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The Hole in The Wall by Arthur Morrison (1902)

Morrison’s oeuvre

Morrison is remembered for his bleak novel about a squalid East End slum, A Child of the Jago, and the related collection of short stories about slum life, Mean Streets, but he was nothing if not versatile. At the same time as he was producing his dark stories of slum life, he turned out no fewer than 25 short stories about a respectable middle-class detective, Martin Hewitt, and another series of stories, about a corrupt detective, Horace Dorrington.

The third in the loose trilogy of books about London low-life, To London Town (1899) was surprisingly upbeat, and he then wrote a collection of stories about a legendary folk magician of Essex, Cunning Murrell, published in 1900. Morrison also wrote several one-act plays, and a stream of articles about Japanese art about which he made himself an expert. An impressively diverse output.

The Hole in The Wall

Morrison published The Hole In The Wall in 1902, and it marks a return to a working class milieu of his first stories – but with the twist that it’s set very firmly amid the sight and sounds of London’s old docklands, amid sailors, dockers, lightermen and the river police.

The novel is formally interesting because it alternates between the first-person narrative of an eight-year-old boy, little Stephen Kemp, and chapters told by a third-person narrator about characters and events beyond Stevie’s ken.

It is a crime thriller. Almost all the characters are corrupt, greedy and guilty of at least one crime. It features two brutal murders, a drowning, a grotesque blinding scene and climaxes in one of the characters being burned to death. So it is frequently very dark and grim, way painting a much more lurid picture of lower class life than A Child of the Jago had done. And yet not only the presence, but the narrative voice of little Stevie, who doesn’t understand most of what he sees and cleaves to his grandfather as a figure of hope and trust, lend a curious wistful sweetness to the story.

I found the combination really powerful and read the book in one sitting, compared with Jago which I struggled to finish. Partly, I think, because Hole is like a modern thriller, made up of short chapters with melodramatic scenes, and conveys a really effective atmosphere of dread and tension – whereas Jago, or at least the OUP edition of Jago which I read, is so festooned with historical notes and references, that it often feels more like a documentary than a work of fiction.

Moods and settings

When little Stevie’s mother dies in childbirth, Stevie is taken in by his kindly if gruff grandfather, Old Nat, Cap’en Nat as he’s generally referred to, landlord of The Hole in the Wall pub on the river’s edge in Wapping, ‘the bilge of all London’, as he calls it.

Cap’en Nat is big and strong, inspires fear in all his customers, even the hardened crooks, but is sweet and gentle with young Stevie. He is an ideal grandad.

This is overwhelmingly a tale of the London docks. Little Stevie’s mum’s house was hard by the docks in Blackwall, and Stevie has grown up amid the sight and sounds of ships and sailors and cargos. He’s hardly ever seen his dad because he’s a sailor on a merchant vessel owned by the small Wapping trading firm of Marr and Viner, spending most of his life at sea. He is currently on a voyage to Barbados.

The world as seen through eight-year-old Stevie’s eyes is strange and wonderful and often very funny. Early on Morrison gives us a comic portrait of the dead mother’s sisters – Stevie’s aunts – at the wake, all smug sanctimoniousness, sharp elbows and hard-heartedness, and the way one of them bullies her feeble husband.

Later on we meet one of the regulars at the pub, Mr Cripps, an ironically depicted, high-minded ‘artist’ who pays for his drinks in kind by furnishing the small bar at The Hole In The Wall with scores of paintings of ships under sail. Cripps is notorious for the endless delays he’s made about getting round to paint a sign for the pub. ‘A picture of a hole in a wall, what could be more simple?’ asks Old Nat. ‘Well,’ the shabby alcoholic artist replies:

‘It may seem simple enough; that’s because you’re thinkin’ o’ subjick, instead o’ treatment. A common jobber, if you’ll excuse my sayin’ it, ‘ud look at it just in that light—a wall with a ‘ole in it, an’ ‘e’d give it you, an’ p’rhaps you’d be satisfied with it. But I soar ‘igher, sir, ‘igher. What I shall give you’ll be a ‘ole in the wall to charm the heye and delight the intelleck, sir. A dramatic ‘ole in the wall, sir, a hepic ‘ole in the wall; a ‘ole in the wall as will elevate the mind and stimilate the noblest instinks of the be’older. Cap’en Kemp, I don’t ‘esitate to say that my ‘ole in the wall, when you get it, will be—ah! it’ll be the moral palladium of Wapping!’

This deserves to be said out loud and acted with plenty of ham. It’s funny, and Cripps is a regular character, providing a comic chorus to all the events of the novel, just as Stevie is a wide-eyed innocent witness to them all.

Contrasted with the friendly, humorous atmosphere of the pub, is the outside world and the slum-dwellers, whores, thieves and muggers who infest the dark streets of Wapping, especially of one particular alley of ill fame which Morrison names the Blue Gate.

There are quite a few night-time scenes describing the really pitiful slums of the area – the drunken dancing and fights and robberies – and, early on, a grim description of the murder of Marr, partner in the shipping firm which owns the ship Stevie’s dad’s sailing on. Marr had absconded with the firm’s money, got drunk and is easily lured into a literal den of thieves. Here one of the thief’s harridan mistress realises with mounting horror that the gang are not just going to mug him, but to murder him.

Between the comic warmth of the pub and the grim and lurid descriptions of docklands at night, there is the daylight world of the docks, where grandad Nat takes Stevie and which is described through Stevie’s young eyes as an Arabian Nights scene of wonder and marvels. This is his first sight of Ratcliffe Highway.

I think there could never have been another street in this country at once so foul and so picturesque as Ratcliff Highway at the time I speak of… From end to end of the Highway and beyond, and through all its tributaries and purlieus everything and everybody was for, by, and of, the sailor ashore; every house and shop was devoted to his convenience and inconvenience; in the Highway it seemed to me that every other house was a tavern, and in several places two stood together. There were shops full of slops, sou’westers, pilot-coats, sea-boots, tin pannikins, and canvas kit-bags like giants’ bolsters; and rows of big knives and daggers. (Chapter 7)

He goes on to describe all the different nationalities of sailors that you see strolling up and down the Highway. On a different expedition grandfather takes him to the sugar dock where he sees piles of sugar bigger than any boy could imagine, and discovers plenty of it lying around crystallised in the street or warehouses and docks, which you can just snap off and suck for free.

The plot

The plot centres round an early version of a MacGuffin. According to Wikipedia:

In fiction, a MacGuffin is a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or another motivator that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrative explanation. The MacGuffin’s importance to the plot is not the object itself, but rather its effect on the characters and their motivations.

The dying stranger

In The Hole In The Wall, Cap’en Nat, Stevie and a few regulars are in the pub one evening when there’s a sudden bang and grunt against the parlour door. They open it and an unconscious body slumps onto the floor while another figure – which had been stooping over it – leaps up and runs off, with Cap’en Nat in hot pursuit.

It is an inky night so Cap’en Nat can’t see the identity of the figure he pursues down the quayside steps and who jumps into the captain’s own dinghy, casts off and within seconds is lost amid the maze of barges, coalers and lighters moored to the river bank.

Stevie had also given little-boy chase but almost immediately trodden on something soft which he assumed was grandad’s tobacco pouch – the Cap’en had been filling his pipe when the bang on the door happens. So Stevie scoops it up and follows the fleeing figures.

The fugitive gets away, the characters all crowd round the man on the floor who has been stabbed in the chest, puncturing the lung, and he quickly drowns in his own blood. One of the many macabre images which imprints itself on the young boy’s memory.

