Twice round the clock, p.1
Twice Round the Clock, page 1
This edition first published in 2023 by
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London NW1 2DB
Twice Round the Clock was first published in 1935 by Hutchinson & Co., London.
Introduction © 2023 Martin Edwards
Twice Round the Clock © 1935 The Estate of Billie Houston
Volume Copyright © The British Library Board
Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7123 5403 5
e-ISBN 978 0 7123 6875 9
Front cover image © Mary Evans Picture Library
Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London
Contents
Introduction
A Note from the Publisher
Twice Round the Clock
Introduction
Twice Round the Clock is a long-forgotten mystery by a woman whose life encompassed professional fame and personal tragedy. Although she was once extremely well-known, it was not as a crime writer. When the book was first published by Hutchinson (a company of considerable renown) in 1935, the dust jacket blurb explained:
Billie Houston, as one of the Houston Sisters, is already famous, for she and her sister Renée form what is probably the best known and most successful vaudeville sister acts within living memory, and there must be few indeed who, through the music-hall and newspapers and wireless, are not acquainted with the smiling, fair-haired “boy”.
And now Billie Houston has turned novelist and here is her first novel. It is a thriller and a gripping one too. A man is murdered at a dinner party held in honour of his daughter at his lonely house. The telephone wires have been damaged, cars tampered with, and for long hours the guests are cooped together, each aware that his neighbour may be the murderer. A dramatic, exciting situation which Billie Houston develops to the full.
How this novel came to be written is in itself a story which tells of many dressing-rooms all over the country in which between appearances on the stage, pages were planned and scribbled and often torn up. It tells, too, of a life-long ambition and an absorbing interest in criminology, and its success may mean to its author more than thunderous applause from a packed theatre.
The dust jacket was adorned with pictures of Billie Houston (and her sister Renée) on the front cover as well as the back, making it clear that her celebrity status—or “platform”, in the jargon of the modern publishing world—was seen as a crucial marketing advantage. I must admit, however, that when I acquired a copy (inscribed by Billie to Nancy Maitland in the year of publication) from the estate of the late Bob Adey, a true bibliophile, I had never heard of either Billie or her novel. Research uncovered a great deal of material about the Houston Sisters, but the book itself has seldom been discussed.
The undeniable truth is that sometimes forgotten books have been forgotten for a very good reason. When I started reading the novel, I was prepared to be disappointed. To my delight, however, the storyline proved to be lively and unpretentious. The real disappointment was that Billie Houston never followed up her debut in the genre.
A keen and intelligent reader of mysteries, she made the excellent decision to create a sense of pace and suspense by emphasising the rapid passage of time. The title reflects this approach, and so do the chapter headings. This is a country house mystery and Billie—whose second husband came from an aristocratic family—had rather more extensive personal experience of life in country houses than many writers of Golden Age detection. In a prologue, a body is discovered, but we then have a long flashback scene in which the tension mounts as it becomes evident that numerous people have good cause to commit a murder. The structure anticipates, in some respects, that of a later—and otherwise very different—novel that has justifiably earned acclaim from aficionados of detective fiction: Lonely Magdalen by Henry Wade.
Billie Houston was the stage name of Sarah McMahon Gribbin, born in Shettleston, Glasgow, in 1906. Her parents James Gribbin and Elizabeth Houston were music hall performers who had a song and dance act. Her older sister Renée (Caterina Rita Murphy Gribbin, 1902–80) began a stage career in 1912. Four years later, with their parents suffering from ill-health, the two girls began working together as the Houston Sisters. In the 1920s, the pair enjoyed sustained popularity, topping the bill in venues around Britain and filling the London Palladium on numerous occasions. They appeared at a Royal Variety Command performance in the days when performers really did take part as a result of a command, or request, from the King.
Typically, they pretended to be children, with Billie playing a boy. According to Frances Gray’s essay in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the secret of their success lay in meticulous attention to detail: their sets sometimes included furniture that was scaled-up in size so as to make them look like small children. Gray describes the sisters as “both sharply observational about working-class Scottish life and childhood, and sexually magnetic.” Billie became highly skilled as a male impersonator.
The sisters appeared together in a handful of films, including Happy Days are Here Again (1936), but the act broke up. As Renée explained in her autobiography Don’t Fence Me In (1974), this was due to Billie’s poor health. Renée went on to enjoy a long screen career, with film credits as varied as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac as well as A Town Like Alice and Carry on at Your Convenience. A very informative website devoted to Renée may be found at renéehoustonsite.wordpress.com.
Billie’s first marriage (to Bobby Wilton, son of the well-known comedian Rob Wilton) ended in divorce and in 1938 her second husband, the actor Richard Cowper, died. By melancholy coincidence, he and her first husband both took their own lives. In 1939, she married again, to Paul Wills-Eve, and this marriage lasted until her death from emphysema in 1972. They had two children, Carole and Anton, and I’m indebted to Carole for providing me with fascinating background information about her mother. One favourite anecdote concerns Billie, as a very small girl, interrupting a performance of the stage version of East Lynne. When her mother declaimed those famously melodramatic lines: “Gone! Gone! And never called me mother!”, Billie cried out to reassure her that she was very much alive and kicking.
After the Second World War, Billie was much less visible in public than her sister. This was due in part to the fact that she found contentment in the domestic life but also due to continuing health problems. During one performance she fell from the stage into the orchestra pit and damaged her back severely, necessitating a major operation. Her husband Paul was a journalist who spent several years as bureau chief of United Press International; as a result, the family was based in Paris, a city Billie loved. Carole, who worked in publishing, and Anton, a journalist, both inherited their parents’ literary leanings.
From the early 1950s onwards, Billie was a semi-invalid, but she showed considerable courage in coping with her physical limitations and continued to travel extensively. Always a voracious reader of detective fiction, she was a devotee of female authors such as Sayers, Marsh, and Allingham. She also developed into a formidable chess player, reaching regional championship standard.
At one point, Billie thought about writing another crime novel, tentatively entitled Whatever Happened to Aunt Jane?, but she never got beyond the stage of writing notes for an outline. Nevertheless, Twice Round the Clock evidences a genuine talent for storytelling. To this day, debates persist about whether celebrities who publish fiction have some sort of unfair advantage over fellow authors. The reality, however, is that plenty of celebrities write good novels and even though some of them produce work that is less impressive, it is folly to under-estimate an author simply because he or she is well-known in some other walk of life.
I don’t claim that Twice Round the Clock is a literary masterpiece, but I’m glad that at long last others have a chance to read the story and form their own views about it. Seven years have passed since I wrote about the book on my blog “Do You Write Under Your Own Name?” but at the time of writing, I’d never come across anyone who had read it and until now it has remained in the shadows. A new edition as a British Library Crime Classic will change that and I hope that others will share my view that this is a book deserving of better than total obscurity. Billie Houston was a modest woman who once said to her daughter that the novel was only published because she was a celebrity. I like to think that she would be thrilled to see it enjoying a new life, more than half a century after her death, solely on its own merits.
Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com
A Note from the Publisher
The original novels and short stories reprinted in the British Library Crime Classics series were written and published in a period ranging, for the most part, from the 1890s to the 1960s. There are many elements of these stories which continue to entertain modern readers; however, in some cases there are also uses of language, instances of stereotyping and some attitudes expressed by narrators or characters which may not be endorsed by the publishing standards of today. We acknowledge therefore that some elements in the works selected for reprinting may continue to make uncomfortable reading for some of our audience. With this series British Library Publishing aims to offer a new readership a chance to read some of the rare books of the British Library’s collections in an affordable paperback format, to enjoy their merits and to look back into the world of the twentieth century as portrayed by its writers. It is not possibl
British Library Publishing
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London, NW1 2DB
United Kingdom
Book One
Prologue
Four A.M.
Bill Brent made his way swiftly across the dark hall, moving with extraordinary quiet for a man of his size.
Arrived at the door of the room from which, he felt sure, the sounds had come, he felt for the knob and grasped it carefully. Even as he did so his head jerked up and he paused for a moment, every sense alert. The faintest sound from somewhere behind him had disturbed the stillness of the night. But the thunder started again with a low rumble, gradually working up to a crashing crescendo, and Brent turned the knob with a swift twist of the wrist and threw the door open.
A gust of cold air rushed through the open door and something white—a sheet of thin paper—fluttered along the floor towards him.
The thunder, having reached its crescendo, commenced to die away, and Brent strained his ears for any sound from the dark room before him. Came another sudden gust of air, the rustling of paper, and more white sheets danced towards him. Then, without warning the room sprang into blue, vivid life as the lightning flashed, and Brent caught his breath at the momentary glimpse of the figure sprawled across the big table with something white and gleaming sticking up out of its back.
He stepped across the threshold and felt on the wall for the switch, found it, and flooded the room with light. Another moment’s pause, his eyes fixed upon the figure at the table, and in three strides he was at its side, bending over it.
The table was in chaotic disorder. Papers covered it and overflowed on to the floor at its side. An inkstand had overturned and the contents had trickled out in blue and red streams; the telephone had fallen to the floor, and lay there amongst two or three open books; pens, letter-rack, an overturned ash-tray, were mixed up in the confusion of the table.
