The Woman in the Wardrobe Read online




  Mr Verity

  This edition published 2020 by

  The British Library

  96 Euston Road

  London

  NW1 2DB

  The Woman in the Wardrobe was first published under the penname ‘Peter Antony’ in 1951 by Evans Brothers Ltd, London.

  Preface copyright © 2020 Elinor Shaffer

  Introduction copyright © 2020 Martin Edwards

  The Woman in the Wardrobe copyright © 1951 The Estate of Peter Shaffer

  Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 7123 5346 5

  eISBN 978 0 7123 6776 9

  Front cover image: Southern Railway Folkestone poster © NRM/Pictorial Collection/Science & Society Picture Library

  Illustrations reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Estate of Nicolas Clerihew Bentley

  Copyright © 1951 Nicolas Clerihew Bentley

  eBook and typesetting by Tetragon, London

  Contents

  Preface by Elinor Shaffer

  Introduction by Martin Edwards

  The Woman in the Wardrobe

  Preface

  Anthony and Peter Shaffer, twin sons (b. 1926) of Jacob and Reka Shaffer, were called, like other boys of their wartime generation, to support the war effort by going down the coal mines as “Bevin Boys”. Tony, who always assumed and was accorded the role of elder brother, managed the arduous underground work in the mines, but Peter fell ill, and bore the traces for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, they completed their war service and went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1947, together with their brother Brian, three years younger and coming straight from St. Paul’s School. Tony read law, Peter, history; their younger brother read natural sciences. They wrote some pieces for College magazines, and Peter submitted a story to the well-known writer E.M. Forster, a Fellow of King’s College; it was not accepted for publication, as it was deemed too long, but Forster wrote a very appreciative and constructive set of comments on the young man’s story, and invited him to tea. Peter was amazed and delighted, as an unpublished note of the period shows, that the famous novelist was so civil to him and spoke to him as to a fellow writer.1

  The two brothers were fans of detective stories in that heyday of detective fiction, stemming from G.K. Chesterton if not from Sherlock Holmes, and during their student days coinciding with the popularity of Agatha Christie and the long-standing Detection Club, founded in 1930 after notable examples of the genre had appeared, they enjoyed imagining stories in the style of the genre. The inter-war years had been called “the golden age of detective fiction” by John Strachey in 1939;2 but the “age of detective fiction” was far from over.

  Essential was to invent a detective who could vie with Christie’s Hercule Poirot, the dapper Belgian detective who always bested the dull-witted police and unmasked the malefactor dramatically from a large cast of suspects. Who could do this more dramatically than their invented detective, the learned, wilful and eloquent Mr Verity? A domestic setting was often the place of the murder, with a large cast of suspects, some of whom were concealing their pasts. A particular room in the house was the scene of the murder; whether drawing room, bedroom, dining room, or library, and who had access to it, when and how, was often key to the solution. The murder weapon was also a vital component. So, in The Woman in the Wardrobe the body is not simply in a room, it is in a wardrobe in a room; why? How many keys are needed? Who had access to them? to the room? to the wardrobe? The solution is magnificently complex and triumphantly convincing, delivered with the required brio by the sleuth. The two brothers called their invented author by the twinning pseudonym, Peter Antony.

  Tony was a fount of elaborate, hilarious and over-the-top plot ideas, and he and Peter shared in the fun; but when it came to writing, it was Peter who carried it out, smoothly, proportionately, and believably. Tony’s memoir So What Did You Expect? confirms that Peter was the author, the sole writer of the book; and it was with Peter alone that the contract with the then publisher was drawn up.

  In later years, Peter saw and defined himself simply and proudly as a playwright, and his career as a playwright he dated from the London production of Five Finger Exercise in 1958, which won the Evening Standard Drama Award. Works, even plays, written before that date he grouped together casually and dismissively—“there had been some for television and radio before that”, he wrote in the preface to his Collected Plays in 1982, referring in this phrase to the detective novels, to a TV drama (his excellent The Salt Land, shown on ABC TV in New York in 1955), and radio plays perhaps still to be rediscovered.3

  Nevertheless, a thread of the early fascination with mysterious or inexplicable actions, threatening events even including murder, and alternative modes of unravelling a strange event still run through his most serious and challenging dramatic works.