The fortune in notes

More importantly, when Stevie shows his grandad what he picked up, it turns out to be a notebook containing a huge amount of cash – £800 in white banknotes! This is the MacGuffin or target or goal or treasure, which triggers the complicated action of the second half of the novel.

In scenes which are shocking or upsetting or lurid or conspiratorial, the reader then slowly learns that:

The brig Stevie’s dad (and Cap’en Nat’s son) was aboard as first mate, the Juno has gone down and he was drowned. But not before they receive a letter from him claiming that the owners want it to sink in order to claim the insurance and that the corrupt captain has tried to run it aground several times, with only Stevie’s dad preventing him. Now (he writes, in his last letter) he is worried that they’ll murder or drug him in his sleep, and do it so he goes down with the ship. Which is what then appeared to happen, according to newspaper reports…
The Juno was owned by the firm of Viney and Marr. They were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Their plan was to sink the Juno and quickly claim the insurance money in order to pay off their creditors. But due to the delays caused by Stevie’s dad, and the rumours that spread about the ship (at each port it docked some of the crew jumped ship with stories about its owners’ plans) the insurance money might now be difficult to claim. So the partners had liquidated all their assets and gathered the cash into the pocket book – the one Stevie found.
But no sooner had they done this than Marr did a runner, betraying his partner Viney and taking all the money. But he didn’t get far. He’d begun drinking in pubs along the Highway and we meet him, very drunk, in a squalid furniture-less thieves den, accompanied by the prostitute known as Musky Mag, serenaded by the sinister blind fiddler, Blind George, and loomed over by the book’s bully-boy murderer, Dan Ogle. Mag picks Marr’s pocket but Dan indicates he wants more than that. Later, three sailors are seen staggering down to the docks, singing and weaving. In fact only two of them are actually walking, supporting the middle figure who appears comatose. It is Marr. They have killed him. (In later scenes, we see Mag alone in the room where the murder took place as night falls and, with Poe-like or Dickensian luridness, she watches the shadows recreate the shape of the black thing which lay there i.e. Marr’s body).
Having murdered Marr for the pocket book full of notes, Ogle gives the pocket book to an associate to hide somewhere safe but, following him, sees him make for Grandfather Nat’s. Now we have already seen enough through Stevie’s eyes to begin to realise that Cap’en Nat is in fact a ‘fence’, a handler of stolen goods. He is careful about it – dodgy-looking blokes come to the snug bar, show him silvery objects which Stevie only partly sees, and he sends them out again. But tips a wink to a pale quiet man who sits in the corner of the pub all day, who then goes out to negotiate with the bringers of stolen goods. The reader realises that what’s going on is that Nat assesses the loot, then the pale man actually pays for it. Thus, if ever caught or questioned by the police, Cap’en Nat can honestly say that he never pays for stolen goods.
We learn more about Cap’en Nat’s illicit activities when, in one tense midnight scene, Stevie hears noises and creeps down the stairs from his bedroom in the attic, squeaks open the door into the lumber room – and discovers Cap’en Nat receiving smuggled tobacco, handed up to him through a secret opening in the floorboards of the bit of the pub which overhangs the river, by the lighterman Bill Stagg (chapter 14).
Back to Ogle following his associate. Ogle realises that his associate was clearly making for Cap’en Nat’s in order to get rid of the hot money (the bank notes had numbers which would be recorded and noticed if handed in to a proper bank). Infuriated, Ogle catches up with him right at the door of the pub, stabs him and is in the middle of getting the pocket book out of his pockets when the door opens and Cap’en Nat gives chase.

All of that is the background to the scene we witnessed, of everyone quietly drinking when there’s a thump at the pub door, the figures slumps into the bar and Cap’en Nat gives chase of the person we now know was Ogle.

So, number one, Marr and Viney are responsible for the death of Cap’en Nat’s son and Stevie’s father. Stevie notices a change come over his granddad, a new bitterness and determination.

However, it turns out that the crooked ship-owner Viney has something over the Cap’en. Years ago, when Nat was still a sailor, a man was lost overboard on a ship on which he was first mate. The Cap’en insists the drowned sailor was drunk, but Viney says he can bring witnesses to prove that the Cap’en murdered him, by throwing him overboard. The fact that he can be blackmailed and silenced by the man who more or less killed his own son hardens the Cap’en’s heart, but it is very effective that we see this process mostly through the eyes of little Stevie who notices a change come over his revered granddad.
There’s an added complication in the form of the gaunt harridan of a cleaning lady who the Cap’en employs, Mrs Grimes. Always sneaking around the place, she spies the pocket book being opened and assessed and, in a broadly comic scene, later steals it and tries to smuggle it out of the house in the rubbish scuttle. Unfortunately for her, the drunk artist Mr Cripps is hanging round (as usual) and offers to help the little lady – in order to suck up to the Cap’en – but when he grabs one end of the scuttle and Mrs Grimes refuses to let go of the other, the scuttle tips over and spills out the loot, hidden under the rubbish. Nat sacks her on the spot, with typical graciousness refusing to report her to the police, and giving her a week’s pay. Mrs Grime is a convincing portrait of an embittered harridan and this kindness only drives her to even greater heights of vindictiveness. From now to the end of the book she bends all her energies to ruining the Cap’en anyway she can think of.

A congeries of conspiracies

So the scene is set for the final third of the book to boil down into a very complicated series of manoeuvres between five crooked characters who are all conspiring to regain the pocket book and its £800 and/or ruin the Cap’en – namely Dan Ogle the murderer, his girlfriend Mag, Viney seeking to get his money back, Blind George who knows what is going on and sees the opportunity to squeeze a percentage of the loot for himself, and vindictive Mrs Grimes.

After murdering the unnamed associate on Cap’en Nat’s door, Ogle flees Wapping and is hiding out in the lime works out on the remote marshes towards the River Lea, owned by the brother of Ogle’s brother-in-law. This brother makes his first appearance as a stranger wandering around Wapping, his clothes stained with white lime, and so he is henceforth referred to as ‘the limy man’. The remote setting is a pretext for Morrison to give vivid descriptions of what was then waste land on the edge of London – with one particularly good description of the sun setting over the smog of London in the west.

Out to these remote wastes comes Ogle’s mistress, Mag, with beer and sustenance, though Ogle treats her with all the casual brutality which Bill Sykes shows towards Nancy in Oliver Twist.

Then out to this remote location comes Viney the crooked shipowner, who has learned through the grapevine that Ogle somehow has gotten hold of his money. The pair of crooks have a long interview in which they consider every variation of theft, burglary and mugging of the Cap’en to get the money back, before Ogle settles on a simple plan. Viney will knock on the pub door late one night, after closing time, and when the Cap’en opens, Ogle will step up behind the Cap’en and crack him on the head. Then it will be easy to clean out the pub, not only of the £800 but all the other goods hidden there.

The blinding of Ogle

So far so wicked and corrupt. But there is a big twist in the story. Blind George, the wheedling, whining, calculating blind musician and crook, tipped off as to Ogle’s location, rather improbably taps his way all the way out across the waste marshes and finds Ogle in some half-derelict sheds at the bottom of his brother-in-law’s limeworks. Here he has a lengthy interview with Ogle wherein he, George, tries to bargain for a share of the loot.

Ogle rudely and brutally denies him any involvement and their argument quickly gets out of hand, with Ogle pushing George and George retaliating with his stick which cracks Ogle hard on the wrist and makes him see red. Ogle knocks George to the ground, kicking and punching him till his face is red and bloody. All the while George is yelling out, ‘Attack a blind man, would ye? Wouldn’t be so easy if you was blind, too, then, would it? If we woz both blind I’d give yer a licking’ and so on.

