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The Grell Mystery
Frank Froest
Tony Medawar
The latest in a new series of classic detective stories from the vaults of HarperCollins involves the murder of a notorious criminal in the home of a famous millionaire. But there are no clues, no evidence. The police are convinced that someone may have just committed the perfect crime.“The Detective Story Club”, launched by Collins in 1929, was a clearing house for the best and most ingenious crime stories of the age, chosen by a select committee of experts. Now, almost 90 years later, these books are the classics of the Golden Age, republished at last with the same popular cover designs that appealed to their original readers.The Grell Mystery was first published in 1913 and selected as one of the launch titles for the Detective Club in 1929. It was written by former Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Frank Froest, who had turned in retirement to writing successful and authentic crime novels.“If you like a thriller with plenty of exciting incident and a clever plot you will like this first-rate detective novel by Frank Froest. Chief Inspector Foyle was confronted with the most bewildering case of his career when Goldenburg, the crook, was found foully murdered in the flat of Robert Grell, millionaire. Here was what appeared to be a perfect crime without a clue that led anywhere. But Foyle was more than a match for the arch-criminal and his masterly deduction and determination brought him a splendid triumph.”
Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain 1913
Published by The Detective Story Club Ltd
for Wm Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1929
Introduction © Tony Medawar 2015
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1929, 2015
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008137175
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008137182
Version: 2015-08-17
Contents
Cover (#u47d59afa-a895-5e49-b9d3-750b70d22179)
Title Page (#udcd9ee3d-a74e-5bf0-a931-e1f6248746b4)
Copyright (#ueb597ff9-9ff0-54e5-96d1-e6d69487f8e1)
Introduction (#u9c4dcb0f-76e9-58b3-81ee-dbebfdebcbf1)
Chapter I (#ud6f13649-05e1-55cc-9f03-de5e2d45f40a)
Chapter II (#ue8a5239f-ebf2-51cd-b62d-e51a3bd3d12f)
Chapter III (#ucd40ab6c-7978-52eb-b770-e08f95ba44bf)
Chapter IV (#u25fb1dc8-c5e6-5b27-8bd0-3b100d74245d)
Chapter V (#u48f3268b-e391-5607-a391-195caf1c2fc4)
Chapter VI (#u3e5bf667-711d-5eec-a3c0-c4f3cb2de2d8)
Chapter VII (#u64cd9fd7-3340-5078-8cd3-bc1f543fee10)
Chapter VIII (#ue43dfbd2-a56f-5281-89f2-e48f68fa9333)
Chapter IX (#uf6807141-1040-5cfc-9b0f-2719fc2e9ad9)
Chapter X (#u1c5a57b7-4617-58e4-a483-ae8c758bf192)
Chapter XI (#u609b648c-2e3f-53fa-b0bc-ff6e533ede82)
Chapter XII (#u061a29e0-3c4c-5de3-81e9-24023aa3acf9)
Chapter XIII (#u6ac8e1f2-3d59-54d3-af72-5a13a21f172c)
Chapter XIV (#ue253d5b1-e788-50d2-a385-3b1f2423bff7)
Chapter XV (#u3a9db46f-66c4-5bb9-8078-b8256fd76278)
Chapter XVI (#u33fa1adc-9514-5acf-a99b-467614b598a2)
Chapter XVII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XVIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXVI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXVII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXVIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXIX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXXI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXXII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXXIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXXIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXXV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXXVI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXXVII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXXVIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXXIX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XL (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XLI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XLII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XLIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XLIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XLV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XLVI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XLVII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XLVIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XLIX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter L (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter LI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter LII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter LIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter LIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter LV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter LVI (#litres_trial_promo)
The Detective Story Club (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#u5349bdef-f9e1-5f6b-96e2-d3b2c0ddeba5)
First published a hundred years ago, The Grell Mystery is best regarded as an early example of what has become known as the police procedural. However, it is also one of the earliest instances of a novel written by an individual who has already attained fame, in this case Frank Froëst, a former Superintendent at Scotland Yard and once the most famous policeman in the world.
Frank Castle Froëst was born in the West of England around 1858. He joined the Metropolitan Police in 1879 and was promoted to detective two years later. In 1903, Froëst attained the rank of Chief Inspector and in 1906 he was appointed Superintendent of the Yard’s premier division, the Criminal Investigation Department. According to contemporary newspaper reports, ‘Frankie’ Froëst was a genial, kindly-faced man, broad-shouldered and thick-set with twinkling blue eyes, a short greyish moustache and a misleading air of innocence. There are also numerous references to Froëst’s extraordinary strength and, in particular, his ability to bend coins and to tear a pack of playing cards in two.
