The Cornish Coast Murder (British Library Crime Classics)

This edition published in 2014 by

The British Library

96 Euston Road

London NW1 2DB

Originally published in London in 1935 by Skeffington & Son

Introduction © Martin Edwards 2014

Cataloguing in Publication Data

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

ISBN 978 0 7123 6315 0

Typeset by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

       I.   
MURDER!

      II.   
THE UNDRAWN CURTAINS

     III.   
THE PUZZLE OF THE FOOTPRINTS

      IV.   
STRANGE BEHAVIOUR OF RUTH TREGARTHAN

       V.   
THE INSPECTOR FORMS A THEORY

      VI.   
THE MISSING REVOLVER

     VII.   
CONVERSATION AT THE VICARAGE

    VIII.   
WAS IT RONALD HARDY?

      IX.   
COLLABORATION?

       X.   
THE SINGLE SHOT

      XI.   
THEFT FROM THE BODY

     XII.   
THE OPEN WINDOW

    XIII.   
CORONER'S INQUEST

     XIV.   
THE NOTE

      XV.   
COWPER MAKES A STATEMENT

     XVI.   
THE VICAR MAKES AN EXPERIMENT

    XVII.   
ENTER RONALD HARDY

   XVIII.   
PERFECT ALIBI

     XIX.   
REUNION

      XX.   
THE LITTLE GREYSTOKE TAILOR

     XXI.   
THE MYSTERY SOLVED

    XXII.   
CONFESSION

   XXIII.   
THE VICAR EXPLAINS

INTRODUCTION

MARTIN EDWARDS

The Cornish Coast Murder
, originally published in 1935, marked the crime writing debut of Ernest Carpenter Elmore. Probably thinking that his real name was a bit of a mouthful, and perhaps also to differentiate his detective fiction from his other writing, he opted for the snappier pseudonym of John Bude.

Like many debut novels,
The Cornish Coast Murder
had a small print run. There was no paperback edition (paperbacks were in their infancy in those days) and the publisher, a small firm called Skeffington, sold mainly to libraries. As a result, copies in good condition are today almost impossible to find. Anyone lucky enough to chance upon a signed first edition in a fine dust jacket (does any such book exist? I wonder) would possess a rarity of great value. This is partly due to the sheer scarcity of the novel, but also to the fact that in recent years Bude's work has become increasingly admired, and correspondingly more sought after by collectors.

Why is this?
The Cornish Coast Murder
provides a number of clues that help to explain Bude's growing popularity, more than half a century after his death. His writing style is relaxed and rather more polished than one would expect from a first-time novelist, and he pays more attention to characterisation and setting than many of his contemporaries. This is because he was, if not an old hand, already a writer who had experienced some success with popular fiction. He had a taste for weird tales, and in 1928, under his real name, he published a book with the rather wonderful title
The Steel Grubs
. In this novel, a Dartmoor convict comes across some alien eggs which hatch into the eponymous grubs. They eat the iron bars of the convict's cell, and needless to say, that proves insufficient to sate their appetite.

Bude, born in Maidstone in 1901, was a young man when he wrote
The Steel Grubs
. A major publisher, William Collins, bought his next novel of the fantastic.
The Siren Song
appeared in 1930, and although Bude soon became more interested in detective stories, he returned successfully to writing strange fiction under his own name in 1954 with
The Lumpton Gobbelings
, a fantasy with allegorical elements, in which an English village is invaded by naked little people and splits into two camps, those who are charmed by the newcomers and those determined to eliminate them.

The choice of a Cornish place name for his crime-writing pseudonym was probably an attempt to emphasise his focus on the setting for his first novel. At the time
The Cornish Coast Murder
appeared, detective novels with a recognisable and well-evoked rural background were less common than they are today. Perhaps anxious to avoid unintentional libel, authors who wrote rural mysteries often resorted to setting their stories in ‘Midshire’ or ‘Wessex’, a habit that persisted until after the Second World War. Bude was ahead of his time in realising that detective fans would enjoy mysteries with attractive real-life settings other than London. Pleasingly, the fact that the crime scene is on the coast proves central to the murder mystery.

Rather than giving rise to a series of books set in the same area, the success of this book prompted Bude to try variations on the theme in his next two novels,
The Lake District Murder
and
The Sussex Downs Murder
. Readers who hoped for a major Cornish-based crime series had to wait until the late 1960s, when W. J. Burley began to write books featuring the cop Charles Wycliffe, which were eventually televised with Jack Shepherd in the lead role.

Bude turned to fictional crime at the height of the ‘Golden Age’ of the genre, between the wars. This book appeared in the same year as
Gaudy Night
, in which Dorothy L. Sayers sought to elevate the detective story into the ‘novel of manners’, an ambitious project that provoked a division of opinion as to the extent of her success between passionate admirers and fierce detractors which persists to this day.

Bude's aims were not as lofty as Sayers's; his focus was on producing light entertainment, and although his work does not rank with Sayers's for literary style or with Agatha Christie's for complexity of plot, it certainly does not deserve the neglect into which it has fallen. Here, the detective interest is split between a likeable pair of amateurs, a vicar and a doctor, and the professionals. From his second book onwards, Bude would concentrate on accounts of police work, but the balance he strikes in this story provides a good deal of quiet entertainment, as well as an agreeable sketch of life in pre-war rural England.

The Cornish Coast Murder
launched a long career; in all, Bude wrote thirty books about murder before his tragically early death in 1957. He worked as a stage producer and director, and also played a small but important part in the history of the genre, being among the handful of writers who joined with John Creasey to found the Crime Writers’ Association at a meeting at the National Liberal Club on Guy Fawkes Night, 1953. The CWA now boasts over six hundred members based not only in the UK but across the globe, and its Dagger Awards are renowned, but much is owed to the pioneering efforts of men like Creasey and Bude, who had the vision to see the need for such an organisation, and its long-term potential and value.

The appearance of this British Library edition of
The Cornish Coast Murder
will be welcomed not only by collectors who have despaired of ever possessing a copy of their own, but also by crime fiction readers generally. Few will be familiar with Bude's name and work, but the pleasure given by this lively and well-crafted story is likely to tempt many to explore his later work as well. They will not be disappointed.

THE CORNISH COAST MURDER