What I hadn’t anticipated is that, after a scene or two back at the pub in order to vary the scene and pace, the narrative returns us to follow a shadowy figure tapping its way across the wasteland the next evening, carrying a sort of sock full of something. Progressing down the muddy banks of the River Lea. Soaking the sock. Then everso quietly going to the door of the ramshackle shed where Ogle is sleeping. Silently lifting the latch. Tiptoeing inside…

And then there is a truly blood-curdling scene – because the figure is Blind George and he is carrying lime which he was soaked in the water in order to turn it into the highly acidic quicklime and, before Ogle can waken, he has thrust two handfuls of quicklime into Ogle’s eyes and holds them there despite the man’s kicking and punching and fighting, holds them there long enough to sear the flesh of his face and to blind Ogle.

Then he lets go and sneaks away from the screaming figure. ‘Now we’re equal, Dan Ogle,’ he mocks. ‘Now you know what it’s like to fight in the dark,’ and he slips away as the limy man comes running from his nearby cottage.

Ogle is taken to the Accident Hospital. Cut to Viney arriving at the hospital after he’s heard the news, to discover Mag in floods of tears. Nonetheless, despite his permanent injury, Viney discovers that Ogle is more determined than ever to get ‘his’ money.

Fiery climax

And so – partly seen through Stevie’s eyes, partly through the third-person narrator – the story builds to its climax. Viney and Ogle go through with their plan. Viney takes Ogle to the alley beside The Hole In The Wall and positions him by a post just a step or two from the back door. Then knocks. The Cap’en answers.

Viney is nervous. The Cap’en has all sorts of reasons to hate him, it is late at night in a dark alley. But to Viney’s astonishment, when he demands the money, instead of arguing a bit, something in Cap’en Nat snaps. Up till now, for the entire time that they’ve had the pocket book, Grandfather Nat has sworn to Stevie that the money is theirs, finders-keepers, there’s no other claimant and that they will use it to pay Stevie through a good public school, kitted out in all the right togs, and make a ‘gentleman’ of him.

But news of the death of his son, and the his last letter which revealed that the shipwreck was all a wicked scheme by Viney and Marr, made the Cap’en, at first, flare up with anger and then… and then… realise he is sick of crime and a life of crime.

Now, to Viney’s amazement he turns, goes up to Stevie’s room and, to Stevie’s dismay, gets the pocket book out from its hiding place and insists that he ‘has to do right’; he has to give it back to its rightful owner.

Back in the alley he hands the pocket book over to Viney but then – seizes him and insists that they’re going to the police with the whole story. The Cap’en will admit he held onto the pocket book and money which wasn’t his, he’ll even come clean about the drowning incident on the boat all those years ago – but he’ll also tell them all about how Viney and Marr conspired to sink the Juno for the insurance money. It’s time for him to come completely clean and make a new start.

Viney whines, complains, argues and then wriggles himself free and sets off down the alleyways towards the Highway, with the Cap’en in hot pursuit. Stevie has watched all this from his bedroom window, pulls on some clothes and also goes haring off after his granddad.

‘Police, police, stop thief’ the Cap’en yells as he runs. When Viney sees a couple of constables approaching over the bridge of the lock which separates the spit of land the Hole In The Wall sits on from the mainland, Viney instead heads for the actual lock gates, which are narrower, much more precarious, and only secured with a low chain (as anyone who’s crossed an English lock knows).

In his panic and in the dark Viney misses the sharp angle where the two lock gates meet, trips over the low chain which always lines locks gates, and plunges into the bubbling water at the foot of the gates, instantly disappearing in the strong undertow.

The Cap’en and Stevie arrive along with the police who’d been crossing the bridge and a crowd of neighbours woken by the hue and cry. But they are still staring down into the bubbles and swirl of water, when others raise a cry. The Hole In The Wall is on fire!

Remember that Ogle had been left by a post deep in the darkness of the alleyway, waiting to strike the Cap’en and equally surprised when Nat simply handed over the money? Well, once everyone ran off, he saw his opportunity and had blundered into the pub in search of goods and money. But, in doing so, he had knocked over the paraffin lantern and the dry old house had gone up like a torch.

Now a huge crowd gathers round the flame-ridden building and watch horrified as a human figure appears shrieking in agony at a window, a human torch. It is Ogle. First blinded, then burned to death. When the fire brigade arrives its sole concern is to protect the neighbouring buildings. The Hole In The Wall is a lost cause. As Stevie laconically records:

And that was the end of the Hole in the Wall: the end of its landlord’s doubts and embarrassments and dangers, and the beginning of another chapter in his history – his history and mine.

A swift half page coda ties up the loose ends. Viney’s body was never found. Ogle’s body was found, burned to a crisp. Humorous Mr Cripps tried to claim insurance for the loss of his priceless works of art. Mrs Grimes continued her vendetta against the Cap’en and was eventually locked up for assaulting a police officer in her frustration. The Hole In The Wall was rebuilt in brick and renamed. The Cap’en, or Captain Nat Kemp to give him his proper name, turns to honest work, enlarging the nearby wharf which he owned and setting up a company of lighters or flat-bottomed barges.

And little Stevie? In a plain sentence which, after so much storm and stress, moved me to tears:

As for me, I went to school at last.

Characters

This feels the most Dickensian of Morrison’s novels. In the Jago life is too brutal for people to be afforded much description. They just fight and steal and sometimes seem a bit interchangeable, in activity and appearance.

What is Dickensian is the way the brutality of this novel is leavened by the innocence and charm of eight-year-old Stevie, which allows Morrison to approach his characters with a bit more genuine humour than in the Jago.

Also the point of the Jago is that its inhabitants are trapped in it, stuck in a very limited space with only occasional outings to Shoreditch High Street or a little further afield as relief, creating a horrible sense of claustrophobia.

By contrast, the characters of the Hole range widely, and the presence of the mighty Thames, the bustling Ratcliffe Highway, the other pubs and alleys, and the wide wasteland towards the River Lea, all this variety of scene somehow allows for more variety and colour among the characters. Grim they may mostly be, but they are more variegated and vivid and lively than the Jagos.

There was one quiet little man in their midst, who, when not eating cake or drinking wine, was sucking the bone handle of a woman’s umbrella, which he carried with him everywhere, indoors and out. He was in the custody of the largest and grimmest of ladies, whom the others called Aunt Martha.

On the victim’s opposite side sat a large-framed bony fellow, with a thin, unhealthy face that seemed to belong to some other body, and dress that proclaimed him long-shore ruffian. The woman called him Dan, and nods and winks passed between the two, over the drooping head between them. Next to Dan was an ugly rascal with a broken nose; singular in that place, as bearing in his dress none of the marks of waterside habits, crimpery and the Highway, but seeming rather the commonplace town rat of Shoreditch or Whitechapel. And, last, a blind fiddler sat in a corner, fiddling a flourish from time to time, roaring with foul jest, and roiling his single white eye upward.

The man’s right eye was closed, but the left was horribly wide and white and rolling, and it quite unpleasantly reminded me of a large china marble that lay at that moment at the bottom of my breeches pocket, under some uniform buttons, a key you could whistle on, a brass knob from a fender, and a tangle of string. So much indeed was I possessed with this uncomfortable resemblance in later weeks, when I had seen Blind George often, and knew more of him, that at last I had no choice but to fling the marble into the river; though indeed it was something of a rarity in marbles

It was anything but a clean face on the head, and it was overshadowed by a very greasy wideawake hat. Grubbiness and unhealthy redness contended for mastery in the features, of which the nose was the most surprising, wide and bulbous and knobbed all over; so that ever afterward, in any attempt to look Mr. Cripps in the face, I found myself wholly disregarding his eyes, and fixing a fascinated gaze on his nose; and I could never recall his face to memory as I recalled another, but always as a Nose, garnished with a fringe of inferior features.

She was scarce an attractive woman, I thought, being rusty and bony, slack-faced and very red-nosed. She swept the carpet and dusted the shelves with an air of angry contempt for everything she touched… ‘Ho!’ interjected Mrs. Grimes, who could fill a misplaced aspirate with subtle offence… It was not long ere I learned that Mrs. Grimes was one of those persons who grumble and clamour and bully at everything and everybody on principle, finding that, with a concession here and another there, it pays very well on the whole; and so nag along very comfortably through life. As for herself, as I had seen, Mrs. Grimes did not lack the cunning to carry away any fit of virtuous indignation that seemed like to push her employer out of his patience.

There was a knock at the back door, which opened, and disclosed one of the purlmen, who had left his boat in sight at the stairs, and wanted a quart of gin in the large tin can he brought with him. He was a short, red-faced, tough-looking fellow, and he needed the gin, as I soon learned, to mix with his hot beer to make the purl. (Bill Stagg)

I was not prepossessed by Mr. Viney. His face – a face no doubt originally pale and pasty, but too long sun-burned to revert to anything but yellow in these later years of shore-life – his yellow face was ever stretched in an uneasy grin, a grin that might mean either propitiation or malice, and remained the same for both. He had the watery eyes and the goatee beard that were not uncommon among seamen, and in total I thought he much resembled one of those same hang-dog fellows that stood at corners and leaned on posts in the neighbourhood, making a mysterious living out of sailors; one of them, that is to say, in a superior suit of clothes that seemed too good for him. I suppose he may have been an inch taller than Grandfather Nat; but in the contrast between them he seemed very small and mean.

Dickens’ influence broods over the whole story. The Hole In The Wall pub reminds me of the The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters pub in Our Mutual Friend. The scenes out on the marshes towards the River Lea remind me of the opening and the ending of Great Expectations. The bully boy Dan Ogle reminds me of Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist and the pathetic devotion of Musky Mag reminds me of the equally ill-rewarded loyalty of Nancy.

The way so much adult brutality is seen and only partially understood by an innocent boy reminds me of Oliver Twist, and also David Copperfield, and Pip. Little Stevie is a very effective creation. We know that little Arthur Morrison grew up near the docks in Poplar on the Isle of Dogs where his dad was an engine-fitter. A lot of Stevie’s impressions and feelings have the force of real experiences and memories.

And the way the narrative is split between Stevie’s innocent point of view and the unadulterated view of the omniscient narrator, reminds me of the similar split between the first-person Esther Summerson chapters and the third-person narrator chapters of Bleak House.

This is a gripping novel – not, maybe, a work of art like Henry James or Joseph Conrad, but with far more psychological penetration and artfulness than Morrison’s detective stories. If you read A Child of the Jago you should read this too.

Sea songs

This is one of the songs performed on the fiddle by Blind George.

Reviews of other fiction of the 1880s and 1890s

Joseph Conrad

E.W. Hornung

The Amateur Cracksman (1899)

Rudyard Kipling

Henry Rider Haggard

Sherlock Holmes

A Study in Scarlet (1887)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1891–1892)
The Sign of the Four (1890)
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1892–1893)

The Shadows of Sherlock Holmes (a selection of detective stories influenced by Conan Doyle)

Anthony Hope

Arthur Morrison

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bram Stoker

Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

H.G. Wells

Oscar Wilde

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by Simon on October 3, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Crime, Novel, Thriller

Posted by Simon on October 3, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/the-hole-in-the-wall-arthur-morrison/

The Dorrington Deed-Box by Arthur Morrison (1897)

‘I may as well tell you that I’m a bit of a scoundrel myself, by way of profession. I don’t boast about it, but it’s well to be frank in making arrangements of this sort…’ (Horace Dorrington describing himself)

According to Wikipedia,

In contrast to Morrison’s earlier character Martin Hewitt, who one critic described as a ‘low-key, realistic, lower-class answer to Sherlock Holmes’, Dorrington was ‘a respected but deeply corrupt private detective,’ ‘a cheerfully unrepentant sociopath who is willing to stoop to theft, blackmail, fraud or cold-blooded murder to make a dishonest penny.’

Sounds like an interesting guy. Morrison wrote half a dozen short stories about his amoral detective and collected them into a volume titled The Dorrington Deed-Box. It contains:

The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby
The Case of Janissary
The Case of the ‘Mirror of Portugal’
The Affair of the ‘Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre Co., Limited’
The Case of Mr. Loftus Deacon
Old Cater’s Money

The stories

1. The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby

Gripping first-person memoir of James Rigby, born and raised in Australia who came on a visit to Europe with his mum and dad when he was young. They visited Italy where his dad hired a local guide who, once they were all up in the mountains, turned on him with a knife, planning to rob him. Rigby senior happened to have a gun on him which he pulled out and shot the brigand dead.

But over the next few days, as he deals with consuls and local police, several attempts are made on his life by the dead man’s relatives. Turns out the guide was a member of the infamous ‘Camorra’, who will stop at nothing to avenge him.

So Rigby’s family move on to London, where they stay in a posh, supposedly secure hotel. But they still have the feeling they’re being watched and one morning discover a little circle of paper with a logo of crossed knives attached to their door. Within days, Mr Rigby senior is stabbed to death in an alleyway. James and his mother return to Australia where he grows up, inheriting the land his father had shrewdly invested in. James wants to be an artist and, at length, realises he has to come back to Europe to study.

On the boat he gets chatting to a fantastically easy, charming, witty man, Horace Dorrington, who tells young James that he and his partner are private detectives who’ve had much experience with the Camorra and know how to handle them.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve no particular desire to have it known all over the ship, but I don’t mind telling you – you’d find it out probably before long if you settle in the old country – that we are what is called private inquiry agents – detectives – secret service men – whatever you like to call it.’

Dorrington persuades Rigby to skip docking at London and instead to travel directly from the ship’s first port of call, Plymouth, up to Scotland for the opening of the grouse season to be his guest. Rigby does this and is impressed by the man’s house and land and by Dorrington’s confident hosting of the young man. But one morning Dorrington is regrettably called back to London. He advises Rigby to go to London himself, but to take the opportunity to visit some old picturesque English towns along the way, that might inspire his art, such as Chester and Warwick.

Rigby does this but then, in each of the towns he visits, finds himself being followed. Shuffling footsteps follow him everywhere, in Chester, in Warwick, as he explores the old towns, no matter which way he turns, in sequences which begin to have some of the supernatural thrill of an Edgar Allen Poe story.

He is terrified when a dark face with a mop of black hair and ear-rings appears for a moment at his hotel window. Rigby’s conviction that he’s being followed crystallises when he finds a little paper circle with the crossed-knives logo of the Camorra pinned to his hotel door, packs his bags, and hastens to London.

Rigby turns and chases the source of the shuffling footsteps, but cannot find them

Here Rigby goes to Dorrington’s office, meets his rather withered assistant Hicks, tells Dorrington he’s being followed, and submits to Dorrington’s plan. Dorrington will take him to a safe house in Hampstead where he can lie low. Meanwhile Dorrington will assume Rigby’s identity and try to draw the assassins out into the open. Rigby gives Dorrington the letters from his London lawyer, Mowbray, as well as the deeds to his extensive landholdings in Australia, for safekeeping, and Dorrington bids goodbye.

