A Voice Like Velvet

Chapter XV (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter XVI (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter XVII (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter XVIII (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter XIX (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter XX (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter XXI (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter XXII (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter XXIII (#litres_trial_promo)

The Alarm Bell (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)

The Detective Story Club (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

INTRODUCTION (#u378c9acd-0f75-5443-94be-6647955d28b0)

A VOICE LIKE VELVET recounts the misadventures of Ernest Bisham, a middle-aged BBC radio announcer who just happens to be a highly accomplished cat-burglar. An unlikely premise? Perhaps, yet the author was careful to include a disclaimer making it clear that Ernest isn’t based on anyone in real life, let alone at the BBC. The story is skilfully written and quietly suspenseful. Like the rest of Henderson’s unusual, off-kilter crime fiction, however, it has suffered long and undeserved neglect.

So often, the fate of a novel—whatever its quality—depends upon how effectively it is first presented to the reading public. Hurst and Blackett published this book in October 1944 with the unexciting title The Announcer, and subtitled it simply ‘a novel’. Certainly, Henderson offers an intriguing and perceptive study in character, but it would surely have been wise to market the story as a crime novel—which, unquestionably, it is. Yet it seems to have been regarded as belonging to a different category from the author’s crime writing, and was therefore published under one of his pen-names, D. H. Landels, even though the previous year Constable had published Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper under Henderson’s own name, and that novel became the most successful of his short life.

When Random House published this book in the US in 1946, they changed the title to A Voice Like Velvet (a phrase which crops up in the narrative) and made no bones about the criminous nature of the story: ‘People who have a weakness for stories about gentlemen crooks—and judging by the popularity of Raffles, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, etc., there are thousands of them—will be delighted to make the acquaintance of Ernest Bisham.’ This time, the novel appeared under Henderson’s own name, and the blurb made the most of his earlier success: ‘Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper caused something of a sensation in mystery circles two years ago. His new book is the kind that English writers, for some reason, do much more expertly than our own. You will be seeing it on the screen before long; we hope it will not be too different from this fourteen-karat original.’ This was more like it in terms of exploiting the book’s commercial potential, and the critics were impressed. Kirkus Reviews, for instance, appreciated the way Henderson ‘combines a psychopathic study with [an] effective hare and hounds adventure’. But he was a writer forever dogged by bad luck. He died the very next year, and as far as I have been able to ascertain, no screen version of the novel was ever made. Not even (or perhaps especially not) by the BBC.

The crime story focusing on a criminal, rather than a detective, pre-dates Raffles, the ‘amateur cracksman’ created by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law E. W. Hornung towards the end of the nineteenth century; in fact it pre-dates the detective fiction genre. William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) was published almost half a century before Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, which is commonly regarded as the first detective story. Through the years, the criminal protagonist has maintained an appeal to readers, as witness the success of Patricia Highsmith’s books about Tom Ripley and Jeff Lindsay’s about Dexter Morgan. (Incidentally, British readers unfamiliar with Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford may like to know that he was a swindler created by George Randolph Chester early in the twentieth century.)

So Henderson was working in a long-established tradition, but A Voice Like Velvet has a distinctive flavour. Ernest’s activities may remind us of Raffles, but Henderson explores his character’s state of mind in a way that Hornung never attempted. He also teases his readers, who cannot be sure what fate has in store for Ernest. As a crime writer, Henderson belongs to that loose group of authors who were influenced, directly or indirectly, by the work of Anthony Berkeley’s alter ego Francis Iles, author of two ground-breaking crime novels of the early Thirties, Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact. Richard Hull, Bruce Hamilton, C. E. Vulliamy and Henderson were among those whose mysteries, like Iles’ masterpieces, brimmed with irony and an awareness of the fallibility and limitations of conventional systems of justice.

