The Snark was a Boojum Read online

  THE SNARK WAS A BOOJUM

  Gerald Verner

  completed by Chris Verner

  © Gerald Verner 1957

  © Chris Verner 2015

  Gerald and Chris Verner have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work.

  First published in 2015 by Ramble House.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Posthumous Dedication:

  For my daughter-in-law Jenny

  and for Mark and Zoe,

  my grandchildren I never met.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  THE VANISHING

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  PART TWO

  THE HUNTING

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  PART THREE

  THE SNARK!

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  EPILOGUE

  Introduction to

  The Snark Was A Boojum

  Chris Verner

  My father’s fictional detective Simon Gale is first featured in a BBC eight part Radio Serial Play entitled Noose For A Lady which was broadcast from 24th July to 11th September, 1950, with Ivan Samson and Joan Matheson. It subsequently became a book published by Wright & Brown in 1952. Simon Gale’s first appearance takes place in a London restaurant:

  Jill lit a cigarette and looked around her. There was some kind of altercation going on near the entrance but a pillar obscured her view, and she couldn’t see what it was about. Presently a deep, booming voice reached her ears. “No room?” it roared, rising above the chatter and clatter of the place. “Nonsense, my good girl. There is an empty chair at that table over there—where that lady is sitting. I can think of no good reason why I should not occupy it. May I suggest that at the first opportunity you consult an oculist? Warne, of Wimpole Street is an excellent man.

  Noose For A Lady was made into a 73 minute film in 1953 by Insignia Films Directed by Wolf Rilla. In 1992 the BFI initiated a search for some of the best lost British films. As part of this effort they published a book Missing Believed Lost which listed and described 92 of the most sought after films. Noose For A Lady was on that list but fortuitously has recently been found and issued on DVD by Network Distributing as part of its valuable The British Film collection. It is a new transfer from the original film elements. The film features his detective Simon Gale played by Dennis Price, but quite unlike my father’s description of the detective. The production unfolds against the clock ticking as cousin Margaret waits to keep a date with the hangman, wrongly convicted of poisoning her husband, unless Simon Gale, home on leave from Uganda, finds the real killer.

  Prince of Darkness was published in March 1946 by John Westhouse. It was a collection of fact and fiction on the subject of Witchcraft. The research my father carried out for Prince of Darkness must have stirred his imagination. I surmise that he had two stories in mind at this time, one was to become a classic macabre tale They Walk In Darkness and the other was Wizard’s Window, which as a title only, was sold to Wright & Brown in May 1947, for which he received £195.00. The book they received for this contract/sum was the other story They Walk in Darkness which was published by Wright & Brown in November 1947. Wizard’s Window, much later on with a change of title, would emerge to become Sorcerer’s House to be published by Hutchinson in 1956, the second book to feature Simon Gale: A legend surrounds Threshold House that the appearance of a light in the long room will be followed by a corpse.

  One reviewer commented: “Mr. Verner has supercharged his writing with eerie suspense and any sudden noise while one is reading the last few pages can affect the heart. Stampeding through this supernatural atmosphere comes Mr. Verner’s Simon Gale, his roaring earthiness only serving to heighten the shivers. A good novel this, very good . . . but, oh, how I should love to see one of these tough American ’tecs tangle with Richmond’s Simon Gale.”

  From Sorcerer’s House, here is a description of the detective:

  The door was flung open violently—so violently that it crashed against a chair—and into the room marched an extraordinary figure. It was a huge man, dressed in very stained and very baggy corduroy trousers and an open-necked shirt of a vivid and startling shade of green. His shock of unruly hair was the colour of a freshly ripened horse-chestnut, and he had an aggressive beard of the same vivid hue which projected belligerently from an out-thrust chin. “Mornin’” boomed this apparition in a voice that set all the ornaments in the room rattling.

  A second book, as part of the Hutchinson deal, as a follow up to Sorcerer’s House, was The Snark Was A Boojum, announced in the press but never completed. The first two parts of this story, The Vanishing and The Hunting, were begun in 1957. A painful time for all concerned ensued. My mother had met someone else. My father, getting something from her handbag one day, came across a letter . . . my mother was having an affair. Divorce ensued and a difficult custody battle raged over me. My mother eventually remarried. The divorce had a very bad effect upon my father’s health and he couldn’t write. Several contracts he was working on at the time had to be abandoned and that didn’t go down too well with the producers. My father ran out of money.

  The Snark Was A Boojum was to be the third book to feature his detective Simon Gale. The book was divided into three parts, commencing with The Vanishing. Part Two was The Hunting, concluding with Part Three, The Snark! This intriguing opus was never finished. Through all the upheavals, moving from place to place, I managed to hang on to the unfinished manuscript. There are two drafts of the first part, The Vanishing. The original begins:

  “Simon Gale realized afterwards, when all the facts were known, that murder must have been in the mind of the murderer long before the dinner-party at Hunter’s Meadow. It probably existed then, only as a vague and formless shape, half-seen, like something emerging from a mist, but the desire to kill must have been there, needing just that chance remark of his to bring it into sharp and hideous focus.”