(Incidentally, Dorrington’s offices are given as being in Bedford Street, Covent Garden – which still exists. They cannot, therefore, be very far from the offices of Morrison’s ‘good’ detective, Martin Hewitt, who has chambers ‘in a street by the Strand’. Chalk and cheese, living and working cheek by jowl.)

Once settled in at the ‘safe house’, Rigby is presented with a fine lunch prepared by the landlady, one Mrs Crofting. Next thing he knows he’s waking, awfully groggy, in the pitch-darkness, wet, lying in six inches of water! When he tries to stand up hits his head on a metal roof. He is inside a water cistern with water gushing in from two inlets in the top. He has been drugged, placed here and is going to drown!!!

Panic-stricken, Rigby tries to block up the inlets, then starts hammering at the metal sides and yelling his head off. This scene again reminded me of the genuine claustrophobia and horror generated by the best of Edgar Allen Poe’s horror stories. To Rigby’s immense relief the roof of the cistern suddenly slides off to reveal a grubby London workman looking down at him in amazement. He’d been working in the attic of the neighbouring house, heard all the commotion and come to investigate.

After receiving reviving spirits and reassurance with the neighbours, Rigby goes straight to the police who confirm that ‘Mrs Crofting’ has flown the coop, and so have Dorrington and Hicks. The entire thing appears to have been an elaborate hoax devised by Dorrington, as soon as Rigby let slip, in the middle of his story to him on the boat, that he owned land and money in Australia, a lot of land and money, worth millions.

Dorrington immediately conceived the plan to murder Rigby for the money. He wired to his assistant to rent a property in Scotland for the grouse shooting (designed to stop Rigby going to London and contacting his lawyer), then invented the excuse of having to dash back to London. It was Dorrington’s assistant who dressed up in Italian costume and followed Rigby in the shadows of Chester and Warwick. All the time Dorrington cannily preventing Rigby from meeting his London lawyer, Mowbray because he, Dorrington, intended to pass himself off as Rigby to the lawyer, to present all the letters and deeds, cash everything in as if he were Rigby, and walk away a multi-millionaire.

Wow! What a ripping yarn!

But as the story draws to a close, with Dorrington and all his accomplices disappeared – the police break into Dorrington’s offices and find – paperwork relating to numerous other criminal cases.

The business of Dorrington and Hicks had really been that of private inquiry agents, and they had done much bonâ fide business; but many of their operations had been of a more than questionable sort. And among their papers were found complete sets, neatly arranged in dockets, each containing in skeleton a complete history of a case. Many of these cases were of a most interesting character, and I have been enabled to piece together, out of the material thus supplied, the narratives which will follow this.

And these provide the basis for the rest of the stories in the volume. Hence the title of ‘Dorrington’s Deed Box’. These are the stories taken from ‘Dorrington’s Deed Box’.

2. The Case of Janissary

So this is the first of the ‘reconstructed’ Dorrington cases.

The extremely paranoid racehorse owner, Mr Telfer, contacts Dorrington because he suspects someone is trying to nobble his prize racehorse, Janissary, ahead of a big race, The Redfern Stakes. It might be his nephew, Richard, with whom he had a massive falling out a few weeks before, and has been seen around the stables slipping grooms sums of cash – or a big bloke with a red beard, also seen loitering.

Dorrington lodges in the nearby town of Redfern, at the local pub, During a riotous evening of drinking he befriends nephew Richard and also the leading horsetrainer stacked against Telfer, a Mr Bob Naylor.

Having identified Naylor’s room, Dorrington uses his nefarious skills to break into the room and rifle through a locked box. Here he finds a fake beard and a box containing powders and a syringe. Aha. So Naylor is up to something.

Dorrington returns to the boisterous bar where he befriends Naylor over a few more beers and tells him, casually, that he’s seen the favourite, Janissary, being walked every day at two pm, by a rather dim stable boy.

Dorrington goes back to Telfer, explains that the red-haired man is Naylor and his decoy story of the 2 o’clock walking. Now it just so happens that Telfer owns a horse which looks remarkably like Janissary but is a poor racer. So next day at 2 o’clock, Telfer and Dorrington hide in the stables with a view of the walking ground and watch a stable boy walking this inferior horse, well wrapped up in covers so as to be indistinguishable from the favourite.

Up comes the red-bearded man, chats a bit with the stable boy and goes to stroke the horse under the cover – which suddenly rears and whinnies. The red-bearded man backs off, apologises and walks on. So. Dorrington and Telfer both saw him inject something into the poor horse, which by the time it’s returned to its stall, is already shivering and weak.

The red-bearded man backs off after the horse he’s surreptitiously injected rears up

Overnight the betting against Janissary is big, which is why there are many appalled faces when Janissary finishes an easy first and Telfer cleans up on the betting. Telfer congratulates Dorrington, pays him his fee, and the latter returns to London.

The narrator explains that Naylor is pretty much cleaned out, but still owes the single biggest payout to Telfer’s nephew, Richard. We watch Naylor paying out his customers at his London club, then meeting Richard and telling him he’s temporarily out of cash, and to come round to his house in Gold Street, Chelsea that evening.

Outside the club Richard bumps into Dorrington, who he already knows as a fellow drinker from the Crown pub in Redbury, and who chaffs him about how heavy his pockets must be with winnings. ‘Not yet,’ replies Richard. ‘I’m meeting Bob Naylor tonight to collect them.’ ‘Really?’ thinks Dorrington. He vows to loiter around Naylor’s house and see what develops.

From the pub across the road, Dorrington sees a skinny lady setting up a step-ladder in the house’s top room. Suddenly the penny drops. Dorrington puts on some shoe-silencers, silently breaks into the house’s cellar, and sneaks up to that top room.

He hasn’t too long to wait before Richard arrives. He hears greetings and good fellowship on the ground floor, drinks and food and then the making of a cup of coffee (aha, the same kind of drugged coffee – the reader realises – as was used to drug Rigby in the opening story). Sure enough, we soon hear the bump of Richard falling off his chair and then the sound of two people manhandling an unconscious body upstairs.

They back into the top room to find … Dorrington waiting for them with a revolver! He explains that he understands their scam. They were going to drown Richard in the cistern then throw his body into the Thames. Except that now they aren’t. Now they are going to dump Richard anywhere, Dorrington doesn’t care where, because Naylor is going to pay up whatever he owes, because he is now going to retire from betting, and enter Dorrington’s employ as a full-time ‘disposer of bodies’.

Now we realise the significance of the newspaper cutting Rigby had quoted at the start of the story, an account of a dead man brought out of the Thames, with an empty pocket book and some bruising, suggesting manhandling.

Dorrington had read this, too, and, putting two and two together, had guessed the drowned man had been drowned by the Naylors using the cistern technique. He had caught them in the act preparing to do the same to another inconvenient creditor – Richard. And with that knowledge he blackmails them into becoming his assistants and disposers of bodies.

Having read the full ‘case’, Rigby is left to bleakly wonder how many others met a horrible watery death this way, before he was lucky enough to break out of the cistern (in the first story), sound the alarm, and break up the gang for good.

3. The Case of the ‘Mirror of Portugal’

The ‘Mirror of Portugal’ is, as so often in these 1890s detective stories, a jewel of unimaginable beauty, perfection and price. The narrator tells the traditional cock-and-bull story about its passage through the hands of the Portuguese royal family, into the English royal family, then onto the French royal family and then on into the hands of French revolutionaries of 1789, one of whom was the great-grandfather of the Léon Bouvier who keeps a little café in Soho, after his father was shot during the Franco-Prussian War.

Dorrington is approached by Léon’s cousin, Jacques Bouvier, who was working at a charcoal works in France until he came over to get a job with his cousin in his Soho café. Here he’s discovered Léon’s big secret. That he keeps a massive diamond in a small box under his armpit. Jacques thinks that, as a poor relation, he is entitled to a share of its value.

Dorrington dismisses Jacques, but then strolls round to the Soho café to poke around for himself. He arrives just after some kind of scuffle has taken place, and discovering someone running at top speed from the muddy alley where the café is located. Dorrington follows this runner who, a bit oddly from the reader’s point of view, runs all the way to Dorrington’s own offices in Covent Garden. Dorrington arrives soon after him to discover that it is none other than Léon – who has been mugged.

Léon now takes Dorrington back to the Soho alleyway, where Dorrington pokes around and easily finds shards of glass from a shattered bottle which, judging by the smell of the cork, once contained choloroform.

Someone must have crept up behind Léon, put a knee in his back and a chloroformed cloth over his face, waited till he passed out, cut the straps holding the box with the diamond in place under his armpit, then legged it. Léon is furiously certain that it is his jealous cousin, Jacques, but Dorrington is not so sure.

Because among the many complaints about his cousin that he made on his visit to Dorrington’s office, Jacques had mentioned that Léon had recently started frequenting Hatton Gardens and had been toying with the idea of buying and selling diamonds in a small way, trying to get to know the trade before cashing in his own monster diamond. He had got as far as renting some office or shop space off a certain Mr Ludwig Hamer. Aha.

Next morning Dorrington pays Mr Hamer a visit and, noticing the array of medicine bottles on the shelves of his office, calmly confronts Hamer with the accusation that it was he who mugged Bouvier the night before. Hamer denies it but Dorrington produces the bottle, identical to some on Hamer’s shelves, reveals that he saw the footprints of a woman’s narrow-heeled shoe, probably of Hamer’s wife, who kept watch while Hamer did the deed.

There’s a policeman outside. Dorrington sarcastically asks Hamer whether he should call the copper in and present him with all the evidence that Hamer is a crook? With bad grace Hamer admits it all, and says the jewel is at home with his wife who, he warns, has a furious temper.

Dorrington hails and cab and takes Hamer to the latter’s house in Pimlico. Here Dorrington confronts feisty little Mrs Hamer with the evidence. She is furious with her husband for not overcoming Dorrington. ‘But he had a gun’, Hamer whines. The redoubtable Mrs Hamer says the jewel is safe at another location, and sets off leading them across Vauxhall Bridge. Half way across the bridge she announces, ‘There’s your jewel, you crook, you thief’ and before Hamer or Dorrington can do anything, throws it into the Thames. Oh.

‘There’s your diamond, you dirty thief!’ (Dorrington on the right)

4. The Affair of the ‘Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre Co., Limited’

Remember the dot com bubble of 2001? Well, I bet you didn’t know about the Bicycle Bubble of the 1890s.

Cycle companies were in the market everywhere. Immense fortunes were being made in a few days and sometimes little fortunes were being lost to build them up. Mining shares were dull for a season, and any company with the word ‘cycle’ or ‘tyre’ in its title was certain to attract capital, no matter what its prospects were like in the eyes of the expert. All the old private cycle companies suddenly were offered to the public, and their proprietors, already rich men, built themselves houses on the Riviera, bought yachts, ran racehorses, and left business for ever. Sometimes the shareholders got their money’s worth, sometimes more, sometimes less – sometimes they got nothing but total loss; but still the game went on. One could never open a newspaper without finding, displayed at large, the prospectus of yet another cycle company with capital expressed in six figures at least, often in seven. Solemn old dailies, into whose editorial heads no new thing ever found its way till years after it had been forgotten elsewhere, suddenly exhibited the scandalous phenomenon of ‘broken columns’ in their advertising sections, and the universal prospectuses stretched outrageously across half or even all the page – a thing to cause apoplexy in the bodily system of any self-respecting manager of the old school.

Everyone’s investing in bicycle companies. Dorrington goes along to the time trials featuring an exciting new competitive bike rider, Gillett, at a purpose-built velodrome.

Gillett is representing the ‘Indestructible Bicycle Company.’ Dorrington chats up a representative of the IBC who introduces him to the paunchy owner, Paul Mallows. They explain that Gillett will be competing against Lant, who is representing the new and much-talked-about ‘Avalanche Bicycle Company’. The ABC is about to launch on the stock market and is likely to be hugely subscribed in this time of bicycle bubbles.

The sun sets and the velodrome becomes dark as the cyclists do their last couple of laps. Suddenly there is a tremendous accident, as Gillett crashes into two other bikes, breaking his arm. Mallows is hopping mad, swears it’s sabotage, and offers a hundred pound reward on the spot to whoever can find the culprits..

Dorrington takes him up and goes over the crash site very carefully. In the dark someone had placed an old rusty chair smack bang in the middle of the track, it being so dark the approaching cyclists couldn’t see it till too late. Dorrington picks up evidence that it was Mallows who planted the chair.

To confirm his suspicions he catches a train that night to Birmingham, where the prospectus for the Avalanche Bicycle Company claims to have its factory. In fact, he discovers that the ‘factory’ is a disused warehouse in the corner of which are piled a bunch of knackered second-hand bikes, with a nearby oven used for making enamel badges with the ABC’s logo. The company’s business plan is to buy up old bikes, pin the labels to them, and turn over business just long enough for the board of the company to do a bunk with the money raised when the company floats on the stock market.

His suspicions confirmed, Dorrington telegraphs Mallows, pretending to be an employee and saying something important is happening at the Birmingham factory. Now, before he had left London, Dorrington had hired a snoop to watch Mallows’ house. Within minutes of getting the telegram, this spy reports that Mallows leaves his house and goes to a disguise and wig shop, emerging looking a lot different, before getting a train to Birmingham.

The disguised Mallows makes his way to the bike factory where Dorrington is waiting.

Dorrington confronts him and taunts and teases Mallows, saying he easily sees through his disguise, saying he knows it was him who planted the chair which caused the Gillett crash.

Why? In order to remove him from the Big Race and ensure that Lant wins. Lant winning will enormously boost the share launch of ABC on Monday. Mallow features in the prospectus for ABC under a false name. He and partners will pocket the cash raised by the stock market flotation, then abscond, leaving the company to crash and a couple of titled aristocrats, who put their names down as directors without bothering to learn the details, to take the flak.

But Dorrington is not going to turn him into the police for fraud. No, Dorrington wants a cut, not just any old cut either, but 50% of Mallows’s takings,

During this edgy confrontation Mallows has been manoeuvring Dorrington closer and closer to the oven where the bikes are melted down. Now, in a sudden desperate move, Mallows pushes Dorrington into the oven, bolting the door, and turning on the gas.

Most of these stories are fairly languid in pace with, at most, a chase through streets being the most exciting it gets. But this is a genuinely tense, cinematic moment, with Dorrington beginning to lose consciousness from the gas, beating futilely at the door. Luckily, he discovers a loose spar of metal inside the oven which he uses as a lever to prise open the door a fraction, repositions the spar to prise it open some more, and so on until it eventually bursts open and Dorrington staggers out half-gassed.