It would be a step too far to describe Ernest as a self-portrait, but certainly he and Henderson had much in common, including a failed first marriage. Both men worked for the BBC, and A Voice Like Velvet wittily portrays everyday life at Broadcasting House. Before the Second World War, Henderson had spent years as an actor, as well as writing novels and plays, but success in all these fields proved elusive and he was often desperately short of cash. In his unpublished and incomplete memoir The Brink, rescued from oblivion by Paul T. Harding in 2010, Henderson said: ‘I offered my services to the BBC, feeling that my experience as a writer might be of some use in wartime … Knowing little or nothing of the BBC until this date, I was a bit surprised … to be offered a technical job in no way suited to a writer … I was an assistant in a department … called the Recorded Programmes Department, and my duties were twofold; I had to put on gramophone records whenever told to do so, by day or by night—and I had to give “ten second cues”, in studios, when various programmes were to be recorded for transmission at later dates … The most restful of the transmissions I was called upon to do was undoubtedly The Morning Service, as this only involved one disc lasting the conventional three minutes. There was always a soothing hymn.’

Although Henderson resented the BBC’s bureaucracy, the salary compensated for the need to battle with red tape. After years of poverty and struggle, a steady job ‘meant marriage and starting a home at last … As I was getting on for forty, I got more money than much cleverer people, simply and solely because they were younger.’ It was while Henderson was at the BBC that Constable accepted Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper, and this boosted his confidence. He proceeded to write a light comedy called A Man of Character, and then wrote this book.

In The Brink, he said: ‘By the time I was working on [A Voice Like Velvet] I had been appointed an “assistant” in the Home News Talks Department … Here I was in a splendid position to study “announcers”, for they would come into the News Room—an enormous, noisy place filled with erudite and striking literary personalities—a quarter of an hour or so before each news bulletin was due to be read to the waiting world.’

For Henderson, Broadcasting House had ‘none of the glamour or romance of the theatre. There seems to me to be a continual safety-first feeling in the air.’ So far as the BBC was concerned, he was an outsider. A rather different picture of life in Portland Place is presented in Death at Broadcasting House, published in 1934 by Val Gielgud and (under the pen-name Holt Marvell) Eric Maschwitz, both of whom were senior and experienced Corporation men. Their novel, an entertaining if relatively orthodox whodunit, proved highly successful and was filmed, with Gielgud himself playing one of the suspects.

Restless by nature, Henderson wasn’t suited to conventional working life. He moved to the Features & Drama Department, concentrating on the former rather than the latter. However, curiosity was apt to get the better of him. On one occasion, he was sent ‘to visit a factory on the outskirts of London where they were making Rose Hip Syrup, as well as extracting certain properties from the glands of animals. Both the rose hips and the glands appeared to be stacked overnight in a vast refrigerator thick with artificial snow. I was so absorbed by this that I stayed in it far too long and nearly caught pneumonia.’

As his personal finances improved, Henderson felt he could afford to resign from the BBC staff. However, he continued to work for the Corporation on a freelance basis, which ‘seemed more fitting for a writer, rather than continuing on the inside, posing as a producer’. He wrote occasional radio plays for the BBC, including The Trial of Lizzie Borden which, like several passing references in A Voice Like Velvet, illustrates his long-term interest in ‘true crime’. He shared this fascination with the detective novelist John Dickson Carr, who also worked for the BBC during the Second World War, and who encouraged Henderson to tackle the story of Borden, sensationally acquitted in 1892 of murdering her parents with an axe in Fall River, Massachusetts.

The Trial of Lizzie Borden was first broadcast in July 1945, and a Radio Times article publicising the play noted that Henderson had spent seven months working as a scriptwriter on Front Line Family, ‘the famous daily serial which BBC listeners overseas have been hearing throughout the war’. Paul Harding’s researches in the BBC archives reveal that on one occasion, Henderson was called upon to write a special episode at a few minutes’ notice. He completed the script within a couple of hours, earning praise from the BBC and an enhanced fee of twelve guineas. Front Line Family, later known as The Robinson Family, was the BBC’s first venture into soap opera—much to the consternation of those, like Val Gielgud, who feared that it would lead to creeping Americanisation of the Corporation’s output—and was a forerunner of Mrs Dale’s Diary and The Archers. Henderson’s predecessors as writers on the series included Alan Melville, who had published a handful of lively detective novels in the Thirties and later became a popular broadcaster, and Ted Willis, who went on to earn fame as the creator of Dixon of Dock Green, and ultimately received a life peerage. Like them, Henderson had a talent to entertain, but sadly enjoyed much worse fortune.

In 1945, Henderson discussed with Gielgud and Michael Sadleir the possibility of adapting Sadleir’s popular novel Fanny by Gaslight for radio, but the project fizzled out, as did a proposal to write a light-hearted radio thriller in six parts called The Haunted Wireless. He considered that ‘book writing is thoroughly odd’, but kept working on novels and also adapted Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper for the stage. Tragically, he died of lung cancer when he was only 41 years old, at a time when his work was finally beginning to achieve recognition after years of setbacks. A Voice Like Velvet was, he said sadly, ‘perhaps the best reviewed of all my books, [but it] was only allowed one edition of three thousand copies.’ Among those who heaped praise on it in Britain was the influential critic James Agate, whose laudatory notice in the Daily Express was headed: ‘Ah, just the sort of book I like.’

Thanks to the Detective Story Club, this highly readable tale of a scoundrelly BBC presenter can finally enjoy the new lease of life it has merited for many years.

MARTIN EDWARDS

February 2018

www.martinedwardsbooks.com

CHAPTER I (#u378c9acd-0f75-5443-94be-6647955d28b0)

MR ERNEST BISHAM kept as still as possible behind the green velvet curtains and listened to a clock ticking. Suddenly he slipped from behind the curtains and made for the door. He went unchallenged along a corridor and opened the first door he came to. Nobody was in it, it was a bedroom. He went to a window and softly opened it. A few minutes later he was hurrying along a side street and panting slightly. He was not so young as he had been, and he was not so slim as hitherto.

He couldn’t find a taxi, so he got a bus and reached Waterloo Station a little before eleven. Comfortably, he caught the eleven-five for Woking and sat in a first-class carriage, lighting a cigar, and knowing: ‘That porter recognized me again—he knows I’m Ernest Bisham, the Announcer!’ He still got a kick out of it, in spite of much recent mental research. Then he sat back and relaxed, thinking: ‘I promised myself I would never do it again. But I’ve failed myself again. It’s worse than smoking.’ He made a new promise to himself not to do it again, he really would get caught one day, and think of his position now! But he recognized that it meant giving up the biggest thrill of his life, not excluding that first time he had sat at the microphone and read: ‘And this is Ernest Bisham reading it.’ Deep in his overcoat pocket his fingers touched something hard.

Mr Bisham had recently arrived at one of those stages any intellectual man can arrive at during middle life, if he is honest: which stage was to take a day off and have a serious look at himself. So he spent a rather windy March day looking at himself, and in the evening asked Mrs Bisham to have a look at him too. Unfortunately, the evening was interrupted by the arrival of Mr Bisham’s sister. Bess Bisham had the knack of interrupting things. She always brought a bit of an atmosphere with her and somehow or other induced a pause. Even before her brother had become the famous announcer, Bess had possessed a tremendous sort of family consciousness and now it seemed ideal for her to go about saying her brother was, ‘the BBC announcer, you know’. But she was a good sort, and she made a good friend if anyone took the trouble to be patient with her and not laugh at her war efforts.

Mrs Bisham went in for a good deal of sewing in wartime, and she strained her eyes and her pink lips at it, looking genial and concentrative at the same time, with three little lines over the bridge of her large nose. She had a beautiful petal-like skin, it was really the skin of a young girl. Yet she was on the hefty side, in an elegant kind of way. She was called Marjorie, with a j, not a g, and she spent her time saying she must not get snobbish, in spite of the rather snobbish district, and in spite of the determination of the public that announcers must become, and remain, the very hallmark of English respectability. This was all very fine, in its way, but the public might surely be entitled to like its announcers human, in addition? They were human beings, weren’t they? And she had quite a dread of Ernest becoming pompous and inhuman. He was already a borderline case. But both Marjorie and Bess knew that the Bisham family had ‘arrived’ when Ernest came home one night a year or two before and said, as he threw his hat on the hall table: ‘Thank God—they’re transferring me from the Overseas Service! I’m going to be at Broadcasting House! You’ll hear my name on the air!’ As a matter of fact, it was the day Rommel had used up all his best cards and the war, for us, seemed suddenly to have reached a happier turning point.