  Five Finger Exercise, a well-made family drama, itself ends with a death, a suicide, but one brought about through a complex plot by others (indeed revealing both an individual plot and a world-historical issue); Equus, revolving around the blinding of six horses by a young man (based on an actual court case related to Peter by a magistrate) and a complex unravelling of the circumstances and the forces as understood by a psychiatrist in the terms of his own life as well as those of his profession; in Amadeus, an interpretation of the life and death of Mozart in terms of a murderous jealousy on the part of a rival musician, Antonio Salieri, who over a period of time intervened disastrously in his career; and one might point to other examples in Peter’s oeuvre, including the playscript he left at his death in 2016, centring on the mysterious and much-debated death of Tchaikovsky: was it death by accidental infection during a typhus epidemic, or death by suicide brought about by the provocation and judgement of a self-appointed “court”?

  One could add still other examples from his work: was the death of the Inca king at the hands of the conquistador Pizarro in The Royal Hunt of the Sun not the murder of one civilisation by another? Later Peter remembered that he had read of the conquest of the Incas while he had been lying in his sickbed after his stint as a Bevin Boy. At the last, is there not a “mortal mystery” behind or within these stories which some call tragedy.

  The youthful detective jape thus unfolded itself into world-historical questions. But that does not take away from the sheer hilarity and good spirits that went into the two undergraduates’ invention. If Peter quickly came to dismiss his early efforts, and defined himself as a writer for the stage (though many of his plays also came to the screen despite his strong preference for the live theatre), Tony continued in this vein, writing the scripts for Hollywood’s versions of two of Agatha Christie’s most popular detective fictions, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. We may also recall that much later Peter jumped to the defence of his brother’s work when after Tony’s death the well-known playwright Harold Pinter requested permission to use Tony’s very successful play and film Sleuth while rewriting the dialogue himself. Peter refused this permission with considerable anger and indignation and a strong defence of Tony’s power and originality, in language as well as plot, as the author of the script.4 Tony’s film The Wicker Man, now something of a cult film, still follows the detective thread (indeed, the main character is a police detective); but the hunt is for the victim.

  The Woman in the Wardrobe may then still be glimpsed behind the grander edifices that Peter Shaffer constructed over the rest of his life as one of the leading playwrights of the half century following the Second World War.

  Elinor Shaffer, 2020

  Elinor Shaffer is Peter Shaffer’s sister-in-
law, who just before her wedding flew from her teaching post at Berkeley for the opening night of The Royal Hunt of the Sun at Chichester, and was present at nearly all the productions of his plays in London as well as the opening on Broadway of Equus. She is herself an author and founder of the British Comparative Literature Association.

  Notes

  1 Letter from E.M. Forster to Peter Shaffer, 7 March 1948, in the Wren Library Collection of Peter Shaffer’s papers, Trinity College, Cambridge.

  2 See Martin Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder (London: HarperCollins, 2015), p. 9.

  3 Preface, The Collected Plays of Peter Shaffer (New York: Harmony Books, 1982), p. vii.

  4 Peter Shaffer, unpublished letter to Harold Pinter, 18 April 2007, in the Wren Library Collection of Peter Shaffer’s papers, Trinity College, Cambridge.

