Portrait of a Murderer
A Christmas Crime Story
Anne Meredith
With an Introduction
by Martin Edwards
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Originally published in 1933 by Victor Gollancz
Copyright © 1934 Lucy Malleson
Introduction copyright © 2018 Martin Edwards
Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library
The right of Lucy Malleson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
First E-book Edition 2018
ISBN: 9781464209055 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
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Contents
Portrait of a Murderer
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
Part I: Christmas Eve
Part II: The Journal of Hildebrand Gray
Part III: Christmas Day
Part IV: Aftermath of a Crime
Part V: The Verdict of You All
Part VI: Witness for the Defence
Part VII: The Answer
Epilogue
More from this Author
Contact Us
Introduction
Portrait of a Murderer is a Christmas murder story whose tone, suited to the bleak midwinter, is captured in the opening words:
Adrian Gray was born in May 1862 and met his death through violence, at the hands of one of his own children, at Christmas, 1931. The crime was instantaneous and unpremeditated, and the murderer was left staring from the weapon on the table to the dead man in the shadow of the tapestry curtains, not apprehensive, not yet afraid, but incredulous and dumb.
The novel earned praise from that most demanding of judges, Dorothy L. Sayers, who reviewed detective fiction for the Sunday Times: “The book is powerful and impressive, and there is a fine inevitability in the plot-structure which gives it true tragic quality.” Portrait of a Murderer also earned Anne Meredith a contract with an American publisher, but despite its quality, it earned her neither fame nor fortune. Soon the book was forgotten, even though its author continued to write (under another name) with considerable success for another forty years.
Meredith was, even at the time Portrait of a Murderer first appeared in 1933, a seasoned writer of detective novels, but this book is not a whodunit, and is conspicuously more ambitious than her earlier work. As Sayers put it: “In the ‘straight’ spot-the-villain kind of detective story, the murderer is apt to be the most unreal character in the book. This defect is inevitable, since we must never be let into the inner secrets of his murderous mind—if we did, we should know him for what he is and there would be no story. His motives, his hesitations, the dreadful spiritual convulsion that precipitates him from dreaming into doing—all must be taken on trust, and frequently we remain, after all, unconvinced.”
She contrasted that kind of story with those “told from the murderer’s viewpoint. We see the crime committed and watch, through his eyes, with painful anxiety, while the evidence is piled up against him.” One of the examples she cited was Francis Iles’ masterly Malice Aforethought (1931). “A third method,” she added, “shows us first the crime from the murderer’s point of view and then the detection from the point of view of the detective.” Richard Austin Freeman, as Sayers said, used this approach in The Singing Bone (1912), “and now comes Miss Anne Meredith, with less emphasis on clues and more on character”. Meredith’s sympathies were with the killer, and “because he is what he is, we can understand that callous determination… He combines meanness and magnanimity, both in a heroic degree… the detection is throughout subordinated to the psychology.”
The book’s American publishers added an exclamation mark at the end of the title to add a touch of melodrama to the vivid red and black dust jacket, and solicited a blurb from Carolyn Wells, one of the most popular crime writers of the era: “It seems to me a Human Document, crammed with interest and personality. And a fascination from which there is no escape until the last page is reached.” A biographical note about the author informed readers that Anne Meredith came “from a legal family on both sides. Had she been allowed her way, she would have become a lawyer herself, but her aunt was sure that ‘no man would marry a lawyer’. So she went to London and spent her time reading up on the law, studying books on detection, and organising a Crime Circle which once a week attempted to solve some unsolved crimes.”
The biography is interesting as much for what it conceals as the information that it discloses. It was an attempt—from the commercial perspective, eminently sensible—to reinvent the author who had adopted the pseudonym of Anne Meredith. Her real name was Lucy Beatrice Malleson (1899–1973), and her list of novels produced under two different names, J. Kilmeny Keith and Anthony Gilbert, already ran into double figures. She had also achieved enough success to merit election to membership of the Detection Club, which she later served as Secretary; there is an entertaining account in her memoir Three-a-Penny (1940; also published as by Anne Meredith) of her induction into the Club.
She became a good friend of fellow Club member Cecil John Street (two of whose novels written under the name Miles Burton have been published in the British Library Crime Classics series), and dedicated her memoir to him, or at least to his best-known pseudonym, John Rhode. Detection Club members amused themselves by giving each other’s names to characters in their mysteries, and Agatha Christie duly gave the name Anne Meredith to a woman in Cards on the Table (1936) who has apparently committed murder and got away with it, only to be suspected of another crime.
Anne Meredith novels continued to appear until the early 1960s, but their connection with crime fiction diminished and ultimately disappeared altogether, and none of the books made quite such an impression as Portrait
