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The Rynox Mystery
Philip MacDonald
A classic Golden Age crime novel, and the first time Philip MacDonald wrote a crime novel without a detective.‘Rynox’ is at that point where one injudicious move, one failure of judgement, one coincidental piece of bad luck will wreck it. So why would anyone send more than a million pounds in one-pound notes to Mr Salisbury of the Naval, Military and Cosmopolitan Assurance Corporation? Who would shoot F.X. Benedik, the senior partner of the firm, through the head in his study? And where is the choleric Mr Marsh, who had an appointment with F.X. on the night of his death? Rynox is on the edge of big things. But the edge of big things is a narrow edge. And narrow edges are slippery . . .Philip MacDonald’s Rynox is an engrossing murder mystery set in the business world, a crime novel without a detective in which murder and big business are inextricably combined. Beginning with the Epilogue and ending with the Prologue, it is a subtle and exciting book by one of the greatest masters of the mystery story.This Detective Club classic includes a rare introduction by author Philip MacDonald himself, never before published in the UK, and also ‘The Wood-for-the-Trees’, the only short story to feature his series detective, Anthony Gethryn.
‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’
Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929
Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.
THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB (#ulink_49feb40c-f903-5814-9b16-7b27256f7b94)
E. C. BENTLEY • TRENT’S LAST CASE
E. C. BENTLEY • TRENT INTERVENES
E. C. BENTLEY & H. WARNER ALLEN • TRENT’S OWN CASE
ANTHONY BERKELEY • THE WYCHFORD POISONING CASE
ANTHONY BERKELEY • THE SILK STOCKING MURDERS
LYNN BROCK • NIGHTMARE
BERNARD CAPES • THE MYSTERY OF THE SKELETON KEY
AGATHA CHRISTIE • THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD
AGATHA CHRISTIE • THE BIG FOUR
WILKIE COLLINS • THE MOONSTONE
HUGH CONWAY • CALLED BACK
HUGH CONWAY • DARK DAYS
EDMUND CRISPIN • THE CASE OF THE GILDED FLY
FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS • THE CASK
FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS • THE PONSON CASE
FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS • THE PIT-PROP SYNDICATE
FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS • THE GROOTE PARK MURDER
MAURICE DRAKE • THE MYSTERY OF THE MUD FLATS
FRANCIS DURBRIDGE • BEWARE OF JOHNNY WASHINGTON
J. JEFFERSON FARJEON • THE HOUSE OPPOSITE
RUDOLPH FISHER • THE CONJURE-MAN DIES
FRANK FROËST • THE GRELL MYSTERY
FRANK FROËST & GEORGE DILNOT • THE CRIME CLUB
ÉMILE GABORIAU • THE BLACKMAILERS
ANNA K. GREEN • THE LEAVENWORTH CASE
DONALD HENDERSON • MR BOWLING BUYS A NEWSPAPER
VERNON LODER • THE MYSTERY AT STOWE
PHILIP MACDONALD • THE RASP
PHILIP MACDONALD • THE NOOSE
PHILIP MACDONALD • MURDER GONE MAD
PHILIP MACDONALD • THE MAZE
NGAIO MARSH • THE NURSING HOME MURDER
G. ROY McRAE • THE PASSING OF MR QUINN
R. A. V. MORRIS • THE LYTTLETON CASE
ARTHUR B. REEVE • THE ADVENTURESS
FRANK RICHARDSON • THE MAYFAIR MYSTERY
R. L. STEVENSON • DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE
J. V. TURNER • BELOW THE CLOCK
EDGAR WALLACE • THE TERROR
ISRAEL ZANGWILL • THE PERFECT CRIME
FURTHER TITLES IN PREPARATION
Copyright (#ulink_a1a4e936-6377-556e-9758-5004d2166555)
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 by W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1930
Published by The Detective Story Club Ltd 1931
Copyright © Estate of Philip MacDonald 1930, 1963
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
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: 9780008248994
Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008249007
Version: 2017-10-30
Contents
Cover (#uec09d327-ff38-5387-b68f-125784d4b88b)
The Detective Story Club (#u105345bf-e670-52af-b0fd-86576c1f6477)
Title Page (#ue16db368-e756-5f07-882c-47df7cebdc61)
Copyright (#u9d4f948d-ba60-5e8a-8831-018d42a77410)
Introduction (#ud09de074-8b8a-5ab1-9da1-85c10f22ef67)
Epilogue (#u97384b1c-4019-5398-b7e4-e7739798bd7e)
Reel One (#u5f943094-b769-5b54-a467-175de6eb6885)
Sequence the First (#u7e06f9fe-57e2-51e6-9fbe-5a81f17d6847)
Sequence the Second (#u7f567084-df5e-51be-99cc-9ed14fd2e75d)
Sequence the Third (#uc8665688-06c3-5463-827f-831a6d835037)
Sequence the Fourth (#litres_trial_promo)
Sequence the Fifth (#litres_trial_promo)
Sequence the Sixth (#litres_trial_promo)
