The Duel of Shadows (Lost Clasics Book 31) Read online

  The Duel of Shadows

  by Vincent Cornier

  With an introduction

  by Mike Ashley

  This compilation copyright © 2011 by Crippen & Landru Publishers Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2011 by Mike Ashley

  These stories reprinted by arrangement with the author’s daughter, Deiodore Sellers

  Cover artwork by Gail Cross

  Lost Classics series design by Deborah Miller

  Crippen & Landru logo by Eric D. Greene

  Lost Classics logo by Eric D. Greene, adapted from a drawing by Ike Morgan, ca. 1895

  ISBN: 978-1-932009-97-2 (cloth edition)

  ISBN: 978-1-932009-98-9 (trade softcover edition)

  FIRST EDITION

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, recycled paper Crippen & Landru Publishers

  P.O. Box 9315

  Norfolk, VA 23505

  USA

  e-mail: [email protected]

  web: www.crippenlandru.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Stone Ear

  The Silver Quarrel

  The Throat of Green Jasper

  The Duel of Shadows

  The Catastrophe in Clay

  The Mantle That Laughed

  The Tabasheeran Pearls

  The Gilt Lily

  The Monster

  O Time, In Your Flight

  Sources

  REGULAR SERIES

  CRIPPEN & LANDRU LOST CLASSICS

  SUBSCRIPTIONS

  Introduction

  For over sixty years the work of Vincent Cornier has been something of a secret treasure within the vaults of mystery fiction. It was in the December 1946 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine that Frederic Dannay resurrected Cornier’s story “The Smell That Killed” which presented the puzzle of how a lowly racecourse trickster was turned into a block of stone overnight. It was the story’s first publication in America, but it had previously appeared in Britain eleven years earlier in Pearson’s Magazine for February 1935 under the title “The Catastrophe in Clay”. For the first time American mystery devotees were introduced to the bizarre cases investigated by Barnabas Hildreth, an agent of British Intelligence – whose stories are collected together here for the first time.

  It was not Cornier’s first appearance in an American magazine – in fact, it wasn’t the first American appearance of Hildreth. Readers of the short-lived historical-adventure pulp magazine Golden Fleece would have stumbled across him in “The Mantle That Laughed” in the November 1938 issue. Cornier was also in the April 1939 Golden Fleece with the non-historical, non-Hildreth “Octave Seventy-Five”, a bona fide science-fiction story. Devotees of weird fiction might also have seen his story “The Singing Shadows” in the February 1939 Strange Stories, a short-lived pulp rival to Weird Tales.

  These all gave the impression of Cornier as a writer of unusual, somewhat exotic stories and certainly not as a writer of crime fiction. The crossover readership between Ellery Queen’s and Strange Stories was probably minimal, and even less with Golden Fleece, so few readers would have been prepared for what Dannay came to call “one of the great series of modern detective stories.” Dannay revealed that there were fifteen stories about Hildreth, but Cornier had not assembled any story collection and to the book world he was virtually unknown. A few stories had been picked up by anthologies in Britain during the 1930s, but none in America. During the Second World War, Cornier’s British magazine markets closed down. He turned to teaching journalism and selling his ideas to another writer.

  For a few years after the War his main market became Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. “EQMM has taught me this,” he wrote to Dannay, “there is a dignity in the mystery story that I knew existed, yet never saw, with honesty, declared.” Dannay would run eight of Cornier’s stories between 1946 and 1951. Then, after a long wait, two quite different (and non-Hildreth) stories appeared in 1961 and 1968, and that was it. Cornier’s sudden re-emergence faded as rapidly as it started and he was again forgotten.

  Well, not by everyone. Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor remembered him when they compiled A Catalogue of Crime in 1971. Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler gave him an entry in their Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976), noting that his “best puzzles are as bizarre and baffling as anything written by John Dickson Carr or Queen.” Francis M. Nevins made a passing reference to him in his biography of Ellery Queen, Royal Bloodline (1974), calling him an “unclassifiable maverick.” But all these judgements were made on the few stories reprinted in Ellery Queen’s. The ever diligent Robert Adey had listed some of Cornier’s other “impossible crime” stories in Locked Room Murders (1979), but there had still been no collection of Cornier’s work and still nothing was known about him beyond what Dannay had written in his introductions to the stories.