  The book is then revised, now in the first person. The events are seen through the eyes of Jeff Trueman, a guest at Hunter’s Meadow. The story now opens:

  I realised, afterwards, that murder must have been in the mind of the murderer long before the dinner-party at Hunter’s Meadow.

  There is no doubt that murder would have been committed in any event, but it is almost equally certain that it would not have taken the grotesque and horrible form it did, if Simon Gale, in that joking reference concerning the people at the dinner-table, had not supplied the murderer with a plan.

  In 2015 I resolved to finish it, and so began a process of completely revising the story from the beginning, major additions and rewrites for Part Two, and adding the final part, the solution: The Snark!

  The story is set during autumn, with no year specified. I have chosen approximately 1935, when villages were still small villages, country houses still had butlers, cooks, and other servants, and guests dressed for dinner. The rural police were not particularly bright, and did not have the backup they do now to solve crime. It is a period prior to a World War that would change life in England forever. It was an era beloved by my f
ather who, despite writing well into the sixties, kept stories firmly entrenched in the Edwardian period.

  Adding my own solution to the events described by my father in the original manuscripts involved weaving my plot backwards into his manuscript, and wherever possible retaining his original themes.

  I would like to thank my wife, Jenny for putting up with, and contributing to endless conversations as to how the story would progress and reach a conclusion. I would like to thank Philip Harbottle for his help and advice and all his hard work to ensure this story is finally published 58 years after it was started. I would like to thank Gavin O’Keefe from Ramble House for suggesting I’d be the best person to tackle it. This inflated my ego and niggled at me until I read the manuscripts again. Then I began thinking how the story might end. Before I knew it I had made a start and the story wouldn’t let me go. I hope I have done it justice.

  *

  Chris Verner

  Berkhamsted, England

  2015

  “It’s a Snark!” was the sound that first came to their ears,

  And seemed almost too good to be true.

  Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:

  Then the ominous words “It’s a Boo—”

  *

  Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air

  A weary and wandering sigh

  That sounded like “—jum!” but the others declare

  It was only a breeze that went by.

  *

  They hunted till darkness came on, but they found

  Not a button, or feather, or mark,

  By which they could tell that they stood on the ground

  Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

  *

  In the midst of the word he was trying to say,

  In the midst of his laughter and glee,

  He had softly and suddenly vanished away—

  For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

  The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll

  PART ONE

  THE VANISHING

  They hunted till darkness came on, but they found

  Not a button, or feather, or mark,

  By which they could tell that they stood on the ground

  Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

  The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll

  Chapter One

  I realised, afterwards, that murder must have been in the mind of the murderer long before the dinner-party at Hunter’s Meadow.

  There is no doubt that murder would have been committed in any event, but it is almost equally certain that it would not have taken the grotesque and horrible form it did, if Simon Gale, in that joking reference concerning the people at the dinner-table, had not supplied the murderer with a plan.

  The long dining-room, in deep shadow except for the soft light from the candles in the two silver candelabra at each end of the refectory table, with the servants moving silently, like ghosts, is a memory that lingered vividly in my mind long after the whole, grim business was over.

  It was like the last glimpse of a sane and well-ordered community before the thin crust cracked open to let out some of the strange and terrifying things that writhed beneath.

  It is curious how an apparently trivial incident can mushroom out into something that changes your entire life. I should never have got mixed up in this hideous business, at first hand, anyway, if my father had not left his umbrella behind at the office. The severe chill, which resulted from him getting soaked to the skin on his way home, laid him up in bed with a steadily mounting temperature and an equally mounting temper, when he should have been staying at Hunter’s Meadow as the guest of Joshua Bellman.

  The consequence was that as the only available representative of that ancient and highly respected firm of solicitors, Trueman, Hartly, Ward and Trueman, I had to go to Lower Bramsham in his place.

  There was nobody else.

  There has not been a Hartly or a Ward in the firm for over ninety years. Nowadays it consists of only my father and myself and old Timothy Wyse, our managing clerk, who probably knows more about law than either of us—certainly more than I do.

  “You’ll have to go, Jeff,” croaked my father irritably from among his rumpled pillows. “Bellman’s our most important client. He wants to talk over the legal details of this new acquisition . . .”

  And that’s how I came to be at the dinner-party on that Friday evening, and involved, at the very beginning, in this strange affair that began as a joke and ended so horribly in the locked hut in the wood near Farley Halt . . .

