INTRODUCTION

      THE Elizabeth Tower is purportedly the most photographed building in the UK, and yet most people would not be able to name it. But as the clock tower that dominates the Palace of Westminster and houses the great bell of Big Ben, it is an instantly recognisable global landmark. Completed in 1859 as part of a 30-year rebuild of the Houses of Parliament after the original palace complex was all but destroyed by fire in 1834, the tower and its clock face quickly became the defining symbol both of the mother of parliaments and of London itself, and the hourly chimes of its 14-tonne bell indelibly associated over 157 years with national stability and resilience. When the bell was silenced on 21 August 2017 for an unprecedented four-year programme of essential maintenance, for some it was as though a death had occurred at the heart of Westminster.

      In the annals of crime fiction, of course, deaths at Westminster are all too common. But this was not always the case. When Collins’ Crime Club published J. V. Turner’s Below the Clock in May 1936, the idea of a minister being killed in the chamber was rather sensational, not to say disrespectful of the high office. Ngaio Marsh had dispatched the Home Secretary in The Nursing Home Murder in 1935, although even she hadn’t the audacity to have him drop dead at the Despatch Box. But then Marsh’s stories were not as audacious as those of J. V. Turner.

      John Victor Turner, known to family and friends as Jack, was the youngest of three boys in a family of six children. His father Alfred was a saddle-maker, who married Agnes Hume in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, in 1890. Jack was too young to serve in the First World War, but his eldest brother Alfred (after his father) joined up at only 16 and was profoundly affected by shell-shock for the rest of his life. The middle brother, Joseph, moved to London and joined the police, and eventually attained a senior rank at Scotland Yard. Jack himself attended Warwick School and worked on a local newspaper before moving to Fleet Street, where he worked for the Press Association, Daily Mail, Financial Times and as a crime reporter on the Daily Herald. Turner was seemingly married twice, his first wife having tragically drowned.

      At first sight, J. V. Turner was not a prolific author, having written seven detective novels under his own name, all of them featuring the solicitor-detective Amos Petrie, published between 1932 and 1936. However, under the pseudonyms Nicholas Brady and more famously David Hume, Turner wrote almost 50 crime novels in a relatively short writing career. He wrote impressively quickly, publishing up to five books a year, with his obituary in the New York Times claiming, ‘while still in his early thirties [he] was often called the second Edgar Wallace. At one period he wrote a novel a fortnight.’

      Some of David Hume’s books bore an author photo and short biography on the back of the dust jacket. Under the heading ‘If David Hume can’t thrill you no one can’, it revealed a little about the author:

      ‘David Hume has an inside knowledge of the criminal world such as few crime authors can ever hope to command, for he has had first-hand experience of it for over fourteen years. During his nine years as a crime reporter he spent most of his days at Scotland Yard, waiting for stories to “break”. In this way he gained an extraordinarily wide and intimate knowledge of criminals and the methods employed in tracking them down. And his personality is such that he won his way completely into the confidence of the criminals themselves, who revealed to him the precise methods they employ to enter a house or to open a safe. Indeed, no one knows more about the technique of crime or criminal detection: and (we should add) David Hume, far from sitting back on his author’s chair, is taking care to maintain the contacts from which comes the convincing realism that is the greatest feature of his books!’

      Hume’s supercharged thrillers, dripping with underworld slang, typically dealt with gangs in Soho and Limehouse and featured Britain’s first home-grown ‘hardboiled’ detective. The Private Eye was an established fixture of the American detective novel by 1932, but when Mick Cardby appeared in the first David Hume novel Bullets Bite Deep, he must have been something of a revelation for readers. Hume’s version of London was a city of gun-toting gangsters, and the fist-swinging Cardby—a detective who tended to rely on brawn rather than brains—offered a refreshingly exciting alternative to the cerebral whodunits that had grown so incredibly popular over the previous decade. Although they would continue to dominate the genre in the years leading up to the Second World War (and arguably beyond), tastes were beginning to change, and as authors and publishers became more innovative, so came diversity within the genre.

      Twenty-seven of Hume’s books featured Mick Cardby, two of which were adapted into films: Crime Unlimited (1935, remade four years later as Too Dangerous to Live) and They Called Him Death (1941, entitled The Patient Vanishes). Hume also wrote a trilogy of novels about crime reporter Tony Carter, and under his Nicholas Brady pseudonym he created the eccentric amateur sleuth, Reverend Ebenezer Buckle. But it was using his own name that Turner wrote more traditional detective novels of the kind that are now characterised as ‘Golden Age’, although they had a darker vein running through them than many of their cosier contemporaries. The first, Death Must Have Laughed (1932, published in the US as First Round Murder), was a classic impossible crime story, and featured an amateur detective, the solicitor Amos Petrie, and his long-suffering Scotland Yard counterpart, Inspector Ripple: Below the Clock was their last, and arguably most accomplished, case, and outsold the others—maybe in part thanks to its striking but understated jacket featuring a painting of that famous Westminster clock tower.

      As well as writing the hardboiled books (as David Hume) for Collins from 1933 right up to his death in 1945—they were still being published a year after he died—he also participated in the collaborative novel Double Death (1939). Often mistaken for a Detection Club book, on account of its principal authors being Dorothy L. Sayers and Freeman Wills Crofts, in fact it was not, and none of the other collaborators were members of that august body. At Turner’s suggestion, the writers each included notes in the book about the others’ contributions, which although interesting to the fan did rather highlight deficiencies in the novel, which was unfortunate at a time when the ‘round-robin’ format had begun to drop out of fashion. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the 1941 adaptation of Peter Cheyney’s Lemmy Caution novel, This Man Is Dangerous.

      Sadly, Turner’s reign as one of the most reliable crime writers in the UK came to a sudden end. On Saturday, 6 February 1945, he died from tuberculosis at Haywards Heath in West Sussex, aged only 39. His early death and the transitory nature of authors’ popularity have sadly resulted in Turner, Brady and even Hume becoming almost entirely forgotten about, and the books very hard to track down. It is to be hoped that the republication of Below the Clock will be the first step towards this remarkable and in many ways trailblazing talent being rediscovered by mystery and crime fans.

      DAVID BRAWN

      August 2017