England’ (Sunday Mercury); ‘… just the effortless telling of a good story and meticulous observation of the rules’ (Torquemada in the Observer). And in 2014, J. F. Norris wrote: ‘… keep your eyes out for any book with the Vernon Loder pseudonym on the cover. They make for fascinating reading and are as different from the standard whodunits of his colleagues as champagne is to soda water.’
Since the 1930s Loder has remained out of print, and his works have largely been the purview of Golden Age book collectors, among whom he has a following, with scarce first editions commanding high prices. This welcome re-issue of The Shop Window Murders and earlier The Mystery at Stowe, should help Loder, deservedly, to be rediscovered and enjoyed by a new wider readership.
NIGEL MOSS
March 2018
MR TOBIAS MANDER’S new stores in Gaffikin Street had been a public wonder from start to finish. From the moment that this almost unknown man from the west country had visualised the idea of a store that would beat all other stores for cheapness combined with luxury, a highly-paid press-agent had seen to it that the country should join vicariously in the building and equipment.
The plans had been published in the front sheets of all the prominent newspapers, and every stage of the immense building progress had been reported with diagrams, portraits of the (titled) architect, and descriptions of all the eminent firms that had contributed to the material elegancies and equipment of the famous Store-to-be.
But Mr Tobias himself had remained unphotographed and unfeatured throughout the campaign, and no one from the outside world had even guessed accurately at the manner of man he was, until the Store was opened with a flourish of trumpets, and a luxurious house-warming.
To that function everyone of importance went. People who were wont privately to sneer at trade, forgot their principles, and crowded to the show; even titled actresses (notoriously exclusive) were among the throng.
When Mr Tobias Mander first burst upon the world, the world saw him as a man who might have been a prosperous stockbroker, a genial bookmaker, or a retired Smithfield merchant. He was of medium height, with a very fresh colour, and roving blue eyes; inclined to stoutness, always dressed in trousers with a very black stripe, a morning-coat and vest, with a white slip, and a monocle that never by any chance went into his eye.
The connoisseurs among the men called him a ‘cheery bounder’, but the women’s votes were mixed. Some thought him charming, if vulgar; and others vulgar if charming; while a few, who had encountered his roving blue eyes with a twinkle in them, declared themselves fascinated.
There was one detail in which he differed from most men of his kind, and that was in the fact that he lived on the premises. To call the very luxurious flat on the top floor ‘premises’ is modestly to understate facts. But undoubtedly Mr Mander had taken up his residence within the walls of the store.
One of the stunts with which he had taken London, some months after the store opened, was a new gyroplane. No one knew the inventor’s name, but there was trouble one day when it sailed over London, and landed with the greatest precision on top of the flat roof that covered the store. ‘The Mander Hopper’ it was called, yet that particular hop was frowned on by the authorities, who were not convinced that any aeroplane was quite safe among the roofs of a city. But the necessary prosecution provided further réclame for Mander and his store, and, later, those were not lacking who said they had heard aero-engines at night, and professed to believe that the great man sometimes landed after dark on his own roof.
There was no reason, beyond out-of-date regulations, why he should not have done so, for the ‘Mander Hopper’ proved to be the gyroplane for which the world had been looking, and the department which stocked and sold the ‘Plane you fold up in a room; and land in a tennis-court’ was one of the most paying in the whole Store. The ‘Hopper’ was, as one ancient pilot said, ‘The plane that put the F in safety.’
The windows of the store were enormous, and each window was changed weekly. There you did not see wax figures disposed in solitary state, but naturally disposed in a room, with an appropriate stage-setting, so to speak. And the contents of each window were announced in the Sunday papers, so that an avid public would know where to look for a novelty when the blinds were drawn up on Monday morning.
The store did not believe in a constant, all-night electric-lit display. Mr Mander, with the turn for quaint originality which had helped him so much in booming his business, explained to a reporter (and he, in turn, to a delighted world) the reason for this.
‘It’s my house, you see,’ he told the man. ‘I make it a rule to put business out of my head when business is over. At night, and during the weekends, the Store is my Store only in name, and you do not pull up the blinds, and keep the light on, in private houses during the night.’
During the first week in November, the Sunday papers had spoken of the season of fancy-dress, and the writers had artfully proceeded from the general to the particular, and mentioned that the principal window in the chief bay of Mander’s Store would ‘feature’ the next day a marvellous selection of fancy dresses, carried out by British workers, in British materials, by British designers.
There are always in London, at any hour of the day or night, sufficient people with no visible occupation, and an intense curiosity about anything novel, to form a crowd on the pavement. At five minutes to nine, there was a line of spectators three deep before Mander’s Stores, which was continuously being added to by fresh arrivals. Many of them, it is true, were not of the class likely to wear fancy-dress, but all kept intent eyes fastened on the immense blinds that cloaked the splendours within from view.
At nine precisely, a man inside set in motion the mechanism which raised the blinds, and there was the instant ‘Oo-er!’ of vulgar appreciation, mingled with the more polite enthusiasm of the cultivated.
The floor-space inside the window was dressed as a ball-room, even to a waxen band that sat in a recess at the back. The moment portrayed was a pause between dances, and at least forty couples in the most novel costumes stood about the floor, or leaned against the walls in dégagé attitudes that were almost lifelike.
But there was an exception to the rule, and, while most of the crowd outside were in ecstasies over the originality displayed, it was left to a commoner, a little bricklayer with ginger hair, on the outskirts, to discover it.
‘Lumme!’ he said contemptuously. ‘Mebbe it’s a novelty for the likes of ’im to work, but t’ain’t what I would call novel!’
‘It’s supposed to be a motor-mechanic,’ said someone next to him.
‘Wat if it is?’ he demanded firmly. ‘Moty mechanics isn’t novel!’
The figure in blue overalls to which he referred at once drew every eye. It was not elegant or elegantly disposed, as were the others in that window. And there was something else about it that provoked a sudden shriek, and a flop, from someone in the crowd.
Most of the spectators now concentrated on giving the fainting one as little air as possible. The few who remained at the window gasped and stared, or shivered. For there is a difference between even the best wax model and the appearance of a dead man beside it.
While they shuddered and debated, the bricklayer darted across the road to a policeman and spoke to him energetically. Then, with the policeman at his heels, he hurried in through the principal
