“Heaven forbid,” said his passenger. “I detest the thing.”

“So do I.”

“Sir, you are one among millions. I regard myself as highly privileged in making your acquaintance.”

“Thank you. It is a beastly invention.”

The passenger’s eyes glowed with passionate sympathy. “It is worse. It is diabolical.”

“Very true.”

“Literally diabolical. It is put here by the devil to destroy us. Did you know that it spread the most terrible diseases?”

“I didn’t know. But I can well believe it.”

“It causes cancer, tuberculosis, infantile paralysis, and the common cold. I have proved it.”

“It certainly causes headaches,” said Mr. James.

“No man,” said his passenger, “has suffered more excruciating headaches than I.

“They have tried to kill me with headaches. But I was too clever for them. Did you know that the BBC has its own secret police, its own prisons, its own torture chambers?”

“I have long suspected it.”

“I know. I have experienced them. Now it is the time of revenge.”

Mr. James glanced rather uneasily at his passenger and drove a little faster.

“I have a plan,” continued the big man. “I am going to London to put it into execution. I am going to kill the Director-General. I shall kill them all.”

They drove on in silence. They were nearing the outskirts of the town when a larger car driven by a girl drew abreast of them and passed. From inside it came the unmistakable sounds of a jazz band. The big man sat up in his seat, rigid as a pointer.

“Do you hear that?” he said. “She’s got one. After her, quick.”

“No good,” said Mr. James. “We can never catch that car.”

“We can try. We shall try, unless,” he said with a new and more sinister note in his voice, “unless you don’t want to.”

Mr. James accelerated. But the large car was nearly out of sight.

“Once before,” said his passenger, “I was tricked. The BBC sent one of their spies. He was very like you. He pretended to be one of my followers; he said he was taking me to the Director-General’s office. Instead he took me to a prison. Now I know what to do with spies. I kill them.” He leaned towards Mr. James.

“I assure you, my dear sir, you have no more loyal supporter than myself. It is simply a question of cars. I cannot overtake her. But no doubt we shall find her at the station.”

“We shall see. If we do not, I shall know whom to thank, and how to thank him.”

They were in the town now and making for the station. Mr. James looked despairingly at the policeman on point duty, but was signalled on with a negligent flick of the hand. In the station yard the passenger looked round eagerly.

“I do not see that car,” he said.

Mr. James fumbled for a second with the catch of the door and then tumbled out. “Help!” he cried. “Help! There’s a madman here.”

With a great shout of anger the man dodged round the front of the car and bore down on him.

At that moment three men in uniforms charged out of the station doorway. There was a brief scuffle; then, adroitly, they had their man strapped up.

“We thought he’d make for the railway,” said their chief. “You must have had quite an exciting drive, sir.”

Mr. James could scarcely speak. “Wireless,” he muttered weakly.

“Ho, he’s been talking to you about that, has he? Then you’re very lucky to be here to tell us. It’s his foible, as you might say. I hope you didn’t disagree with him.”

“No,” said Mr. James. “At least, not at first.”

“Well, you’re luckier than some. He can’t be crossed, not about wireless. Gets very wild. Why, he killed two people and half killed a third last time he got away. Well, many thanks for bringing him in so nicely, sir. We must be getting him home.”

Home. Mr. James drove back along the familiar road.

“Why,” said his wife when he entered the house. “How quick you’ve been. Where’s the parcel?”

“I think I must have forgotten it.”

“How very unlike you. Why, you’re looking quite ill. I’ll run in and tell Agnes to switch off the radio. She can’t have heard you come in.”

“No,” said Mr. James, sitting down heavily. “Not switch off radio. Like it. Homely.”

At the time of my father’s death I was in Morocco, at a small French hotel outside the fortifications of Fez. I had been there for six weeks, doing little else but write, and my book, Murder at Mountrichard Castle, was within twenty thousand words of its end. In three weeks I should pack it up for the typist; perhaps sooner, for I had nearly passed that heavy middle period where less conscientious writers introduce their second corpse. I was thirty-three years of age at the time, and a serious writer. I had always been a one-corpse man and, as far as possible, a clean corpse man, eschewing the blood-transfusions to which most of my rivals resorted to revitalize their flagging stories; moreover, I eschewed anything that was even remotely sordid or salacious. My corpses, invariably, were male, solitary, of high position in the world and, as near as possible, bloodless. I abhorred blunt instruments and “features battered beyond recognition.” Lord George Vanburgh, in Death in the Dukeries, was decapitated but only, it will be remembered, after he had been dead for some time through other causes. My poisons were painless; no character of mine ever writhed or vomited. Cardinal Vascari, in Vengeance at the Vatican, my first and in other ways my least successful story, met death in a model fashion, lapsing into coma while he sat at his window, one tranquil autumn evening, overlooking the Tiber; the fingers relaxed in the scarlet lap and the rosary with the missing decade—that ingenious clue—slipped unnoticed to the carpet. That was how John Plant’s characters died.

On the other hand, while avoiding blood, I was tolerably free with the thunder. I despised a purely functional novel as I despised contemporary architecture; the girders and struts of the plot require adornment and concealment; I relish the masked buttresses, false domes, superfluous columns, all the subterfuges of literary architecture and the plaster and gilt of its decoration. A tenth of my writing or more—and some of the best of it—went on stage effects; sudden eddies of cold air would stir my curtains, candles guttered, horses lathered themselves to frenzy in their stalls; idiots gibbered; my policemen hunted their man in a landscape of crag, torrent, ruin, and fallen oak. And now and then, when the sequence of emotions I planned for my readers required a moment of revulsion and terror, I would kill an animal in atrocious circumstances—Lady Belinda’s Blenheim spaniel, for example, in The Frightened Footman.

Murder at Mountrichard Castle bristled with Gothic enrichments and I was tolerably confident of its good reception. Success, even at its first approach, failed to surprise me. I took pains with my work and I thought it excellent. Each of my seven books sold better than its predecessor. Moreover, the sale was in their first three months, at seven and sixpence. I did not have to relabel the library edition for the book-stalls. People bought my books and kept them—not in the spare bedrooms but in the library, all seven of them together on a shelf. My contract provided me with an advance on each book corresponding with the total earnings of the one before it. In six weeks’ time, when my manuscript had been typed, revised and delivered I should receive a cheque for something over nine hundred pounds. This would pay off my overdraft and Income Tax and leave me with five hundred or so, on which, with another overdraft, I should live until my next book was ready. That was how I ordered my affairs. Had I wished it, I could have earned considerably more. I never tried to sell my stories as serials; the delicate fibres of a story suffer when it is chopped up into weekly or monthly parts and never completely heal. Often, when I have been reading the work of a competitor, I have said, “She was writing with an eye on the magazines. She had to close this episode prematurely; she had to introduce that extraneous bit of melodrama, so as to make each installment a readable unit. Well,” I would reflect, “she has a husband to support and two sons at school. She must not expect to do two jobs well, to be a good mother and a good novelist.” I chose to live modestly on the royalties of my books.