End of Chapter

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  Dedication

  Title Page

  1. Set Up

  2. First Impression

  3. Stet

  4. Verso

  5. Run On

  6. Delete

  7. Query

  8. Lower Case

  9. Insert

  10. Revise

  11. Bring Back

  12. Lead In

  13. Transpose

  14. Wrong Fount

  15. Close Up

  16. Final Proof

  More from Vintage Classic Crime

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Wenham & Geraldine are a long-established and very well respected publishing firm, so when a printer’s proof is sabotaged and libellous passages are mysteriously reinstated, they call in private detective Nigel Strangeways. But the situation takes a turn for the worse when one of the publishers’ best-selling authors – glamorous novelist Millicent Miles – is found dead in the offices.

  About the Author

  Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.

  During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  A Question of Proof

  Thou Shell of Death

  There’s Trouble Brewing

  The Beast Must Die

  The Widow’s Cruise

  Malice in Wonderland

  The Case of the Abominable Snowman

  The Smiler with the Knife

  Minute for Murder

  Head of a Traveller

  The Dreadful Hollow

  The Whisper in the Gloom

  The Worm of Death

  The Sad Variety

  The Morning After Death

  TO

  N.S. AND I.M.P. WITH GREAT AFFECTION FROM THEIR UNSLEEPING PARTNER IN A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF FIRM

  Chapter 1

  Set Up

  NIGEL STRANGEWAYS TURNED into Adelphi, and soon arrived at the distinguished backwater of Angel Street, the Strand traffic roaring softly behind him like a weir. It would be a nice street to live in, he thought—a top-floor flat in one of these tall, elegantly uniform houses: above the hurly-burly, but not cut off from it. As middle age advances and one’s youthful illusions recede, almost the only way to get the sensation of starting again, of being reborn, is to move house. But, restless though he was by nature, two moves in twelve months would be carrying one’s mobility too far—one must beware of developing a tolerance for that stimulating drug.

  His thoughts took Nigel the length of Angel Street, till he reached the high iron gateway which opens on a passage dividing the end of the street from Embankment Gardens. The gardens looked pinched and dismal this raw late-November morning. Beyond them, on the Thames, a tug mooed dispiritedly. Glancing at his watch, Nigel decided to be five minutes early for his appointment, rather than stand about in the cold admiring the apology for nature which these gardens offered.

  The office of Wenham & Geraldine occupied the last house to his right, with its frontage on the street and its south side overlooking the gardens. The main door was flanked by two display windows, and there was a smaller door five or six yards up the street. Façade of dark-crimson brick, dazzling white paintwork, exquisite moulding and fanlight of the doorway—they created an impression of solidity and grace, charm and decorum, altogether appropriate to the imprint of Wenham & Geraldine. How many Victorian grandees, Nigel reflected, must have carried their bulging personalities up those shallow steps to take a glass of madeira with the now legendary James Wenham: how many of their ill-conditioned modern successors, surveying this opulent front, must snarl ‘So that’s where the profits go!’ A book, the legendary James Wenham had constantly declared, is the precious life-blood of a master spirit; and a vast quantity of more or less precious life-blood had been siphoned off, over the last century, to swell the tide of Wenham & Geraldine’s prosperity.

  Moreover, though venerable, the firm was capable of moving with – or at least not more than twenty years behind – the times. One of the windows, Nigel observed, carried a display of the new book by a well-publicised R.A.F. line-shooter, together with a model airfield and a collection of toy aircraft dangling from threads above it. The display must be rather wasted on this backwater, he thought; then realised that Angel Street would be a short-cut for pedestrians from the Strand to Charing Cross Underground station, and at certain times of the day busy enough.

  He found himself mounting the steps in front of a well-preserved lady, whose equine face made her choker of pearls resemble a horse-collar. He opened the door of the reception room for her, and stood aside. She swept past him, with no other acknowledgment of his politeness than a puff of scent, and disappeared through a door at the far end of the room.

  ‘My name is Strangeways,’ he told the receptionist. ‘I have an appointment with Mr. Geraldine.’

  After applying herself to the house-telephone, the girl announced, ‘If you will take a seat for a moment, Mr. Geraldine’s secretary will come down for you.’

  Nigel was getting the Number Two treatment, as later he would learn. The Number One, reserved for the equivalent of Royalty among the firm’s writers, was for a partner to come downstairs in person. Lesser V.I.P.s were fetched by a secretary; while the rabble had to find their own way. Nigel filled in time now by studying the signed photographs of authors which adorned one wall of the reception room. The earlier ones ran to beards and expressions of quite unnerving self-confidence: as the eye moved on towards present times, the faces gradually lost both hair and assurance, the most recent being marked either by grinding angst or by that pop-eyed, implausible bravado which looks out so often from the photograph files of Scotland Yard. To this, however, there were two noticeable exceptions: a heavily-moustached type in military uniform—the photo was signed ‘Richard Thoresby,’ and the lady who had brushed past Nigel at the door. The large signature on her photograph informed him that she was none other than Millicent Miles—the glamorous, the unspeakable Millicent Miles, that queen of best-sellers who changed her publishers almost as often as once she had changed (so rumour said) her lovers. It was odd that Wenham & Geraldine should have taken her on. Well, here she was—full evening dress, tiara, perfectly waved hair—gazing haughtily from the wall.

