served as President of the prestigious Detection Club, won two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, and is well known as the author of Bloody Murder, a classic history of crime fiction.

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The Belting Inheritance

By Julian Symons

Poisoned Pen Press

Copyright © 2018 The Estate of Julian Symons
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4642-1087-7

CHAPTER 1

How I Came to Belting

It was a hot day in late July when I sat with Uncle Miles at Belting beside the strippling ream. The deliberate Spoonerism was Uncle Miles', and it did seem to express something about the stream that rippled beside us as we sat on the spongy grass. To say strippled rather than rippled conveyed something subtle about the movement of the water, and ream instead of stream suggested that large bream waited in it ready to be caught. At least, that was what I thought at the time, although I had never caught anything in it that was more than twelve inches long.

The strippling ream or the rippling stream was, in any case, a pleasant place to sit. Uncle Miles had on the back of his head the panama hat which he always wore on a warm day.

He stared across the stream at the small field we called the paddock, I lay on my back and stared up at the blue but cloud-flecked sky.

"This is a pretty kettle of horsefeathers," Uncle Miles said in his jerky, rather nervous way, and went on. "Don't suppose you've ever seen the Marx Brothers. Too young."

"One film, At the Circus. Not very good."

"They were real comics, wonderful clowns. At the Circus wasn't quite vintage, mind. I saw Animal Crackers nine times in seven weeks."

One of the clouds was in the shape of an island. You sailed through the sky and landed in the small bay on the southern side. And then what happened? "Why is it a kettle of horsefeathers?"

"Because because," Uncle Miles said. His voice seemed to come from far away.

"Won't you be pleased if Uncle David's alive? Didn't you – don't you like him?"

"It's not a question of that," Uncle Miles said rather pettishly, although he did not say what it was a question of. I took a book from the jacket that lay beside me. "What are you reading?"

I held up Works by Max Beerbohm, and quoted from memory the last of those seven essays, "Diminuendo": "Once I wrote a little for a yellow quarterly. But the stress of creation soon overwhelmed me. I shall write no more. Already I feel myself to be a trifle outmoded. I belong to the Beardsley period." As soon as I had spoken the words I regretted them, for I feared that Uncle Miles would take their application personally. I ended rather lamely, "Wonderful to publish your collected works at the age of twenty-four," and then rolled over on my stomach to look at him. I could not see the expression on his face, but the corners of his mouth were turned down in disapproval.

All of this happened long ago, and it seems to me much longer, and I see it as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope at figures quite lifelike but extremely minute. Yet that is not right, for a telescope does not distort, and what I want to convey is that my vision and understanding of the things that happened, at Belting and elsewhere, during that summer was a distorted one. It was distorted by my ignorance of the past, for I have noticed that the past only becomes real to us as we grow older, but more still by my own age, or rather youth. I was eighteen, I had that very term left school and was waiting to go to university, and anybody over twenty-five seemed to me old. Nowadays I am inclined to think that middle-age does not begin until forty, or perhaps even forty-five, and it is a consequence of this that the people in the story seemed to me much older than they were, or at least than I should feel they are today. Uncle Miles, for instance, was in his late thirties, although at the time I should have felt him and a man of sixty to be very much of an age. Even Uncle Stephen, stiff-collared, stiff-necked and incredibly rigid Uncle Stephen, was only a year older than Uncle Miles.

I have begun with Uncle Miles and myself beside the stream, and that is as good a place to begin as any, but I ought to cast back a little, to say something about myself and about Belting, and how I came to be there. First of all, Belting. I have not been to Belting for years and shall never go there again, and I cannot trust my memory to give the picture that you, as reader, would see if you went to Belting today. I went there to live when I was twelve years old, and in my memory it is an immense house, one where I used at first often to lose myself. I can remember going up the big staircase and standing on the galleried landing at the point where the south and west wings met, and wondering which of three corridors to take. Each of them looked at night, and even in the daytime, dark and uninviting, and two of them, still more sinisterly, turned sharply after a few feet so that to go down them was to face a double unknown threat. It might be thought that the natural thing was to go down the third corridor, but the dim bluish electric light half-way down it seemed to reveal at the other end the shadow of a humpbacked man – the Deadly Humpback I called him to myself – poised waiting for me. It was not much of a light and hence it was not much of a shadow, but it was enough to make me wary of going down that corridor. I never did discover exactly what caused the shadow, but the width of the corridors varied at certain points, and these wider places were often filled with bits of old military junk, trunks, and all sorts of relics of the First World War. There was in one corridor a collection of German caps and helmets from such units as the Uhlans and the Death's Head Hussars. I remember that I used often to try on the Death's Head helmet. It must have belonged to a hussar with a very small head, for it seemed to fit me quite well. Some such collocation of relics was no doubt responsible for the Deadly Humpback and in a way of course I knew this, but I was frightened just the same.

It was a frightening house, at least to a nervous boy of twelve who was received there only because of the death of his parents. My father, James Barrington, was a film director. He had married my mother, Sarah Wainwright, very much against the wishes of her family. Her father Jonathan would, I think, have forgiven their runaway marriage, but her aunt Lady Wainwright would have none of it. She had met my father once, and strongly disapproved of him. He was a film director, he drank heavily, and he professed a rather noisy republicanism. It would hardly have been possible to find a combination of qualities more detestable to Lady Wainwright, who (as I learned later) regarded the cinema as one of the most corrupting influences in modern life, had a horror of drunkenness, and thought the Royal family our most valuable bulwark against the insidious advance of Socialism. I have never discovered what my father said or did on his one visit to Belting, but it must have been something that was to Lady Wainwright irrevocably awful. In the many references to my mother's family that I heard my father make, "that old bitch Lady W," figured always as an ultimate obstacle to reconciliation, certain not only to repel any advances but to do so in the most painful way. I think, even so, that my father would have been inclined to risk making an advance, not to Lady W in person but to Jonathan. It was my mother who would have none of it. She was fiercely independent, and when the family cut off contact with her after her marriage, she was prepared to be as unrelenting as they. She must, as I think of it now, have been herself an unforgiving woman, a kindred spirit to her aunt. At the time I knew only that cards arrived at Christmas from her father and from somebody who signed...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: POISONED PEN PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 146421087X
• ISBN 13: 9781464210877
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 218
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar