"If it comes to swinging, swing all, say I."
- Billy Bones (R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, 1883)
Eric
Elrington Addis was a retired Lieutenant-Commander of the British
Royal Navy and a barrister-at-law at the Admiralty bar, but was "recalled to the Navy upon the outbreak of the Second World War"
and served as Commander on HMS Warspite during the Norwegian
campaign of 1940 – notably during the Second Battle of Narvik. One
year later, Addis was mortally wounded in a German air-raid on the
British Royal Navy base at Alexandria, Egypt. Addis left behind a
wife, two children and a small body of crime-fiction.
As
the pseudonymous "Peter Drax," Addis was one of the "exponents
and practitioners of realism in the British crime novel" and
published six novels between 1936 and 1939. A seventh novel was left
unfinished upon his death, but was eventually completed by his wife
and posthumously published in 1944. However, Drax's contributions to
the Realist School were soon forgotten and never considered as
reprint material. Until this month.
Dean
Street Press is bringing back five of the six novels published
during the thirties and the posthumous book, which come with an
introduction by genre-historian and professional fanboy, Curt Evans –
who can be found blogging as The
Passing Tramp. The only title not being reissued is Murder
by Proxy (1937). Since the books have become really obscure, I
suppose there were no secondhand copies available to scan.
High
Seas Murder (1939) was the last book published during Drax's
lifetime and demonstrated his literary ambitions "to tell a
story that was credible," which resulted, according to Evans,
in "one of the most important bodies of realistic crime fiction"
of the early twentieth century.
I think this specific title clearly
showed Drax was a subversive voice within the genre, because the
slender plot is completely antithetical to the image most readers
have of the typical, 1930s ship-bound mystery novel.
The
first half of the book tells the story of two unlucky ships, a
trawler and a cargo-ship, which are passing one another in their
respective hours of need.
Carl
Swanson is "recognized as the best ship's captain in the fishing
town of Gilsboro" and is assembling a small crew of fishermen
to take out a new ship, named the John Goodwin, but the maiden
voyage of the trawler is plagued by bad luck and losses – two men
and both trawlers were lost to the sea. They also had a run-in with a
gunboat when they were caught poaching. So the fishermen were looking
at missing out on a good chunk of money when they serendipitously
came across an apparently derelict steamship.
The
steamship Ivanhoe, owned by Captain MacTaggart, was badly
damaged and the crew had abandoned ship when it looked as if it were
going to sink. Somehow, the ship managed to stay afloat and when the
John Goodwin sighted the Ivanhoe they assumed they
could make up their lost by salvaging the derelict ship and its
cargo. However, they found that the captain was still on board, who
had refused to abandon ship, which is going to "cut down"
on anything Swanson expected to get for salvage – which becomes
very apparent in the way MacTaggart approaches those "damn'
pirates."
So,
as to be expected, these two captains have a confrontation that ended
with Swanson striking MacTaggart. Assuming he has just killed a man,
Swanson threw the body into the sea and told the others he had fallen
overboard by accident, because the ship was in poor condition. He
also told them they could get more money, if they simply told
authorities they found the Ivanhoe completely derelict and
abandoned.
And
there you have it. The first half of the book and all of the plot
material of High Seas Murder.
During
the second half, they return to port and put in their salvage claim,
but, slowly, Swanson's lies come unstuck, which began with the
unexpected recovery of the captain's body from the sea – something
he had not counted on. Once again, this unraveling of lies shows Drax
was a contrarian voice, within the genre, during the 1930s, because
this process hardly resembles anything you'd expect from a classic
detective story. The reader is already aware of all the facts and
mistakes, which are gradually revealed without any real detective
work. Swanson's lies gradually begin to collapse in on themselves,
because he's not really all that clever and a poor liar on top of
that. So not really your typical vintage criminal.
As
you can probably understand, High Seas Murder wasn't really
the sort of crime story I typically enjoy reading, but the first half
was both intriguing and well-written. I did not care as much about
the second leg of the book, but, again, this is not the kind of story
that was written for readers like yours truly. However, if you really
like the work of such realists writers like Georges
Simenon and Seicho
Matsumoto, you might want to add Drax to your wish list.
On a final note...
 |
| DRAX THE (NAVY) DESTROYER |
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