  It was not until Stephen Leadbetter wrote his groundbreaking “Vincent Cornier, Rediscovered” for the Fall 1988 The Armchair Detective that some idea of the full scale of Cornier’s output was revealed. Since then further discoveries have been made, chiefly by George Locke, who included them in the third volume of his A Spectrum of Fantasy (2002), and Arthur Vidro, who researched Cornier’s letters to Frederic Dannay, publishing the results in his magazine Old Time Detection. Jack Adrian reprinted a couple of stories in anthologies, but still the vast majority of Cornier’s work remained unknown and unreprinted, lost in rare British magazines of the twenties and thirties.

  Thanks to the pioneering work of Stephen Leadbetter and my own researches, including help from Cornier’s daughter, Deidore (who prefers to be called Pat), and Arthur Vidro, I have been able to piece together something of Cornier’s life, though much still remains a mystery.

  * * *

  Cornier was not Cornier at all. He was William Vincent Corner, and had been born at Coatham, near Redcar, in what is now Cleveland but which was then North Yorkshire, on 22 January 1898. Corner is a common surname in that part of Yorkshire and most seem to have lived in Whitby, further down the coast, with which the family may have had some seafaring connections. Vincent’s father, Edward Gardin Corner, was a marine engineer who had married Beatrice Kirkby the year before, when he was 25. Soon after Vincent’s birth the young family moved to Beatrice’s home town of Middlesbrough, a few miles inland along the River Tees, where Vincent’s brother, Donald, was born in October 1900.

  Vincent was evidently a precocious child. He told Dannay that when he was fourteen he was already earning a hundred guineas a year from articles he sold to newspapers at half-a-guinea each. A guinea was one pound and one shilling in old money, so a hundred guineas was £105. At the time that was equal to about $510, and is the equivalent today of about £7,000 ($14,000), not bad pocket-money for a young teenager. No records of these early sales survive and it is not known if he sold any fiction during these pre-War years. In fact no primary records of Cornier’s writings survive. In later years, when he and his wife separated, she destroyed all of his papers.

  With the outbreak of the First World War, Vincent, then aged 16, volunteered for service with the newly formed Royal Flying Corps. He had no flying experience – in fact he was too young to fly, though in later years he referred to his service as an “airman.” In fact he served as an air mechanic, an expression used to cover all ground person-nel, including non-technicians. Cornier – or Corner as he still was at that stage – was allocated to one of the squadrons allied to the British Expeditionary Force in France where he served from March 1915 to early 1916, when he was invalided out apparently, according to his daughter, as a result of gassing, though this does not seem to have had any lasting effect. He subsequently served as a journalist in the London offices of the Yorkshire Evening Post and as a Special Correspondent for the Press Association in the years immediately after the War. He became entangled in the Burgenland dispute between Austria and Hungary in August 1921 and had to prove his role as a neutral journalist to the sharpshooters.

  Returning to England, a change of fortune allowed him to turn to writing as a career. His grandfather died in 1922 leaving him a significant sum. It may have been at this time that he entered a story contest and though he won first prize, his entry was disqualified because it was over the stipulated length. The prize went to another story which turned out also to be by Cornier, but under an alias. I have no idea whether Cornier had any fiction published pseudonymously. It’s entirely possible because the majority of his known output at the start was for the stable of magazines published by Cassell, and he may have used an alias for stories sold to other companies. He was writing for the biggest selling Sunday newspaper, the Weekly Dispatch, owned by Lord Rothermere, by 1926 as it published his article on black magic, “Shrines of Satan”. It must have been around this time that he changed his name officially to Cornier (pronounced Corn-ee-ay), as it was under that name that his marriage was registered, to Doris Goulding, in 1928. They settled in a large house near Guisborough in Yorkshire where, over the next decade, they raised a family of six children.

  The one photograph of Cornier I have seen depicts a shrewd man. His daughter, Pat, describes him as fairly tall (about six feet) with black hair and blue eyes. He smoked cigarettes a lot when he was writing and drank copious cups of tea.