CHAPTER II (#u378c9acd-0f75-5443-94be-6647955d28b0)

HIS new duties were more of a relief than an excitement to Ernest. It was a long time yet from the advent of the General Forces Programme and a long time before he was to say it was the So and So News and it was ‘read by Ernest Bisham’. He liked broadcasting, and he knew quite a lot about it; the public knew, or thought it knew, all about the wonderfully glamorous life of an actor: but if it had ever been an actor it would know something about such snags as being out of work, or of being in a three years’ run with matinees three times a week. But to Bess and Marjorie, who thought the radio full of glamour and romance—which it was, of course—it was as if Ernest had been made Lord Privy Seal. They joined hands and did an excited and rather ungainly sort of dance in the lounge, tilting over a small Chinese table with the silver cigarette-box on it, and only stopping because one of the servants happened to come in. You could not dance with BBC announcers in front of the servants, however closely connected. As the particular servant said (she was sacked for it later, when it came out): ‘Blimey, it’s like dancing with God!’ She was sacked because of the religious implications, quite apart from anything else that might be read into it. Bess advising Marjorie: ‘You owe it to Ernest to live very differently now, dear. And what about a bigger house?’

Ernest, however, had a particular affection for Tredgarth, The Ridgeway, Horsell, Woking. He often pleased Marjorie very much by saying he had never been happy anywhere else, and that Tredgarth, in spite of its frightful name, had brought him a happiness he had never known before.

‘And by that, of course, I mean you have brought it, Marjorie! For it was your house!’

Ernest paid compliments in rather a stately manner. He was a bit ponderous, rather as if he was reading it out to fifteen millions at six o’clock, or to twenty millions at nine o’clock. But although he said this and laughed, she usually blushed, for he was always sincere.

‘It’s nice of you to say so, Ernest.’

‘I mean it.’

‘I know you do.’

They had the habit of linking arms and wandering around the house or the garden. There were little stone toadstools, and carved garden imps called Rufus and Redbreast. A small, pale boy, in stone, called ‘Norman’ in gilt lettering, was standing beatifically under a fine tree with his hands extended as if measuring the air. There was a little garden shed for Shorter, the gardener, to have tea in. Being a BBC official, the question of alcohol, for Ernest Bisham, needed intensely delicate thought, yet it seemed reasonable to fill Tredgarth cellars as full as possible in case of weekend guests. They were not obliged to drink. There was always a pin of Best Bitter, and a thinning shelf of gin, whisky, brandy, port and sherry. The cigar department was so depleted that there remained only a box of a hundred Coronas from Throgmorton Street, and two boxes of fifty from Piccadilly. The garden was full of leeks and sprouts and celery dug into trenches, though in another part there were delphiniums, forget-me-nots, fuchsia and dahlias. Marjorie and Ernest were both rather vague about gardens and staff arrangements, leaving most of it to Bess, who more or less lived there with them. Bess disappeared at long intervals, but always turned up, usually in the morning after a tinny toll call which asked: ‘I’m in Folkestone, is the bath water hot? I heard you at eight, Ernest, you sounded rather hoarse.’ Within two hours she would arrive in very large boots and a tin helmet and, ‘Oh, a hundred Churchman Number One, for Ernest, canteen prices—or are you saving your voice?’

Generally speaking, it was calmer when Bess was away, for the servants didn’t worry about anything, least of all work, and when she came back, they did, and it was never long before one of them was being threatened with the sack, Marjorie privately protesting: ‘Please, Bess, don’t offend them, we only get servants at all because Ernest happens to be Ernest Bisham, the announcer. And even under these circumstances the servant problem is becoming increasingly difficult.’ But Bess said that no young person ought to take a servant’s job in these days unless they were pregnant. She saw women down coal mines, even, and applauded the Russian women fighting at the front. ‘Why don’t you look for an elderly couple? That’s all you need for this place.’