  Further Reading

  Michael Billington, ‘Shaffer, Sir Peter Levin (1926–2016)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

  Michael Billington, State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945 (London: Faber & Faber, 2007)

  Martin Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder (London: HarperCollins, 2015)

  Peter Shaffer, The Collected Plays of Peter Shaffer (New York: Harmony Books, 1982)

  Peter Shaffer, Amadeus. A Play by Peter Shaffer (London: HarperCollins, 2001)

  Peter Shaffer, Equus (London: Penguin, 2007) (see also the 1977 film adaptation written by Peter Shaffer and directed by Sidney Lumet)

  Peter Shaffer, My Life in the Theatre: A Memoir, eds Richard Mayne and Elinor Shaffer (London and New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming)

  Introduction

  The Woman in the Wardrobe is a highly enjoyable whodunit in the classic tradition of the detective story. The novel’s young author would eventually become one of Britain’s most distinguished playwrights and a knight of the realm. He disguised himself as Peter Antony, but his real name was Peter Shaffer, and today he is more commonly associated with such theatrical successes as Equus and Amadeus. In his twenties, he produced three detective novels, two of them written in collaboration with his twin brother Anthony. These books are now very rare, and are much sought after by collectors, having been out of print for more than half a century. Thanks to the British Library’s policy of rescuing obscure classics of crime fiction, a new generation of readers finally has the chance to relish the delights of this jeu d’esprit, a book that served as a form of authorial apprenticeship.

  Although the Golden Age of detective fiction is generally regarded as the period between the two world wars, echoes of the Golden Age style and the use of popular Golden Age tropes are to be found in a wide range of books published during the past three-quarters of a century. In their youth, the Shaffer twins devoured Golden Age mysteries, and their own novels followed the traditional pattern, just as did those of later detective novelists such as Patricia Moyes, V.C. Clinton-Baddeley, and Sarah Caudwell, all of whose careers began long after the Golden Age had ended.

  The Woman in the Wardrobe looks back, very consciously, to fiction of the past, whereas novels such as Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and Julian Symons’ The Thirty-First of February, early examples of post-war psychological suspense, appeared the year before Shaffer’s debut. In writing his novel, Shaffer’s aims were very different from those of Highsmith and Symons. He simply wanted to amuse and entertain, and accordingly sub-titled his debut A Light-Hearted Detective Story.

  Shaffer’s protagonist is a jokey version of the Great Detective beloved of Golden Age authors and their fans. Mr Verity, much-travelled but now a resident of Amnestie in Sussex, “was very much disliked. It was partly because he was so often right. And partly… because he had an inexcusable manner of making himself indispensable in a case, and finally of solving it between tea and supper, with a mixed display of condescension and incivility.” He becomes embroiled in a mystery concerning a shooting in a locked room. The late Bob Adey, the foremost expert on this sub-genre of detective fiction, went so far in his definitive guide Locked Room Murders as to describe Shaffer’s story as “the best postwar locked-room mystery… [with] a brilliant new solution.”

  Anthony Joshua Shaffer was born in Liverpool on 15 May 1926 at 9.30 a.m. To everyone’s surprise, given that the maternity doctor’s stethoscope had failed to detect two heartbeats, Peter Levin Shaffer was born five minutes later. The twins had a brother, Brian, three years their junior. The family was affluent, Jewish, and academically gifted. Peter was educated at St Paul’s School and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1951, Evans published The Woman in the Wardrobe; although it was a solo effort by Peter, he adopted a pseudonym that combined his name with a version of his twin’s. The book benefited from sketches of the main characters by Nicolas Bentley, himself an occasional crime writer as well as an artist; Nicolas was also the son of E.C. Bentley, author of the seminal detective novel Trent’s Last Case and second President of the Detection Club.

  The Woman in the Wardrobe was followed a year later by How Doth the Little Crocodile, again authored by Peter Antony, and again featuring Mr Verity, but published by Gollancz. This time, however, the book was a collaboration between the twins. In Anthony’s entertaining if highly unreliable memoir So What Did You Expect? (2001), he described theirs as “an odd sort of partnership, with me providing the basic plots and Peter and I penning alternate chapters.” (One is tempted to speculate that he might have made a minor, unacknowledged contribution to The Woman in the Wardrobe, but the publishing contract suggests otherwise; the agreement is with Peter alone.) The third book, published as by A. and P. Shaffer, was Withered Murder (1955). Anthony, by then the editor of The London Mystery Magazine, cheekily reviewed the book himself in highly enthusiastic terms. Anthony observed in his memoir: “despite this chicanery, sales were comparatively modest, and the books today remain something of a curiosity, though we have so far resisted numerous offers to republish them.”

