Juggernaut Read online

  Alice Campbell

  Juggernaut

  Up and up crept the weight. Its touch was cold and scaly; she shuddered at the contact. At the same dreadful moment she realised what the Thing was.

  Esther Rowe, a Canadian, is on holiday in Cannes. She decides to stay on, and seeks nursing employment with the enigmatic and elusive Dr. Gregory Santorius. She finds herself caring for the ageing invalid Sir Charles Clifford, and meets various members of his family, some nice—some less so.

  Certain suspicious events seem to indicate that someone wants Sir Charles out of the way—after all, there’s a will to be considered. When Sir Charles meets his demise, it appears that the causes of death are natural. Edith isn’t so sure—and finds herself caught up in murderous machinations. But will she have an ally to protect her and help her solve this macabre mystery—and escape death herself?

  Juggernaut, Alice Campbell’s first crime novel, was originally published in 1928, and later made into a film starring Boris Karloff. As in many of her novels, the setting is France. The milieu is rich, cosmpolitan and vividly rendered, the plot intriguing to the very end. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  “She could not be unexciting if she tried” Times Literary Supplement

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  About the Author

  Titles by Alice Campbell

  Copyright

  ALICE IN MURDERLAND

  Crime Writer Alice Campbell, The Other “AC”

  In 1927 Alice Dorothy Ormond Campbell—a thirty-nine-year-old native of Atlanta, Georgia who for the last fifteen years had lived successively in New York, Paris and London, never once returning to the so-called Empire City of the South, published her first novel, an unstoppable crime thriller called Juggernaut, selling the serialization rights to the Chicago Tribune for $4000 ($60,000 today), a tremendous sum for a brand new author. On its publication in January 1928, both the book and its author caught the keen eye of Bessie S. Stafford, society page editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Back when Alice Ormond, as she was then known, lived in Atlanta, Miss Bessie breathlessly informed her readers, she had been “an ethereal blonde-like type of beauty, extremely popular, and always thought she was in love with somebody. She took high honors in school; and her gentleness of manner and breeding bespoke an aristocratic lineage. She grew to a charming womanhood—”

  Let us stop Miss Bessie right there, because there is rather more to the story of Alice Campbell, the mystery genre’s other “AC,” who published nineteen crime novels between 1928 and 1950. Allow me to plunge boldly forward with the tale of Atlanta’s great Golden Age crime writer, who as an American expatriate in England, went on to achieve fame and fortune as an atmospheric writer of murder and mystery and become one of the early members of the Detection Club.

  Alice Campbell’s lineage was distinguished. Alice was born in Atlanta on November 29, 1887, the youngest of the four surviving children of prominent Atlantans James Ormond IV and Florence Root. Both of Alice’s grandfathers had been wealthy Atlanta merchants who settled in the city in the years before the American Civil War. Alice’s uncles, John Wellborn Root and Walter Clark Root, were noted architects, while her brothers, Sidney James and Walter Emanuel Ormond, were respectively a drama critic and political writer for the Atlanta Constitution and an attorney and justice of the peace. Both brothers died untimely deaths before Alice had even turned thirty, as did her uncle John Wellborn Root and her father.

  Alice precociously published her first piece of fiction, a fairy story, in the Atlanta Constitution in 1897, when she was nine years old. Four years later, the ambitious child was said to be in the final stage of completing a two-volume novel. In 1907, by which time she was nineteen, Alice relocated to New York City, chaperoned by Florence.

  In New York Alice became friends with writers Inez Haynes Irwin, a prominent feminist, and Jacques Futrelle, the creator of “The Thinking Machine” detective who was soon to go down with the ship on RMS Titanic, and scored her first published short story in Ladies Home Journal in 1911. Simultaneously she threw herself pell-mell into the causes of women’s suffrage and equal pay for equal work. The same year she herself became engaged, but this was soon broken off and in February 1913 Alice sailed to Paris with her mother to further her cultural education.

  Three months later in Paris, on May 22, 1913, twenty-five-year-old Alice married James Lawrence Campbell, a twenty-four-year-old theatrical agent of good looks and good family from Virginia. Jamie, as he was known, had arrived in Paris a couple of years earlier, after a failed stint in New York City as an actor. In Paris he served, more successfully, as an agent for prominent New York play brokers Arch and Edgar Selwyn.

  After the wedding Alice Ormond Campbell, as she now was known, remained in Paris with her husband Jamie until hostilities between France and Germany loomed the next year. At this point the couple prudently relocated to England, along with their newborn son, James Lawrence Campbell, Jr., a future artist and critic. After the war the Campbells, living in London, bought an attractive house in St. John’s Wood, London, where they established a literary and theatrical salon. There Alice oversaw the raising of the couple’s two sons, Lawrence and Robert, and their daughter, named Chita Florence Ormond (“Ormond” for short), while Jamie spent much of his time abroad, brokering play productions in Paris, New York and other cities.

  Like Alice, Jamie harbored dreams of personal literary accomplishment; and in 1927 he published a novel entitled Face Value, which for a brief time became that much-prized thing by publishers, a putatively “scandalous” novel that gets Talked About. The story of a gentle orphan boy named Serge, the son an emigre Russian prostitute, who grows up in a Parisian “disorderly house,” as reviews often blushingly put it, Face Value divided critics, but ended up on American bestseller lists. The success of his first novel led to the author being invited out to Hollywood to work as a scriptwriter, and his name appears on credits to a trio of films in 1927-28, including French Dressing, a “gay” divorce comedy set among sexually scatterbrained Americans in Paris. One wonders whether in Hollywood Jamie ever came across future crime writer Cornell Woolrich, who was scripting there too at the time.

  Alice remained in England with the children, enjoying her own literary splash with her debut thriller Juggernaut, which concerned the murderous machinations of an inexorably ruthless French
Riviera society doctor, opposed by a valiant young nurse. The novel racked up rave reviews and sales in the UK and US, in the latter country spurred on by its nationwide newspaper serialization, which promised readers

  . . . the open door to adventure! Juggernaut by Alice Campbell will sweep you out of the humdrum of everyday life into the gay, swift-moving Arabian-nights existence of the Riviera!

  London’s Daily Mail declared that the irresistible Juggernaut “should rank among the ‘best sellers’ of the year”; and, sure enough, Juggernaut’s English publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, boasted, several months after the novel’s English publication in July 1928, that they already had run through six printings in an attempt to satisfy customer demand. In 1936 Juggernaut was adapted in England as a film vehicle for horror great Boris Karloff, making it the only Alice Campbell novel filmed to date. The film was remade in England under the title The Temptress in 1949.

  Water Weed (1929) and Spiderweb (1930) (Murder in Paris in the US), the immediate successors, held up well to their predecessor’s performance. Alice chose this moment to return for a fortnight to Atlanta, ostensibly to visit her sister, but doubtlessly in part to parade through her hometown as a conquering, albeit commercial, literary hero. And who was there to welcome Alice in the pages of the Constitution but Bessie S. Stafford, who pronounced Alice’s hair still looked like spun gold while her eyes remarkably had turned an even deeper shade of blue. To Miss Bessie, Alice imparted enchanting tales of salon chats with such personages as George Bernard Shaw, Lady Asquith, H. G. Wells and (his lover) Rebecca West, the latter of whom a simpatico Alice met and conversed with frequently. Admitting that her political sympathies in England “inclined toward the conservatives,” Alice yet urged “the absolute necessity of having two strong parties.” English women, she had been pleased to see, evinced more informed interest in politics than their American sisters.

  Alice, Miss Bessie declared, diligently devoted every afternoon to her writing, shutting her study door behind her “as a sign that she is not to be interrupted.” This commitment to her craft enabled Alice to produce an additional sixteen crime novels between 1932 and 1950, beginning with The Click of the Gate and ending with The Corpse Had Red Hair.

  Altogether nearly half of Alice’s crime novels were standalones, in contravention of convention at this time, when series sleuths were so popular. In The Click of the Gate the author introduced one of her main recurring characters, intrepid Paris journalist Tommy Rostetter, who appears in three additional novels: Desire to Kill (1934), Flying Blind (1938) and The Bloodstained Toy (1948). In the two latter novels, Tommy appears with Alice’s other major recurring character, dauntless Inspector Headcorn of Scotland Yard, who also pursues murderers and other malefactors in Death Framed in Silver (1937), They Hunted a Fox (1940), No Murder of Mine (1941) and The Cockroach Sings (1946) (With Bated Breath in the US).

  Additional recurring characters in Alice’s books are Geoffrey Macadam and Catherine West, who appear in Spiderweb and No Light Came On (1942), and Colin Ladbrooke, who appears in Death Framed in Silver, A Door Closed Softly (1939) and They Hunted a Fox. In the latter two books Colin with his romantic interest Alison Young and in the first and third book with Inspector Headcorn, who also appears, as mentioned, in Flying Blind and The Bloodstained Toy with Tommy Rosstetter, making Headcorn the connecting link in this universe of sleuths, although the inspector does not appear with Geoffrey Macadam and Catherine West. It is all a rather complicated state of criminal affairs; and this lack of a consistent and enduring central sleuth character in Alice’s crime fiction may help explain why her work faded in the Fifties, after the author retired from writing.

  Be that as it may, Alice Campbell is a figure of significance in the history of crime fiction. In a 1946 review of The Cockroach Sings in the London Observer, crime fiction critic Maurice Richardson asserted that “[s]he belongs to the atmospheric school, of which one of the outstanding exponents was the late Ethel Lina White,” the author of The Wheel Spins (1936), famously filmed in 1938, under the title The Lady Vanishes, by director Alfred Hitchcock. This “atmospheric school,” as Richardson termed it, had more students in the demonstrative United States than in the decorous United Kingdom, to be sure, the United States being the home of such hugely popular suspense writers as Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon Eberhart, to name but a couple of the most prominent examples.

  Like the novels of the American Eber-Rinehart school and English authors Ethel Lina White and Marie Belloc Lowndes, the latter the author of the acknowledged landmark 1911 thriller The Lodger, Alice Campbell’s books are not pure puzzle detective tales, but rather broader mysteries which put a premium on the storytelling imperatives of atmosphere and suspense. “She could not be unexciting if she tried,” raved the Times Literary Supplement of Alice, stressing the author’s remoteness from the so-called “Humdrum” school of detective fiction headed by British authors Freeman Wills Crofts, John Street and J. J. Connington. However, as Maurice Richardson, a great fan of Alice’s crime writing, put it, “she generally binds her homework together with a reasonable plot,” so the “Humdrum” fans out there need not be put off by what American detective novelist S. S. Van Dine, creator of Philo Vance, dogmatically dismissed as “literary dallying.” In her novels Alice Campbell offered people bone-rattling good reads, which explains their popularity in the past and their revival today. Lines from a review of her 1941 crime novel No Murder of Mine by “H.V.A.” in the Hartford Courant suggests the general nature of her work’s appeal: “The excitement and mystery of this Class A shocker start on page 1 and continue right to the end of the book. You won’t put it down, once you’ve begun it. And if you like romance mixed with your thrills, you’ll find it here.”

  The protagonist of No Murder of Mine is Rowan Wilde, “an attractive young American girl studying in England.” Frequently in her books Alice, like the great Anglo-American author Henry James, pits ingenuous but goodhearted Americans, male or female, up against dangerously sophisticated Europeans, drawing on autobiographical details from her and Jamie’s own lives. Many of her crime novels, which often are lengthier than the norm for the period, recall, in terms of their length and content, the Victorian sensation novel, which seemingly had been in its dying throes when the author was a precocious child; yet, in their emphasis on morbid psychology and their sexual frankness, they also anticipate the modern crime novel. One can discern this tendency most dramatically, perhaps, in the engrossing Water Weed, concerning a sexual affair between a middle-aged Englishwoman and a young American man that has dreadful consequences, and Desire to Kill, about murder among a clique of decadent bohemians in Paris. In both of these mysteries the exploration of aberrant sexuality is striking. Indeed, in its depiction of sexual psychosis Water Weed bears rather more resemblance to, say, the crime novels of Patricia Highsmith than it does to the cozy mysteries of Patricia Wentworth. One might well term it Alice Campbell’s Deep Water.

  In this context it should be noted that in 1935 Alice Campbell authored a sexual problem play, Two Share a Dwelling, which the New York Times described as a “grim, vivid, psychological treatment of dual personality.” Although it ran for only twenty-two performances during October 8-26 at the West End’s celebrated St. James’ Theatre, the play had done well on its provincial tour and it received a standing ovation from the audience on opening night at the West End, primarily on account of the compelling performance of the half-Jewish German stage actress Grete Mosheim, who had fled Germany two years earlier and was making her English stage debut in the play’s lead role of a schizophrenic, sexually compulsive woman. Mosheim was described as young and “blondely beautiful,” bringing to mind the author herself.

  Unfortunately priggish London critics were put off by the play’s morbid sexual subject, which put Alice in an impossible position. One reviewer scathingly observed that “Miss Alice Campbell . . . has chosen to give her audience a study in pathology as a pleasant method of spending the evening. . . . one lea
ves the theatre rather wishing that playwrights would leave medical books on their shelves.” Another sniffed that “it is to be hoped that the fashion of plumbing the depths of Freudian theory for dramatic fare will not spread. It is so much more easy to be interested in the doings of the sane.” The play died a quick death in London and its author went back, for another fifteen years, to “plumbing the depths” in her crime fiction.

  What impelled Alice Campbell, like her husband, to avidly explore human sexuality in her work? Doubtless their writing reflected the temper of modern times, but it also likely was driven by personal imperatives. The child of an unhappy marriage who at a young age had been deprived of a father figure, Alice appears to have wanted to use her crime fiction to explore the human devastation wrought by disordered lives. Sadly, evidence suggests that discord had entered the lives of Alice and Jamie by the 1930s, as they reached middle age and their children entered adulthood. In 1939, as the Second World War loomed, Alice was residing in rural southwestern England with her daughter Ormond at a cottage—the inspiration for her murder setting in No Murder of Mine, one guesses—near the bucolic town of Beaminster, Dorset, known for its medieval Anglican church and its charming reference in a poem by English dialect poet William Barnes:

  Sweet Be’mi’ster, that bist a-bound

  By green and woody hills all round,

  Wi’hedges, reachen up between

  A thousand vields o’ zummer green.

  Alice’s elder son Lawrence was living, unemployed, in New York City at this time and he would enlist in the US Army when the country entered the war a couple of years later, serving as a master sergeant throughout the conflict. In December 1939, twenty-three-year-old Ormond, who seems to have herself preferred going by the name Chita, wed the prominent antiques dealer, interior decorator, home restorer and racehorse owner Ernest Thornton-Smith, who at the age of fifty-eight was fully thirty-five years older than she. Antiques would play a crucial role in Alice’s 1944 wartime crime novel Travelling Butcher, which blogger Kate Jackson at Cross Examining Crime deemed “a thrilling read.” The author’s most comprehensive wartime novel, however, was the highly-praised Ringed with Fire (1943). Native Englishman S. Morgan-Powell, the dean of Canadian drama critics, in the Montreal Star pronounced Ringed with Fire one of the “best spy stories the war has produced,” adding, in one of Alice’s best notices: