But while being so guided in this anthology, I have become aware that I have given my benison to a preponderance of unorthodox selections — that is, stories which are basically neither “whodunits” or “howdiddees.” Having maintained for years that I don’t write “detective” or “mystery” stories, but adventures with a criminal angle, it is ironic that I feel obliged to redress the balance with one of my own few genuine exercises in the formula I disparage. But, in my own judgment, one of the best I have been able to do.
— Leslie Charteris
1
One of Simon Templar’s stock criticisms of the classic type of detective story is that the victim of the murder, the reluctant spark-plug of all the entertaining mystery and strife, is usually a mere nonentity who wanders vaguely through the first few pages with the sole purpose of becoming a convenient body in the library by the end of Chapter One. But what his own feelings and problems may have been, the personality which has to provide so many people with adequate motives for desiring him to drop dead, is largely a matter of hearsay, retrospectively brought out in the conventional process of drawing attention to one suspect after another.
“You could almost,” Simon has said, “call him a corpus derelicti. ...Actually, the physical murder should only be the mid-point of the story: the things that led up to it are at least as interesting as the mechanical solution of who done it... Personally, I’ve killed very few people that I didn’t know plenty about first.”
Coming from a man who is generally regarded as almost a detective-story character himself, this comment is at least worth recording for reference, but it certainly did not apply to the shuffling off of Mr Floyd Vosper, which caused a brief commotion on the island of New Providence in the early spring of that year.
2
Why Simon Templar should have been in Nassau (which, for the benefit of the untraveled, is the city of New Providence, which is an island in the Bahamas) at the time is one of those questions which always arise in stories about him, and which can only be answered by repeating that he liked to travel and was just as likely to show up there as in Nova Zembla or Namaqualand. As for why he should have been invited to the house of Mrs Herbert H. Wexall, that is another irrelevancy which is hardly covered by the fact that he could just as well have shown up at the house of Joe Wallenski (of the arsonist Wallenskis) or the White House — he had friends in many places, legitimate and otherwise. But Mrs Wexall had some international renown as a lion hunter, even if her stalking had been confined to the variety which roars loudest in plush drawing rooms, and it was not to be expected that the advent of such a creature as Simon Templar would have escaped the attention of her salon safari.
Thus one noontime Simon found himself strolling up the driveway and into what little was left of the life of Floyd Vosper. Naturally he did not know this at the time, nor did he know Floyd Vosper, except by name. In this he was no different from at least fifty million other people in that hemisphere, for Floyd Vosper was not only one of the most widely syndicated pundits of the day, but his books (Feet of Clay, As I Saw Them, and The Twenty Worst Men in the World) had all been the selections of one book club or another and still sold by the million in reprints. For Mr Vosper specialized in the ever-popular sport of shattering reputations. In his journalistic years he had met, and apparently had unique opportunities to study, practically every great name in the national and international scene, and could unerringly remember everything in their biographies that they would prefer forgotten, and could impale and epitomize all their weaknesses with devastatingly pinpoint precision, leaving them naked and squirming on the operating table of his vocabulary. But what this merciless professional iconoclast was like as a person, Simon had never heard or bothered much to wonder about.
So the first impression that Vosper made on him was a voice, a still unidentified voice, a dry and deliberate and peculiarly needling voice, which came from behind a bank of riotous hibiscus and oleander.
“My dear Janet,” it said, “you must not let your innocent admiration for Reggie’s bulging biceps color your estimate of his perspicacity in world affairs. The title of All-American, I hate to disillusion you, has no reference to statesmanship.”
There was a rather strained laugh that must have come from Reggie, and a girl’s clear young voice said, “That isn’t fair, Mr Vosper. Reggie doesn’t pretend to be a genius, but he’s bright enough to have a wonderful job waiting for him on Wall Street.”
“I don’t doubt that he will make an excellent contact man for the more stupid clients,” conceded the voice with the measured nasal gripe. “And I’m sure that his education can cope with the simple arithmetic of the Stock Exchange, just as I’m sure it can grasp the basic figures of your father’s Dun and Bradstreet. This should not dazzle you with his brilliance, any more than it should make you believe that you have some spiritual fascination that lured him to your feet.”
At this point Simon rounded a curve in the driveway and caught his first sight of the speakers, all of whom looked up at him with reserved curiosity and two-thirds of them with a certain hint of relief.
There was no difficulty in assigning them to their lines — the young red-headed giant with the pleasantly rugged face and the slim pretty blonde girl, who sat at a wrought-iron table on the terrace in front of the house with a broken deck of cards in front of them which established an interrupted game of gin rummy, and the thin stringy man reclining in a long cane chair with a cigarette-holder in one hand and a highball glass in the other.
Simon smiled and said, “Hello. This is Mrs Wexall’s house, is it?”
The girl said, “Yes,” and he said, “My name’s Templar, and I was invited here.”
The girl jumped up and said, “Oh, yes. Lucy told me. I’m her sister, Janet Blaise. This is my fiancé, Reg Herrick. And Mr Vosper.”
Simon shook hands with the two men, and Janet said, “I think Lucy’s on the beach. I’ll take you around.”
Vosper unwound his bony length from the long chair, looking like a slightly dissolute and acidulated mahatma in his white shorts and burnt chocolate tan.
“Let me do it,” he said. “I’m sure you two ingénues would rather be alone together. And I need another drink.”
He led the way, not into the house but around it, by a flagged path which struck off to the side and meandered through a bower of scarlet Poinciana. A breeze rustled in the leaves and mixed flower scents with the sweetness of the sea. Vosper smoothed down his sparse gray hair, and Simon was aware that the man’s beady eyes and sharp thin nose were cocked towards him with brash speculation, as if he were already measuring another target for his tongue.