At dinner, Bess often looked quite feminine, especially after her masculine and muddy arrival as an ATS sergeant. Her grey hair was a bit short, but that was regulations; she was fond of saying that her hair had at one time reached down to an unmentionable part of her back, but even now she went in for oddly feminine blouses with little tassels down the front. If there were guests to sherry or ‘warish’ dinner, she behaved formally and discussed the War Cabinet. If there weren’t, the subjects she chose depended on whether Ernest was at home or at the BBC. If he was at his place at the head of the table, she discussed what she would like to do with one or two of the other announcers; if she was alone with Marjorie, she never failed to lower her voice and say: ‘Well, my dear—is it a success?’ For Bess had been more or less the cause of the marriage, or at any rate the instrument of it, and for a time there did seem to be a doubt of its success. But that applied to the early stages of any marriage, didn’t it? Was it a success now? Marjorie was rather difficult to draw out. It was often difficult to know if she was merely reserved, or somewhat evasive.

Marjorie Bisham knew quite well what it was that Bess wanted to know. Bess had the forgivable curiosity possessed by some spinsters of her age. And if she sometimes felt a small irritation over Bess, she didn’t remember it for long and had developed quite a deep affection for her. She often felt sorry that Bess had never married, and now never would, and she once told Ernest she thought Bess was happier in her present state; Bess made a sort of profession of being a snob. ‘She enjoys the reflected glory you bring her, Ernest! You must never let her down,’ she teased him. But it didn’t matter being a snob if you enjoyed it and were one for a particular reason. She and Ernest both had to be rather snobbish now and then, even if they were only pretending. At times perhaps they did really feel above other people. Then, it was awful to catch yourself at it. Everyone lived in a particular little world—didn’t they?—within the outer world, and they had to live according to those particular standards. The alternative was to get out and live in another one. Mrs Bisham now knew that this particular world was one which she had chosen deliberately—having got out of another which hadn’t fitted her at all. She had confided the details to Bess just before she’d decided to marry Ernest. And perhaps because Ernest, too, had been living in a world which hadn’t suited him at all, the new world he found with Marjorie succeeded instantly—in the outward and practical sense.

In the emotional sense, however, as Bess suspected, it had not succeeded at all. Ernest and Marjorie had married without really being in love with each other at all. It was one of those practical and smiling marriages and there evidently weren’t going to be any children. Marjorie got sad-eyed and went for long walks in a large white mackintosh, returning to have tea by herself in her room. Bess had to have tea with Ernest in the drawing-room, when she would be at leisure to demand what on earth was the matter with him. Sometimes, even, guests would arrive, having been invited by Marjorie herself, but who now genuinely pleaded a headache. The elderly Wintles might come, bringing their brownish son called Jonas, who was said to have already had a tragic life, though not yet twenty-one, and, with his dead brothers, had been amongst the First of the Few. Poor Jonas seemed to admire Ernest, in a distant sort of way, and was always saying he was ‘browned off’ about this or that. He seemed to admire Marjorie, in a poodle-like way, and when she wasn’t on view he would declare to Bess he was ‘utterly browned off to hear it. Can I do anything, Miss Bisham?’ But there seemed to be nothing he could do, or anyone else.

There was one shadowy evening over muffins, when just such a situation caught her once more. Marjorie had pleaded a headache, though refusing a doctor, and the guests this time were a bunch of rather nice people called the de Freeces, three rather tall cousins, or some such relationship, who spent the days nodding their greying heads and saying that the war would first of all be over by the spring, and then by the summer, and then by the coming Christmas. Then they would have to start all over again from scratch. They came on this occasion because Marjorie wanted to go and do some local part-time work in a new factory. And they rang the rusty bell sharp at four, all ready to nod their heads and say it was all arranged about the factory, it was nuts, and it was two shillings an hour if it was Sundays. But of course Mrs Ernest Bisham wouldn’t want to do it for the money, they knew that, dear. Famous announcers must be very rich, and hadn’t Mrs Bisham a little money of her own, didn’t they say? And no doubt he had? Anyhow, they had such a charming house, all wandery and sort of part of the scenery, like a gingerbread cake. They arrived full of everything, and were ‘mortified’ to hear that Mrs Bisham was ‘indisposed’, making her sound like a famous actress who has really had a row with the leading man, except, of course, that in this case the leading man was far too charming. His manners were enchanting and it was such a thrill seeing the actual person who read the news over your wireless. It was fascinating.