Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

Rome) punctuated by church spires (a startling number of those) watched over by a decaying castle.

Pirates, I sniffed as I eyed the castle gun-ports. Any sensible member of the piratical fraternity would have steered well clear of this place.

I pulled my thick coat around me, made a fruitless attempt to clean my spectacles, and went below to assemble my charges.

* * *

My job – my official job – was to shepherd, protect, nurse, and browbeat into order some three dozen inmates of a mobile lunatic asylum. I was the one responsible for their well-being. It was I who ensured the inmates were housed and fed, entertained and soothed, kept off one another’s throats and out of one another’s beds. I was the one the inmates ran to, sent on errands, and shouted at, whether the complaint was inadequately hot coffee or insufficiently robust lightbulb. On the first night out from England, I had been roused from a fitful sleep by a demand that I-I, personally – remove a moth from a cabin.

A fraternity of actual pirates could not have been more trouble. Even a travelling D’Oyly Carte company would have been less of a madhouse.

But I was working neither with buccaneers nor with travelling players: The letter with the heading of the firm responsible for the Gilbert and Sullivan performances had merely been by way of introduction. Instead, I found myself the general coordinator and jack-of-all-trades for a film crew.

In the early years after the War, Fflytte Films had appeared to be the rising star of the British cinema industry: From Quarterdeck in 1919 through 1922’s Krakatoa, Fflytte Films (“Fflyttes of Fancy!”) seemed positioned to challenge the American domination of the young industry, producing a series of stupendously successful multi-reel extravaganzas with exotic settings and dashing stories. Then came Hannibal, which ran so far over budget in the preliminary stages, the project was cancelled before the second reel of film was fed into the cameras. Hannibal was followed by the wildly popular Rum Runner, but after that came The Writer, which took eight months to make and ran in precisely four cinema houses for less than a week. The Writer’s failure might have been predicted – a three-reel drama about a British novelist in Paris? – except that Randolph St John Warminster-Fflytte (“Fflyttes of Fantasy!”) was a director famous for pulling hugely successful rabbits out of apparently shabby hats (Small Arms concerned the accidental death of a child; Rum Runner was about smuggling alcohol into the United States; both had returned their costs a hundredfold) and a movie about a thinly disguised James Joyce might have been as successful as his other ugly ducklings, particularly when one threw in the titillating appeal of the Ulysses obscenity ban.

However, since the film had skirted around the actual depiction of the obscene acts in question, it went rather flat. So now, with three costly duds on his hands and the threatened loss of his aristocratic backers, Fflytte was returning to the scene of his three previous solid successes (“Fflyttes of Fanfare!”): the sea-borne action adventure.

This one was to be loosely based on the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Loosely as in wobbling wildly and on the verge of a complete uncoupling. Not an inch of film had gone through the cameras; the Major-General was drunk around the clock; the cameraman’s assistant had a palsy of the hands that was explained to me, sotto voce, as the result of a recent nervous breakdown; the actress playing Mabel had taken the bit into her teeth with this, her first starring role, and was out to prove herself a flapper edition of Sarah Bernhardt (if not in talent, then in imperious attitudes and a knack of fabricating alternate versions of her personal history); and the twelve other young ladies playing the Major-General’s daughters – yes, thirteen daughters altogether – formed a non-stop cyclone of lace, giggles, and yellow curls that spun up and down the decks and occasionally below them – far below, to judge by the grease-stains on one pink dress thrust under my nose by an accusing maternal person. Even the eldest of the “sisters,” a busybody of the first order, had blinked her big blue eyes at me in practiced innocence from more than one out-of-bounds state-room.

We had not left the Channel before I felt the first impulse to murder.

* * *

“Producer’s assistant,” then, was my official job. My unofficial one – the one Holmes had manoeuvred me into – was given me by Chief Inspector Lestrade in his office overlooking Westminster Bridge. He had stood as I was ushered in, but remained behind his desk – as if that might protect him. A single thin folder lay on its pristine surface.

“Miss Russell. Do sit down. May I take your bag?”

“No, thank you.” I dropped the bag I had thrown together in Sussex – basic necessities such as tooth-brush, clean socks, reading material, and loaded revolver – onto the floor, and sat.

“Mr Holmes is not with you?”

“As you see.” Was that a sigh I heard? He sat down.

“You two haven’t any news of Robert Goodman, have you?”

“Is that why you asked me here, Chief Inspector? To follow up on the last case?”

“No, no. I just thought I’d ask, since the man has vanished into thin air, and whenever something like that takes place, it’s extraordinary how often Sherlock Holmes happens to have been in the vicinity.”

“No, we have not heard news of Mr Goodman.” The literal, if not actual, truth.

“Why do I get the feeling that you know more than you’re telling?”

“I know a great number of things, Chief Inspector, few of which are your concern. Now, you wrote asking for assistance.”

“From your husband.”

“Why?” Lestrade had always complained, loud and clear, that there was no place for amateurs in the investigation of crimes.

“Because the only police officers I had with the necessary skills have become unavailable.”

“Those skills being …?”

“The ability to make educated small-talk, and mastery of a type-writing machine. It is remarkable how few gentlemen are capable of producing type-written documents with their own ten fingers. Your husband, as I recall, is one who can.”

“And yet the city’s employment rosters are positively crawling with educated women type-writers.”

“I had one of those. A fine and talented young PC. Who is now home with a baby.”

“Oh. Well, now you have me.”

“Yes.” Definitely a sigh, this time. “Oh, it might as well be you.”

My eyes narrowed. “Chief Inspector, one might almost think you had no interest in this matter. Is it important enough to concern Holmes and me, or is it not?”

“Yes. I mean to say, I don’t know. That is-” He ran a hand over his face. “I dislike having outside pressures turned on the Yard.”

“Ah. Politics.”

“In a manner of speaking. It has to do with the British moving picture industry.”

“Do we have a moving picture industry?” I asked in surprise.

“Exactly. While the Americans turn out vast sagas that sell tickets by the bushel, this country makes small pictures about bunnies and Scottish hillsides that are shown as the audience is taking its seats for the feature. I’m told it’s because of the War – all our boys went to the Front, but the American cameras just kept rolling. And now, when we’re beginning to catch up, we no sooner produce a possible rival to the likes of Griffith and DeMille when a rumour – a faint rumour, mind – comes to the ears of Certain Individuals that the man they’re backing may be bent.”

I put the clues together. “Some members of the House of Lords are worried about the money they put up to fund a picture; they mentioned it to the Chancellor of the Exchequer over sherry, and Winston sent someone to talk to you?”

“Worse than that – the Palace itself have invested in the company, if you can believe that. And the trouble is, I can’t say for certain that there’s nothing to it. The studio has been linked to … problems.”

“I should imagine that picture studios generate all sorts of problems.”

“Not generally of the criminal variety. There are some odd coincidences that follow this one around. Three