  It was a warm night in late September and the windows of the long dining-room were open with the curtains undrawn, but the air was so still that the candle flames on the table scarcely wavered.

  An unexpected spell of fine weather had succeeded the cold and the rain of the previous weeks and looked like lasting for a few more days at least. There was a nearly full moon, and the wide terrace outside the windows, with its stone urns of dying flowers, looked spectral in the bluish-white light; like the backcloth in a theatre or an illustration from a book of fairy-tales.

  You could almost imagine that people of a bygone and more gracious age moved silently over the old flagstones . . . It was easy in this ancient house which had seen Henry Tudor on the English throne, to imagine ghosts . . .

  There were, including myself, thirteen of us grouped round the heavy, carved oak table that evening. With the exception of Joshua Bellman, whom I had met once or twice at our London office, I knew none of them. From what I had gathered, during a rather sketchy introduction over cocktails in the drawing room, they were mostly local people. Taking advantage of a story that had something to do with a deal in shares, which threatened to be both dull and interminable; I tried to sort out what little I knew about them. The story was being related with a great deal of throaty enjoyment by a stout red-faced man sitting almost opposite me. The stout man’s name was Arnold Hope, I remembered, and the dark, rather pretty woman in the vivid scarlet dress next to him, was a Mrs. Hilary King who designed hats for a London firm of milliners. The big, square-faced man with the heavy jowls and sonorous voice was a barrister . . . Now, what was his name? Cranston, that was it . . . Edward Cranston . . .

  “. . . these shares continued to fall but I was convinced they would recover. The time element was the difficulty. Settling day was barely a week ahead . . .” The strangled voice of Mr. Hope droned huskily on in the background. Ignoring it, I transferred my attention from the impressive figure of Edward Cranston to the delicate and wholly charming one of the woman on his left. Although she must have been in her late sixties there was scarcely a discernible line in her placid and gentle face. Miss Agnes Beaver looked as though life had been a very happy and tranquil adventure . . .

  Except that the faded grey eyes held a hint of sadness.

  That brought me to the last person on that side of the table, a dark-haired, good-looking man with a rather supercilious curl to his short upper lip. I had no difficulty in placing him. In the first few seconds of our acquaintance, Lance Weston had informed me that he wrote novels; had already published three and was half-way through a fourth; that they sold extremely well and what did I think of them?

  Since I hadn’t read any of them I couldn’t tell him!

  There was something so intensely vital about him that I felt that any length of time spent in his company would leave me completely drained. He sucked away your energy with the competence of a vacuum cleaner sucking up dust.

  On his left, at the foot of the table and facing her husband at the head, but almost entirely screened from him by the massive arms of a silver candelabra, sat my hostess, Ursula Bellman.

  Candlelight is flattering to most women, but Ursula Bellman would have been beautiful in any light.

  She was fair, with that very pale gold hair that looks almost silver, and her eyes, beneath fine-drawn, curving brows, were a deep, nearly violet, blue. She wore, so that her arms and shoulde
rs were the whiter by contrast, a plain dress of black velvet, cut low, with a single diamond clip at the breast.

  A beautiful woman who was well aware of her beauty . . .

  I glanced at the head of the table where Joshua Bellman sat, his thin, blue-veined and predatory hands busily peeling a peach, and wondered . . . What had induced a woman like Ursula to marry such a dried-up, monkey-like little man?

  The answer was probably money.

  Bellman’s chain stores had branches in many towns throughout the British Isles and new ones were opening in the United States. He also controlled a number of subsidiary companies specialising in baking, breakfast cereals, pies, wholesale supplies, and dairy products. Bellman was a very wealthy man.

  But even with that inducement . . .?

  With a slight shock, I discovered that he had raised his small shrewd brown eyes and was watching me. I had a disconcerting feeling that he knew what I was thinking and, rather hastily, I looked away.

  Wedged in between an enormously fat woman who bulged wherever it was possible to bulge out of a hideous dress of a particularly revolting shade of puce, and a very dapper man with grey hair, was a small, sandy-haired individual whose name I could not, for the life of me, remember. He was staring down at his plate and fiddling nervously with his knives, forks and spoons, so that he kept up a continuous muted tinkling, like the distant sound of sleigh bells, to the intense irritation of the grey-haired man next to him, who had been introduced to me as Franklin Gifford, the manager of the local bank, fastidious and possessing a certain charm, but with a hint of cruelty in his eyes.

  Arnold Hope’s apparently endless negotiations with the shares, which by now had become so involved that it was quite impossible to follow them at all, went on relentlessly. Only two more people remained to complete my list—Jack Merridew, Bellman’s lantern-jawed secretary, whose large shell rimmed spectacles gave him an appearance of owlish wisdom, and an extraordinary looking man who occupied the place of honour on his host’s right.