  His first known story is “Mademoiselle Tenebre” in Cassell’s Magazine for June 1928. It’s a straightforward tale, set in France, and c
oncerns a girl who takes revenge upon a man who had assaulted her. In the same month “The Academic Mr. Cateby” appeared in The Story-teller. This is a clever little crime story about a burglar who is apprehended by the apparent owner of the house but who turns out to be another burglar who frames him for a theft he did not make.

  The Story-teller became his main market over the next few years. These early stories cover a range of unusual ideas from borderline supernatural, such as “Mensal” (July 1928) and “The Singing Vase” (January 1929), both dealing with reincarnation and past memories, to stories of lost treasure, such as “Grenhalghen’s Galleon” (September 1928) and “The Eighteen-Carat Duck” (February 1929), and to science fiction, such as “The Light of Lost Land” (October 1928), where a meteorite that crashes into the Earth emits evil psychic forces. “The Relict of Josiah Begg” (August 1928) showed signs of the type of unusual mystery that would become his trademark, as this dealt with the inexplicable problem of why, when a widow moves to another town, she discovers that everyone hates her.

  This approach blossomed in the April 1929 Story-teller, which introduced the of the Brantyngham Riddles, “The Ball Called ‘Good-I’-God’”. The editor, Clarence Winchester, introduced the series by saying, “Readers of the Story-teller will find this and succeeding stories among the most brilliant and original work that has appeared in these pages.” The series was a forerunner of the future Hildreth stories and, indeed, Sir Richard Brantygham was much the same as Barnabas Hildreth, an officer of British Intelligence who became involved in solving bizarre cases in both a professional and private capacity. The idea used in the first story was the same as that developed in “The Duel of Shadows”. A man is found alone in a locked-room shot dead by a musket ball that had been fired 280 years earlier. Cornier became rather notorious for reworking and refining his ideas and most of the Brantyngham plots would resurface in the Hildreth and other stories in the thirties.

  The second Brantyngham riddle, “The Flying Hat” (May 1929), has a victim stabbed to death in full view of everybody but where no assailant was seen and no footprints left in the newly fallen snow. The story was selected by Faber for the second volume of their Best Detective Stories (1930), reprinting the best stories from 1929.

  There were seven Brantyngham riddles in total; none, aside from the second, has ever been reprinted. All have bizarre plots but perhaps the most audacious is that in “The Silent Sound” (June 1929) in which several people in different parts of Europe are struck dead simultaneously by lightning, but at places where there had been no thunderstorms. Although some of the stories include mystical elements, the solutions are all based on scientific concepts, making Brantyngham a scientific detective in the mould of Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke. Cornier, though, pushes the barriers to the very edge of scientific knowledge and, for the period, the more extreme stories read like borderline science fiction.

  Cornier continued to contribute unusual stories to both Cassell’s and The Story-teller, most of which were either outright supernatural, such as “The Secret Eyes of the Nile” (Cassell’s, October 1929), involving a cursed ring and reincarnated spirits, or rationalised supernatural, such as “The Walk of the Spanish Gentleman” (Cassell’s, November 1929), where ghosts seen on a causeway turn out to be descendants of survivors from an ancient wreck. But with Cornier it is but a short step from his weird tales to those involving impossible crimes. The non-series “The Jewelled Tempest” (The Story-teller, July 1930) involves a series of killings with no visible assailant. “Stone Fever” (Cassell’s, September 1931) is not quite an impossible crime but is a very cunning one and involves a unique hiding place for a stolen jewel. “Courtyard of the Fly” (Cassell’s, February 1932), which was reprinted by Jack Adrian and Robert Adey in The Art of the Impossible (1990), likewise involves an ingenious method of theft.

  With “For Humanity’s Sake” (The Story-teller, June 1932), Cornier began another series, this time featuring Major Bruce Helmerdyne of the Intelligence Service and Professor Wanless. As with the Brantyngham series these stories, which ran to five, all involve some scientific device, such as ultrasound or drugs. The fourth in the series, “Dust of Lions” appeared, not in The Story-teller, but in Pearson’s Magazine (April 1933), almost certainly because the story is a reworking of the Brantyngham plot in “The Silent Sound”, only this time the victims all suffer spontaneous combustion in various places throughout Europe. Either the magazine rejected the story or Cornier thought it best to submit the story elsewhere, but I can imagine it annoyed the editor that one of their series should turn up in a rival magazine. That may be why only one more Helmerdyne story appeared in The Story-teller and perhaps why Cornier’s work was absent from the magazine for several years.