There are therefore some similarities between Froëst and Heldon Foyle, the detective who resolves The Grell Mystery, and if its central puzzle has little in common with any of the crimes that Froëst himself investigated, the detective’s experiences and knowledge of what happened at a real crime scene give the novel a more realistic feel than many of its contemporaries. Heldon Foyle also works closely with the newspapers, something that Froëst was renowned for, but it is hard to believe that the real detective ever used disguise as Foyle does in The Grell Mystery. The book has a strong sense of place and the locations and minor characters are vividly realised.
Froëst achieved international renown in 1894 with the arrest of Jabez Balfour. In 1869, Balfour, a Liberal Party politician and one time Member of Parliament for Tamworth, founded the Liberator Permanent Benefit and Investment Society. The society grew to become one of Britain’s largest but its success was built on false accounting and, inevitably, it collapsed, owing millions and leaving thousands of small investors defrauded and penniless. Balfour promptly fled to South America with his wife and sister-in-law, and he must have believed himself far beyond the reach of the Metropolitan Police. But he had reckoned without Frank Froëst. Tasked by the Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard with bringing the financier to justice, the detective travelled to Argentina where, after a year of battling officialdom, he tracked down his man. However, the business of returning Balfour to England was far from straightforward. Working with a British diplomat, Froëst chartered a train and, narrowly evading arrest for murder en route when a local sheriff’s officer was killed trying to board the moving train, the two men reached the coast with their prisoner. Froëst chartered passage for Britain and as soon as the ship reached international waters he arrested Balfour who was later sentenced to fourteen years. The arrest was Froëst’s first major success and in the course of his long career there would be many, many others, including the resolution of the Liverpool Bank Fraud and the arrest of Dr Hawley Crippen after he too had fled from justice.
When Frank Froëst retired in September 1912 after over 30 years’ service, he was by general acclaim ‘the best known of all the detectives in the world’. His fame was even such that the speech marking his retirement was given by King George V, who a few months earlier had awarded the detective the King’s Police Medal, an honour then given rarely to officers of Froëst’s rank.
On his retirement, Frank Froëst and his wife Sarah moved to Axbridge in Somerset, where he became a justice of the peace. Working with the journalist George Dilnot, he wrote The Grell Mystery and in return he helped Dilnot with his history of the Metropolitan Police, The Story of ScotlandYard (1915). The newspaperman and the former policeman got on well together and co-authored two further works of fiction: The Crime Club (1915), an entertaining collection of short stories; and The Rogues’ Syndicate (1916). A silent film was made of each of the two novels by the Vitagraph Company of America and released in 1917 with The Rogues’ Syndicate re-titled as The Maelstrom. Both films starred Earle Williams, an American actor, who played Heldon Foyle in the film of The Grell Mystery.
After his wife died in 1916, Frank Froëst lost his appetite for writing about crime. He moved into politics instead and was elected to Somerset County Council on which he served for some years before a second retirement after the onset of blindness. He died in 1930 in a convalescent home at Weston-super-Mare. Froëst’s passing was marked around the world with one obituary describing him as ‘one of the most brilliant, courageous and resourceful men who ever graduated through Scotland Yard’.
TONY MEDAWAR
February 2015
CHAPTER I (#u5349bdef-f9e1-5f6b-96e2-d3b2c0ddeba5)
OUTSIDE the St Jermyn’s Club the rain pelted pitilessly upon deserted pavements. Mr Robert Grell leaned his arms on the table and stared steadily out through the steaming window-panes for a second. His shoulders lifted in a shrug that was almost a shiver.
‘It’s a deuce of a night,’ he exclaimed with conviction.
There was a faint trace of accent in his voice—an almost imperceptible drawl, such as might remain in the speech of an American who had travelled widely and rubbed shoulders with all sorts and conditions of men.
His companion lifted his eyebrows whimsically and nipped the end from a cigar.
‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘But the way you put it is more like plain Bob Grell of the old days than the polished Mr Robert Grell, social idol, millionaire and diplomat, and winner of the greatest matrimonial prize in London.’
Grell tugged at his drooping iron-grey moustache. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘This is not a meeting of the Royal Society. Here, in my own club, I claim the right of every free-born citizen to condemn the weather—or anything else—in any language I choose. Great Scott, Fairfield! You don’t expect me to wear my mantle all the time. I should explode if I didn’t have a safety valve.’
Sir Ralph Fairfield nodded. He understood. For years the two had been close friends, and in certain phases of temperament they were much alike. Both had tasted deeply of the sweets and hardships of life. Both had known the fierce wander-lust that drives men into strange places to suffer hunger, thirst, hardship and death itself for the sheer love of the game, and both had achieved something more than national fame. Fairfield as a fertile writer on ethnography and travel; and Grell equally as a daring explorer, and as a man who had made his mark in the politics and finance of the United States. More than once he had been employed on delicate diplomatic missions for his Government, and always he had succeeded. Great things were within his reach when he had suddenly announced his intention of giving up business, politics and travel to settle in England and lead the life of a gentleman of leisure. He had bought a thousand acres in Sussex, and rented a town house in Grosvenor Gardens.