Brent bent over the figure of the man seated in the chair with the head and shoulders fallen across the table, and removed a sheet of paper which had fallen across the face and hidden it.
It was Manning, dead, and with the cause of death sticking up from between his shoulder blades—the white ivory handle of a carving-knife. Whoever had put it there had struck with fierce energy, for the blade was buried to within two inches of the handle.
Brent stepped back from the dead man and looked as he felt upon his cheek another rush of cold air.
The French windows were open, and in one of them the centre pane had been smashed. Brent went to them and stared out into the darkness of the night. He was about to step through them on to the lawn outside, when the thunder and lightning came again—together this time—with deafening crash and blinding flash, and he raised his hand in defence of his eyes. Then came the rain, and such rain as Brent had seen before only in the tropics. It beat down with a thunder of its own upon the trees and the lawn outside; it came into the room, wetting his bare feet as he stood near the windows.
Not the slightest use his trying to go out in this storm. He must wait until it passed before attempting to discover the reason for those sounds he had heard beneath his window, and which had brought him hurrying down.
He pulled the windows to and bolted them, and turned again to the room. As he did so something moving at the far end of the hall, which he could see through the open door, caught his eye; something vaguely white, gliding along in the shadows. In a trice he was through the door and making his way towards the place where he had seen it. The light from the room partially lit up the great space of the hall. Whoever it was seemed to have been coming from the dining-room, the door of which was in the far left-hand corner, and… yes, there it was again, at the foot of the stairs.
Brent reached the broad stairway in time to see it disappear around the first bend, and was about to start up after it, when someone else—a man in pyjamas and dressing-gown—appeared around the bend, flattening himself against the wall as he did so, to let the figure in white pass.
The second figure came lightly and quickly down the stairs. It was Dr. Henderson, and Brent recognised him with relief.
“Bill?” whispered the doctor.
“That’s right, Hendy. Who the devil was that going upstairs?”
“Sh! Not too loud. It’s Mrs. Geraint sleep-walking. She does it often. What’s up down here? I thought I heard sounds, though in this storm…”
“There’s plenty up down here, old boy,” replied Brent drily. “Manning’s in there, murdered…”
“Manning? Murdered?”
“With a damn great knife stuck in him. Come along and have a look for yourself.”
The two hurried back to the lighted room, and the doctor bent over the body while Brent waited.
“Dead all right,” said Henderson, straightening himself.
“As mutton,” agreed Brent.
Henderson stared about him at the wildly disordered room.
“My God!” he said presently, “what a mess!”
“I found the windows open,” explained Brent. “Somebody must have come through them, done this”—he pointed to the knife—“and run for it. I heard a sort of scream, and glass breaking…”
“I heard something of the sort, too; about two minutes ago…”
“That’s right. Can’t go out in this storm, of course. Pity, too, because whoever did this is out in it. I heard him go, and that scream, Hendy, came from outside the windows. My room’s directly over this.”
The two men stood in silence for a moment, then Brent said: “Better telephone the police, I suppose.”
“Yes… yes… I suppose so. Nothing to be done for Manning. You telephone, will you?”
Brent picked up the instrument from the floor and held the receiver to his ear, rattling the hook of the holder as he did so. More rattling of the hook, and then a puzzled look on Brent’s face.
“Line’s dead,” he said. He tried again, but with no result, and presently he put the telephone down amongst the papers on the table.
“No good,” he said shortly. “Either the wire’s been cut, or the storm’s done it in.”
Another ear-splitting crash of thunder shook the house, and the night outside lit up with a blinding flash of lightning.
“Better see about the others,” said Brent, raising his voice almost to a shout. “Storm’s sure to wake them, and we can’t have them in here. Helen, too…”
Henderson nodded, and went to the door, looking back as he reached it. Brent was stooping down to look at something under the dead man’s head.
“What is it, Brent?” asked Henderson.
“Nothing,” came the reply. “Caught sight of a photograph, that’s all. His head’s lying on an album; look here.”
Henderson came and looked.
“Yes,” he said, “an album.” He made as if to raise the head and draw the album away, but Brent laid a restraining hand on his sleeve.
“Better not touch anything,” he said in his usual gruff, short way. “Police better see it as it is, eh?”
“Yes… yes… of course. The police… to be sure.”
They turned to the door, and both men pulled up together with a start of surprise. There in the open doorway, her beautiful face as white as chalk, her great eyes distended with horror as they gazed at the sprawling body of the murdered man, stood Helen Manning.
She swayed gently upon her feet as they stared in dismay, and Bill Brent, darting forward, was just in time to catch her as she toppled forward in a dead faint. Without a word he carried her through the door to the hall outside, and across it.
Henderson followed, switching off the light and closing the door behind him, and as he did so, the clock in the room struck four.