  ‘Wasn’t that Miss Miles who came in just before me?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘Yes. She is working here,’ the receptionist replied, in neutral tones.

  ‘In the firm, you mean?’

  ‘Oh no. She’s writing her memoirs for us: and when she was moving house, Mr. Geraldine put a room here at her disposal.’

  ‘Memoirs? That should cause a stir.’

  ‘We hope to do well with them,’ said the girl demurely. ‘Of course Miss Miles is not the type of author we often have on our list
.’

  ‘I should say not! Like a University Press publishing Elinor Glyn.’

  Nigel studied the girl. A handsome creature, in a gipsyish way: about 23 and tries to look older: very self-contained behind her horn-rimmed glasses: couldn’t have worked here long, but was already using the publishers ‘we’ as to the manner born. Some quality in her speech made him ask:

  ‘Were you at Somerville?’

  ‘Oh dear, does it stick out like that?’

  ‘What did you read?’

  ‘History.’

  ‘Do all right?’

  ‘Well, actually I got a First.’ The admission, accompanied by a gauche sideways jerk of the head, took several years off her apparent age.

  ‘But you’re stuck at the end of a telephone?’

  ‘The firm likes one to start at the bottom of the ladder. If I make good with the callers, they’ll promote me to secretary—and some reading, perhaps.’

  ‘The Victorian régime, eh? I see you’re writing a book in between times.’

  Flushing, the girl thrust some MS. pages under a blotter. ‘You see too much. Sorry, but I hate my work being overlooked.’

  ‘Most writers do, I believe—while it’s in progress. No doubt the anthropologists could tell us something about that.’

  At this point another studious-looking girl appeared, Mr. Geraldine’s secretary. Nigel followed her through the inner door into a passage which led, he later discovered, from the smaller street door to the packers’ room. One side of this passage was heaped with bulging sacks: on the other was a lift, whose outer doors struck Nigel a vicious slap from behind as he entered.

  ‘They always do that,’ said the girl brightly, as if explaining the foibles of a favourite but unreliable domestic animal.

  ‘Even to Millicent Miles?’

  The girl giggled. ‘Well, I believe she did ask Mr. Geraldine to have a new lift installed,’ she said; then gave Nigel a startled look, which plainly inquired how she could have let fall such an indiscretion before a total stranger—a question a good many people, who came across Nigel in his professional capacity, had cause to ask themselves.

  Reaching the second floor, Nigel was led to the senior partner’s room. A large, high, rectangular room, lit by a Venetian glass chandelier transformed for electricity and two sash-windows overlooking the street: the wall facing the windows lined with books: white panelling: a luxurious fitted carpet. Nigel’s arrival caught its three occupants in what might have been the dégagé and eternally-arrested pose of a modern Conversation Piece—the bald-headed man sitting at his desk flanked by the woman leaning negligently against the further window, and the saturnine red-haired chap gazing down at his shoes and jingling coins in a trouser-pocket. For a second or two the poses were held. Then the bald man rose and advanced smoothly upon Nigel.

  ‘Mr. Strangeways? Exceedingly good of you to come along. May I introduce you to my partners? Miss Wenham—the granddaughter of our founder. Mr. Ryle, who has recently joined us.’

  Arthur Geraldine had the portly figure, the bland face and address which convention associates with bishops and butlers; he had, also, a surprisingly muscular hand-grip.

  ‘You will take a glass of madeira with us? We keep up the old—’

  ‘Filthy stuff. Like liquid demerara sugar,’ Miss Wenham broke in.

  ‘My dear Liz, you are incorrigible.’

  They sat at the mahogany table in the middle of the room. Arthur Geraldine poured out madeira for the men: Liz Wenham treated herself to a glass of lemonade from the bottle on the silver tray, and bit noisily into an apple. A dumpy woman of about fifty, grey-haired, with very white teeth, rosy-russet cheeks, and a mild, bright, clear eye, she would have looked more at home, Nigel felt, in tweeds, in a cottage-weaving establishment in Westmorland. For all her fresh-air appearance, though, she soon revealed a business-like side, cutting in on Arthur Geraldine’s civilities with:

  ‘Well, hadn’t we better get down to it? Joan, take Mr. Geraldine’s calls for the next half-hour.’

  The secretary whisked out of the room like a leaf in a draught. Basil Ryle stopped chinking the coins in his pocket. A twinkle, whether frosty or humorous Nigel could not be sure, appeared in the senior partner’s eye.

  ‘Quite right, Liz,’ he said. ‘Miss Wenham keeps us all on our toes. Now, let me put our little difficulty before you, Strangeways. It is understood, of course, that this is highly confidential?’

  Nigel nodded.