Now Dorrington goes for Mallows like a murderer and is dragging him by the collar across the floor with a view to locking him in the oven when – the escaping gas reaches a naked candle and there’s a Big Explosion. Mallows is half buried in bricks and has a broken leg. Dorrington is thrown clear and makes an escape before locals and the police turn up.

Dorrington dragging Mallows

5. The Case of Mr. Loftus Deacon

Deacon is an elderly bachelor who collects Japanese objets d’art. (The descriptions of them have extra resonance because we know that Morrison was himself an expert on Japanese artefacts, which explains why the descriptions of Deacon’s works are long and informative.)

Deacon’s proudest object is a rare katana or longsword by the famous Japanese swordsmith, Masamuné. One day Deacon sets off for his club for lunch at a quarter to one, observed by the ever-vigilant hall porter. This same porter is surprised when, a few minutes later, Deacon reappears in a fluster at one o’clock. Turns out he’d forgotten something and lets himself into the flat. Moments later the porter hears ‘a shout followed in a breath by a loud cry of pain, and then silence.’

The door is locked from the inside so the porter has to call up to the housekeeper, who comes running with the spare keys, and they both find Deacon lying in a pool of blood with two fierce gashes to the head. He is dead. They search the room. It is locked, the windows closed from the inside etc.

Next morning Dorrington is hired to investigate the murder by Deacon’s only friend, Mr. Colson, ‘a thin, grizzled man of sixty or thereabout’. Colson takes Dorrington to survey the scene of the crime. It is only now that Colson realises that the famous Masamuné sword is missing.

There follows the usual fol-de-rol of distractions and false leads – for example, that the only window in Deacon’s apartment opened into a well, at the bottom of which a workman was doing some painting and repairs. Upon investigation, it turns out that this decorator had a criminal record and has now disappeared, just the kind of obvious lead the police like. But the reader, having read a few detective stories, suspects this is a red herring.

A much bigger red herring is the fact that for the past months Deacon has been besieged by a polite but determined Japanese man, Keigo Kanamaro. Kanamaro is the son of a Japanese warrior who had fallen on hard times and so was forced to sell the katana which Deacon prizes so much.

Colson gives a long, comprehensive explanation of the way that, for Japanese Samurai and other warriors, their weapons had a spiritual value. It was thought that when they were made by the swordsmith a guardian spirit entered the metal, and looked over its fate. There is no shame worse than being separated from your sword. A traditional Samurai would starve to death rather than barter it away. Nonetheless, that’s what Kanamaro’s father had been forced to do, and now his son – Kanamaro – is back to reclaim his father’s sword so that he can take it back to Japan and bury it with his father in his tomb, and his spirit can finally rest easy.

Deacon refuses but Kanamaro won’t give up, returning again and again, and slowly losing his impeccable Japanese manners.

It is only now that Colson notices – that the sword has gone!! So now Kanamaro is the obvious suspect, and when Colson goes to find him, all his suspicions are confirmed for Kanamaro has checked out of his London hotel in a hurry, and is returning to Japan.

When questioned, Kanamaro says that he has finally retrieved the sword but ‘at great cost’, shows no flicker of emotion upon hearing that Deacon is dead, and is generally cold and dismissive. It must be him! He must have recovered the kanata through violence.

But having read a dozen or so of these stories in quick succession, I recognised a number of the subtle contra-indications pointing towards the real culprit – most notably that Deacon’s body was found lying beneath an impressive statue of a Japanese god,

at the foot of a pedestal whereupon there squatted, with serenely fierce grin, the god Hachiman, gilt and painted, carrying in one of his four hands a snake, in another a mace, in a third a small human figure, and in the fourth a heavy, straight, guardless sword.

This is the kind of grotesque or Gothic detail which characterises the best Sherlock Holmes stories, and almost always turns out to be significant. And so it is here. And when, a lot later in the story, Colson tells Dorrington that the little god figure only arrived in the last few days my suspicions were aroused.

All these stories are divided into four or five logically discrete sections. In the final section of this one Dorrington reveals all: most of Deacon’s collection had been transhipped over the years at a huge warehouse full of all sorts of treasures down on the docks, owned by one Mr Copleston. Copleston employs all kinds of casual labour. One of the most notable employees is a short hunchback nicknamed Slackjaw. Dorrington speculates that the following is what took place.

The statue of the Japanese god arrived in Copleston’s warehouse and sat there for a week or more. During this time Slackjaw discovered that you can open it up and get inside. It was designed for a priest or someone to get inside back in Japan and breathe fire or make prophecies or whatnot from within.

But, having discovered that he could pop inside and lock it from the inside, Slackjaw did so one day, waited until everyone had left the warehouse, and then emerged to steal precious stuff then get a decent night’s kip in the warm.

This explains why Coplestone had told Colson that the men had begun to think the statue was cursed – because objects left near it overnight either disappeared or were found smashed in the morning. It was no ghost. This was just Slackjaw either nicking things, or being clumsy and knocking nearby objects over.

Anyway, when Slackjaw learned that the statue was to be shipped off to Deacon’s he reflected that it might be an opportunity for more plunder, so he stowed away inside and was carried into Deacon’s flat.

Here he waited a night, until Deacon left for work the next day, then crept out and was beginning to prise open a case holding precious gold objects, when Deacon unexpectedly returned. Panic-stricken Slackjaw bolted back to the statue but got there at the same moment as Deacon walked in the door. Slackjaw looked around him for a weapon and, unfortunately for both of them, his hand fell on the display of ornamental swords and he happened to grab the heaviest, sharpest one to whack Deacon with.

Hearing the porter rattling the door, Slackjaw quickly wiped the sword clean and climbed back into the statue. There he spent the rest of the day while the police crawled all over the place, but that night he finally climbed out of the statue, lightly opened the door and snuck away.

Slackjaw

Corroborating evidence is the fact that Dorrington found knife marks on the case of gold, as of someone who had only just started trying to open it when they were disturbed.

Most compelling of all, though, is the fact that Dorrington found a little bottle inside the statue, obviously there to refresh Slackjaw, which he forgot to take with him and on which was written the name of the publican of the pub where it was bought.

Going down to the docks Dorrington ascertains that the pub is the nearest one to Coplestone’s warehouse. So Dorrington had returned there with the police and spotted Slackjaw. The moment the hunchback saw Dorrington and the cops he had turned pale, put down his glass and nipped out the back of the pub.

There was then a brief chase: Slackjaw dropped onto a barge then went jumping from one barge to the next, but suddenly slipped and fell between two. The slow movement of the barges always creates perilous suction. By the time the police got there, the hunchback had disappeared under the murky Thames water and Dorrington had left them dragging the river for his body. Case solved.

6. Old Cater’s Money

Rigby (or Morrison) ends the volume by telling a story from Dorrington’s early career.

Old Jerry Cater lived in the crooked and decaying old house over his wharf by Bermondsey Wall, where his father had lived before him. It was a grim and strange old house, with long-shut loft-doors in upper floors, and hinged flaps in sundry rooms that, when lifted, gave startling glimpses of muddy water washing among rotten piles below.

Old Cater has been a miserly usurer all his life. He had bamboozled his long-suffering secretary Sinclair, by lending him £40 at 200% compound interest to get married with, thus throwing him into a life-long debt he could never repay. Now, broken-spirited Sinclair and his gaunt wife are Cater’s debt slaves. The shabby derelict household where they live also includes ‘Samuel Greer, a squinting man of grease and rags, within ten years of the age of old Jerry Cater himself’.