  Having established a new market Cornier created his new character, Barnabas Hildreth, and felt at liberty to rework many of his past ideas for the new series. It began with “The Stone Ear” (September 1933), which deals with two identical antique glass goblets, one of which turns to dust but the other does not. It was an idea that Cornier had used in “The Three Glass Words” (The Story-teller, November 1930) but here he developed the idea into a unique mystery. “The Stone Ear” was almost deified by Dannay as being the only known story which is not resolved until the very last word.

  The Hildreth stories are the pinnacle of Cornier’s ingenuity and plotting – and audacity. Although the scientific premise in each story is based on scientific principles his extrapolation of them for the purpose of the plot device occasionally takes liberties. He discovered that part of the solution he used in “The Duel of Shadows” was not possible, though that was not known at the time he wrote the story. I also strongly suspect that his solution in “The Catastrophe in Clay,” for all its ingenuity, falls short of achievement. Nonetheless these shortcomings do not spoil the stories, because Cornier still creates magnificent mysteries around truly bizarre phenomena which instil total fascination in the reader. And there are times when he does not transgress scientific possibilities. His idea behind the crime in “The Brother of Heaven” (October 1933), which he embellished from the first Brantyngham riddle, is certainly achievable – allowing for Cornier’s fascination for exotic plants – as is the story-line in “The Silver Quarrel” (November 1933).

  There is one Hildreth story, “The Space-Time Masterpiece,” where Cornier got rather carried away with his idea, in which he almost presages virtual reality in an attempt to create ghosts and visions of the past. The story is a short novel in its own right, too long to include in this collection. Doubtless Pearson’s rejected it because of its length and so Cornier was able to cancel out his debt with The Story teller, where it appeared in the April 1936 issue.

  Cornier was usually too busy writing short stories and journalism to spend time on a novel, but in 1934 he was commissioned to produce a serial, “The Steel Dutchman.” This would have been at home in any American pulp adventure magazine, especially Argosy. I do not know which English paper it appeared in, but it was serialised in the Australian paper, The Queenslander, during June to August 1934. It tells of a Yorkshire scientist who has invented a device for the remote control of flying weapons. The details are stolen by an evil rich Dutchman and it’s down to the scientist’s daughter and her boyfriend, barrister Guy Merlincote, to defeat the Dutchman and save the world.

  The onset of the Second World War saw many of the British fiction magazines fold, due to paper and printing restrictions. The Story-teller had managed to kill itself even before the war started and Pearson’s ceased in November 1939. Cornier sold a few stories to other markets, such as Britannia and Eve, but there were few magazines that ran the unusual type of story that he wrote. Had he been more au fait with the American pulps he would almost certainly have been able to earn a respectable living – some of his plotlines would have been ideal for The Shadow and Doc Savage. Instead he became involved in war work, primarily salvage and munitions near his home at Hutton Hall, where he would frustrate the soldiers that patrolled the factory by calling out to them in German! He also joined the London School of Journalism where he ran courses and eventually became Assistant Director of Studies. It may have been at this time that he came to an arrangement with a fellow author to whom Cornier sold detailed plot ideas for £50 or £60 a time. Cornier told Dannay of the arrangement but did not name the author, revealing only that he was “a Fleet Street feature editor who is a slick writer but has nary a creative thought in his dear old nut.” Pat, Cornier’s daughter, recalls that this was Sidney Denham (1906-1968), whom she worked for after the War. Denham’s output of fiction under his own name is relatively small, whilst Cornier noted that the author had written “a whole series of little ninepenny and one-and-sixpenny thrillers” over a period of fourteen years. Pat believed her father’s ideas were used in stories run under the pen names of Sydney Thomas or Thomas Sydney, but identifying which may prove difficult.