  After that, the twins’ literary paths diverged. Peter found his true calling as a man of the theatre. His first major stage success was Five Finger Exercise, and later works such as The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Black Comedy, Equus, Amadeus, and Lettice and Lovage secured his reputation. He was appointed a CBE in 1987 and knighted fourteen years later. Anthony credits Peter with encouraging him to give up a successful and lucrative career in advertising in order to concentrate on writing. A more avowedly commercial writer than his twin, he is best known for the enormously successful detective play Sleuth, which illustrates his knowledge and understanding of the genre, in the dialogue as well as in the ingenuity of the plot. He also wrote the influential and critically acclaimed horror film The Wicker Man as well as screenplays for big budget films based on novels by Agatha Christie and a script based on a novel by Arthur La Bern, Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, which became the Hitchcock thriller Frenzy.

  Anthony died in 2001 and Peter in 2016, at the age of ninety. At the time of Peter’s knighthood, the actor Simon Callow described him as “the playwright who forced the mainstream audience to think about the big ideas of their times”. There is a distinct shortage of big ideas of the kind Callow had in mind in The Woman in the Wardrobe but the story is none the worse for that. Welcome to a detective novel that is straightforward, unashamed fun.

  Martin Edwards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  The Woman in the Wardrobe

  To my parents

  with deepest love and appreciation

  Chapter I

  The little town of Amnestie had not known a death so bloody since the fifteenth century.

  The place was in Sussex, and generally classed as a seaside resort: it had borne its name since the Wars of the Roses, when there appear to have been two not very pitched battles on the beach. In the first the Lancastrians drove the Yorkists from the sand-dunes back to the town; in the second the Yorkists drove the Lancastrians from the sand-dunes into the sea. After each engagement there was a general amnesty for a popul
ation which, out of a natural desire to maintain its property, had adopted a rather confused neutrality and aided both sides indiscriminately.

  From those times the number of inhabitants had risen from fifty to five thousand—quite a considerable advance in five centuries. The nearest proper town was Carrington, four miles away to the East, and boasting twelve thousand.

  The main concern of the men of Amnestie was with fish; their main entertainment, the couples who came down from London at week-ends, put up at ‘The Charter’, and drove off first thing on Monday morning looking uncomfortable. ‘The Charter’ of Amnestie was quite often in the Sunday papers.

  It was a high, white building standing rather apart at the end of the main street. It was easily the most dominating place in the town, and certainly the most comfortable—with the exception of Mr Verity’s villa.

  As we have a deal to do with Mr Verity—in fact we start with what Mr Verity saw as he watched the front entrance of ‘The Charter’—some form of introduction must be attempted.

  He was an immense man, just tall enough to carry his breadth majestically. His face was sharp, smooth and teak-brown; his blue eyes small and of a startling brilliance. He wore a fine chestnut Van-Dyck, an habitual cloak in winter and the (some would say cultivated) expression of an elderly ‘Laughing Cavalier’. By this time, of course, he had long been a noted figure in the world of detection, and wonderfully respected by the Yard. In fact, if that were possible, almost as much respected as disliked.

  For Mr Verity was very much disliked. It was partly because he was so often right. And partly, also, because he had an inexcusable manner of making himself indispensable in a case, and finally of solving it between tea and supper, with a mixed display of condescension and incivility, when the regular police in charge were about dead with fatigue. The thing which no one could excuse this brilliant, lumbering, bearded giant was his amateur enlightenment—the fact that his words spoke so much louder than everybody else’s actions.