Old Cater is dying. He takes to his death-bed while Greer fusses about him, rummaging through cupboards for anything to steal. All this has the vibe of Morrison’s stories of Mean Streets and the Jago, i.e. describing people who have almost nothing, who live hand to mouth from day to day, for whom the discovery of one penny is a highlight of the day. This story is the most colourful, lively and interesting of the set.

Greer’s face, with its greasy features and its irresponsible squint, was as expressive as a brick.

Old Cater finally passes away, attended by a local poor doctor. Now just before he passed, Greer had been rummaging in the cupboard and found a jar containing the old man’s will. He spies a money opportunity and goes to see Cater’s nephew, Paul Cater in Pimlico. the two take a cab back to Bermondsey during which Greer slimily reveals that he has the old miser’s will – but will only part with it for £20. Cater has a tenner in his wallet. That’ll do, says Greer, and hands over the will, which Paul Cater sees, gives him ownership of all the old man’s belongings.

However, Cater had another nephew, a certain Jarvis Flint, and Greer had also found a codicil to the main will which is in Jarvis’s favour. So Greer now goes and parlays with Flint, demanding £50 for knowledge of the codicil’s whereabouts. Flint throws him out and – here we finally get to Dorrington – has the young Dorrington, who’s working for him as a general dogsbody, follow Greer and try to ascertain the codicil’s whereabouts.

Many of Morrison’s detective stories hinge on sheer luck and this might be the most egregious example of this trait. Dorrington follows Greer around the streets until the latter decides to pop into a barber’s for a penny shave. One of the other customers is a drunk docker. There’s much ribaldry among the customers as this docker finishes his shave, grabs his hat and staggers out into the street. It’s only when Greer has himself finished being shaved and gets up to leave, that he realises that the drunken docker has taken his hat – the hat in which he has hidden the precious codicil.

Greer runs out of the barber’s crying ‘Stop thief’, pursued by the barber who he hasn’t paid yet, and all the other customers for the fun of it.

Now Dorrington had been watching from across the street and saw which way the drunk docker went. While Greer and the mob run off in one direction, Dorrington runs to catch up with the docker. As he catches up with him, he sees the docker getting into a fight: leaning over a wharf his hat fell off and when a helpful sailor brought it up to him, the drunk docker protests that it’s not his hat (which is, of course, true) and accuses the helpful sailor of having stolen his hat. And they fall to fighting.

And while they’re doing so, Dorrington picks up Greer’s hat, which has rolled to one side and saunters off. And as he suspected, it contains the codicil to Old Cater’s will.

The drunk docker and the sailr fight while Dorrington (with moustache) takes the hat

The drunk docker and the sailor fight while Dorrington (with moustache) takes the hat

Greer keeps returning to the barber’s but never sees the hat again. Reluctant to give up, he returns to Jarvis Flint to offer the next best thing, his sworn testimony as to the content of the codicil (which handed over all Old Cater’s property to Flint, valued at ten thousand pounds).

Meanwhile, Dorrington has a copy of the codicil made and legally witnessed. Then he calls on Paul Cater. He coolly demands £1,000 to hand it over. Cater is outraged. Dorrington points out that he will still make £9,000 on the deal and threatens to take a cab to Jarvis Flint to give him the codicil. Cater caves in, takes Dorrington to his bank in Pimlico, takes out £1,000 in gold and notes, and gives it to him in return for the codicil. Jarvis then takes a cab back to Old Cater’s house and promptly burns the codicil. He doesn’t know Dorrington has made a copy of it.

Now, Dorrington had intended to take the copy of the codicil over to Flint’s house and extract another thousand pounds from Jarvis in return for handing it over. But Dorrington leaves it for a day or two – which turns out to be a bad mistake.

For on the day of Old Cater’s funeral, Flint and his sleazy lawyer, Lugg, along with Greer as witness, all go to see Paul Cater and confront him with the fact that Greer – though he doesn’t have a physical copy of the codicil – will testify to its content i.e. that the entire estate goes to Flint.

So the scene is that Cater, Greer, Lugg and Flint are at old Cater’s place, making threats and counter-threats, when the lawyer Lugg reaches over to get the Bible which Old Cater had kept around him in his last days, with a view to then and there getting Greer to testify under oath to the contents of the codicil. But –

As he opens it, Lugg discovers writing scribbled onto its opening pages, and realises that on his very last day, Old Cater changed his will again. And left everything to… neither Jarvis nor Paul, but to Sinclair, the poor broken bondsman who has served him faithfully all this time.

The two nephews are thunderstruck and immediately start trying to bribe the lawyer. But Lugg sees that Greer has witnessed everything and would likely resort to blackmail him in the future, plus he sees the prospect of an extremely grateful new client (Sinclair) and so he promptly adopts a high tone of Pecksniffian morality, and insists that he must ‘perform his duty’ and report this new, final version of the will to authorities.

With the result that when Dorrington calls on Flint to carry out part two of his plan (to blackmail Flint) he, Dorrington, finds himself met with insults and abuse. When the new situation is explained to him, he doesn’t care. He’s already made £1,000 and it is with this money – the narrator tells us – that Dorrington is then able to set up, live and dress as a gentleman, and to begin his life as a detective and crook.

Indeed, when he hears about tCater’s final will scribbled in the Bible, Dorrington bursts out laughing.

The story ends with a comic flourish as a disgruntled Samuel Greer goes to the nearest pub for a wet, and bumps into the drunk docker who took Greer’s hat by mistake. Greer, failing to find the docker, had returned to the barber’s and taken the hat which the docker left behind. Now, finding Greer wearing his long-lost hat, the docker beats Greer up.

It is a very entertaining and comic story – but only if you accept that every single character in it is motivated by shameless greed, and is prepared to lie, cheat and betray everyone, in order to make money.

Thoughts

Being an anti-hero makes Dorrington much more appealing to modern tastes than Morrison’s squeaky clean ‘good’ detective, Martin Hewitt.

And whereas the Hewitt stories seemed to copy the basic Sherlock Holmes formula with slavish conformity, the fact that Dorrington doesn’t mind resorting to breaking and entering, theft and blackmail, and is prepared to do more or less anything when he sees private advantage, makes the stories much more unpredictable.

Sometimes he carries out his client’s wishes perfectly straight, but sometimes he spies an opening for skulduggery and goes over to the dark side – and sometimes he does both – as in the bicycle story where he both gains his reward from Mallows by good detective work, but then goes on to confront Mallows at the ABC factory, and nearly kills him.

And sometimes he does neither, as in the case of the Japanese sword, where he behaves like a perfectly straight and respectable detective.

But there is always the dark and Gothic threat that Dorrington might at any moment pull out his revolver and blackmail someone. And that makes the yarns from Dorrington’s Deed-Box immeasurably more entertaining than the Hewitt stories.

Information is power

Many of the stories bring out the fact that it’s not only always been important to have as much information as possible about your enemies (hence the long tradition of spies) – but also to gather information about people in general – who are neither friends nor enemies. Especially compromising information. You never know when it will come in useful. This is core to Dorrington’s modus operandi. Knowledge is power.

It was an important thing in Dorrington’s rascally trade to get hold of as much of other people’s private business as possible, and to know exactly in what cupboard to find every man’s skeleton. For there was no knowing but it might be turned into money sooner or later.

Knowledge of people’s foibles and secrets was as important then as it is now. The difference is that, in our time, several billion people have been happy to turn over their most intimate secrets to social media, email, phone and internet companies free and gratis, for them to use and exploit any way they see fit. Strange days.