  ‘You will be aware, perhaps, that this firm specialises in memoirs, biographies and the like. It would be no exaggeration to say that the Wenham & Geraldine imprint on any volume of this nature is a guarantee of the highest quality.’

  Mr. Geraldine’s flowing periods were interrupted by a loud crash as Liz Wenham’s teeth took another segment out of her apple.

  ‘Some two years ago we entered into an agreement with General Richard Thoresby to publish his autobiography. When we received the MS., early this year, we discovered that parts of it were—ah—extremely controversial.’

  ‘Riddled with libel,’ Miss Wenham mumbled through her mouthful of apple.

  ‘In particular, where the author criticises the conduct of operations, during the last war, by Major-General Sir Charles Blair-Chatterley. Chatterley, it seems, is his bête noire—’

  ‘The chap who was recently Governor-General of—’

  ‘The same. And Thoresby had also made the most serious allegations about Blair-Chatterley’s handling of the disturbances in the colony in 1947. I will not trouble you, for the moment, with details. Suffice it to say that we made representations to the author, pointing out the relevant passages, and discussing with him how they should be deleted, or at least toned down, to avoid the danger of libel. He proved somewhat intransigent—’

  ‘A blinding nuisance,’ Liz Wenham put in.

  ‘—but we finally reached, or thought we had reached, agreement with him.’

  ‘I take it you had submitted the MS. to your legal advisers?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘It sent them right up the wall,’ Miss Wenham remarked.

  ‘However, when we received proofs, last July, we discovered to our alarm that the author had failed to delete from the MS. two of the most offensive passages, which he had previously agreed to take out.’

  ‘But hadn’t the MS. been examined again before you sent it to the printers?’

  ‘There was a slip-up there. Ryle, who was looking after the book, had gone on holiday; and in his absence, Protheroe, our chief reader, simply marked it up for the printers—it’s a standard format—and handed it to our Production Manager to send off.’

  ‘We were badly behind schedule with the book, and things got rushed at that point,’ Liz Wenham explained. ‘We went straight into page proof so as to get it out for the Christmas market.’

  ‘I see. Right. It’s July. You’ve got your page proofs and found two of the offending passages still there. What next?’

  ‘We asked General Thoresby along,’ said Mr. Geraldine, ‘and pointed out that we couldn’t go to press unless the passages were revised or deleted. Our libel lawyer was present at the conference. It was quite a sticky one.’

  ‘The General behaved like an overgrown schoolboy,’ said Miss Wenham.

  ‘He doesn’t know the difference between a pen and a sword.’ Basil Ryle spoke for the first time—a nasal but not unpleasing voice: his eyes had been moving steadily from one speaker to another during this conversation.

  ‘Well, the long and the short of it is that the General lost his temper and deleted the passages, rather violently, in our presence,’ said Geraldine.

  ‘The word “emasculated” was heard to fall from the warrior’s lips,’ Basil Ryle murmured.

  ‘Fortunately, no serious re-pagination was involved. One of the passages only ran to a few lines, and the longer one came at the end of a chapter.’

  ‘No re-pagination was necessary, anyhow,’ said Liz Wenham brusquel
y. ‘Someone stetted the two deletions.’

  ‘Miss Wenham means,’ explained Arthur Geraldine, ‘that during the period which elapsed between our conference with Thoresby and the sending the book to press, someone marked the deleted passages with dots and the word ‘stet’—in block capitals, so that the handwriting can’t be identified. ‘Stet’ is the sign to a printer that the marked passage be retained.’

  ‘Strangeways knows all about that.’ Liz Wenham’s voice crackled with impatience.

  ‘Of course, of course. I was forgetting that you had put out a book or two yourself. And very charming work too, if I may say so.’

  Nigel felt like bearings bathed in oil, under the mellifluous tones of Mr. Geraldine. He bowed, and caught a quizzical glance from Miss Wenham.

  ‘Where was I? Ah yes. Our representatives travelled proof copies—with the offensive passages heavily inked out, of course—and reported a most satisfactory response. We raised the first printing to 50,000. The book came out two days ago. Yesterday we had a communication from Sir Charles Blair-Chatterley’s solicitors. They have obtained an interim injunction, and it is clear that their client will set his face against any settlement out of court. We took steps instantly to have the book withdrawn, but the damage has already been done.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Nigel. ‘Presumably there were advance copies. And nobody here noticed that the libellous passages had been put back? I’d have thought that some at least of the reviewers would have noticed too, and tipped you off before publication day.’

  ‘I’m afraid the responsibility is mine,’ began Basil Ryle, with something less than his normal self-assurance, after a few moments’ embarrassed silence.

  ‘Nonsense, my dear boy. You mustn’t reproach yourself.’ Mr. Geraldine turned to Nigel. ‘I should explain that each title we publish is given a general supervision, from start to finish, by one of the partners. Ryle was in charge of Thoresby’s book, certainly. But, once final proofs had been passed, there was no onus upon Ryle to scrutinise the text of the advance copy. Nor, in fact, would he have had time to do so. He looks after all our advertising and publicity work, and he’s been heavily engaged with the promotion campaign for this title in particular.’