Reel Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Reel Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Sequence the First (#litres_trial_promo)
Sequence the Second (#litres_trial_promo)
Sequence the Third (#litres_trial_promo)
Sequence the Fourth (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#litres_trial_promo)
The Wood-for-the-Trees (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_c38e8e52-a528-5e83-8443-adfc128ae70a)
I WONDER how many professional storytellers can look back on their own early work with true objectivity. If there are any, I envy them. Because I know I can’t. I always fall into the egocentric trap of disliking mine far too much; of feeling (as was once said of a friend of mine who was forever working on the great American novel and never finishing the first chapter) that ‘it isn’t good enough for me to have written.’
The only time I’m ever halfway satisfied with any work I’ve done is for a short while after I’ve finished it; a depressingly short and evanescent while. A week later any satisfaction with my labours is beginning to fade. In a month I am more than dubious. After a year, I’m convinced the whole thing smells to high heaven, and I can’t imagine why anyone would ever trouble to read it.
But I realize that these are conditioned reflexes, and auto-conditioned at that, so I made up my mind to ignore them as I approached the task of going over the three books in this collection. But I still started on the job with trepidation; because (to be euphemistic) the tales were written some time ago
and I was terrified that, in spite of their original success, they might prove hopelessly out of date.
But somehow they didn’t; and I was able to confine such editing as I did to matters of cutting, wording and style, of writing qua writing. Surprisingly, the stories themselves, as examples of three completely different types of what is now (unfortunately, I think) generically labelled ‘Mystery Story’, seemed to me to hold up pretty well: The Rasp as a pure, dyed-in-the-wool Whodunit; Murder Gone Mad as a tale of mass-murder, half Whodunit and half (to use a label of my own coining) Howcatchem; and Rynox, called a ‘light-hearted thriller’ at the time of its birth, as one of those razzle-dazzle, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t affairs which many of us case-hardened toilers in the field of the roman policier
like to throw off once in a while.
The Rasp was my third novel. It was also my first detective story,
and long before I’d finished it I was determined it should be my last. Conceived during a decade which was a Whodunit heyday, a time when it seemed that everyone in the storytelling business was trying his hand at the form, it was begun in a burst of youthful egotism, to show the world not only that I could do this too, but that I could do it better!
However, by the time I’d finished it I wasn’t at all sure that I was showing anybody anything. All I knew was that this was hard, hard work; I had discovered that if the writer of romans policiers believes (as I think he has to) that his books should be novels as well as puzzles; that they must, always, be literate and credible as well as scrupulously fair to the reader, the writing of them is pure self-torture!
But—well, The Rasp made quite a splash when it came out, first in England and later in the US.
And I’m still torturing myself for a living, nowadays not only between book covers but also in the dramatic forms of film and television. Although I have, at various and several times, sought relief quite successfully in telling other sorts of story, I seem always to come masochistically back to the sweat and the frustration, the challenge and the agony, of working at what John Dickson Carr has called ‘the greatest game of all’. And it might be worth noting that, when I do, I frequently use as my chief instrument a character (Anthony Gethryn) whom I never imagined, when I tucked him tidily away in matrimony at the end of The Rasp, would ever show his inquisitive and somewhat supercilious nose again …
Now for Murder Gone Mad. This was my third or fourth detective novel, and is a very different cup of tea from the first. An attempt to break away from the then accepted, and terribly confining, limits of the pure Whodunit (blunt-instrumented corpse in copse or library—eight suspects—least likely murderer) it was suggested by the macabre but very real-life exploits of the greatest mass murderer of the century, the monster of Düsseldorf.
