I can’t answer that sort of question, Sheringham,’ his host retorted, with (Roger thought) insufferable complacency. ‘Official secrets, you know—Yes, O’Connor, what is it?’
Seeing his employer’s attention distracted, the sidings foreman grinned sympathetically at Roger. ‘Not that there’s much official secret about it, sir,’ he said, behind his hand. ‘Anyone’s only got to look at the labels on the trucks.’
Roger looked.
‘Exactly. In fact, you get the stuff from Henbridge, wherever that may be—looks like a Government works.’
‘Well, no, as a matter of fact we don’t. We’re getting our steel now from Allen and Backhouse, of Wolverhampton—this other label. That one’s cancelled: some consignment from Henbridge to Allen and Backhouse, nothing to do with us.’ The foreman saw Mr Luscombe returning, and hastily stepped back with an air of childlike innocence.
The rest of Roger’s visit to the premises of Luscombe and Sons was uneventful. Indeed, it might very easily have passed out of his mind altogether. It is true that on getting home he had the curiosity to look up Henbridge in the gazetteer, and learned that it was a small village in the more inaccessible part of Cumberland, remarkable only as the site of the only coccodium deposits in England; whereupon he looked up coccodium in the encyclopaedia and gathered that it was a rare metal, resembling vanadium, but possessing certain unique properties, found only at Henbridge, in Cumberland.
It was just one of those coincidences, which so often do happen, which brought the name of Henbridge up in a conversation a few days later at Roger’s club. It appeared that the man to whom he was talking lived there. Roger asked him about it.
‘Used to be a grand little place—if you like ’em remote,’ replied the other. ‘Pitched up among the Cumberland fells and nearly a dozen miles from the nearest railway station. But it’s all spoilt now. They’ve put up a huge great factory or something just outside, and the fells are covered with wooden huts. Just breaks my heart.’
‘It seems queer,’ Roger suggested, ‘to choose a site a dozen miles from the nearest railway for a factory?’
The man snorted. ‘But isn’t it typical? Besides, that wouldn’t worry them. They’ve brought the railway to Henbridge!’
‘It certainly seems off,’ Roger said mildly, and went away to look up trains.
‘And you were as bad as any of them,’ Roger was saying severely to a stricken Mr Luscombe a few hours later. ‘Your works foreman was like a child playing with fire; couldn’t help trying to be clever and drop hints that the stupid visitor wouldn’t understand. He showed me there was some kind of secret going on; a simple remark of an irritated workman showed that the hands weren’t in the secret, so it obviously wasn’t a new hush-hush weapon; and then you gave me the biggest clue yourself.’
‘I only told you a few elementary facts that you could have got out of any text-book,’ protested the deflated remains of the managing director.
‘It was the way you marshalled them. I know nothing of steel, but even I gathered that the hardest steels won’t stand up so well to shock, and the ones that stand up best to shock have other drawbacks. You showed me that this fact, above all others concerned with steel, was most important to you. Naturally enough, perhaps, as one occupied in making gun-tubes, but there it was; the ideal steel alloy for a gun-tube had yet to be found, all the known ones lacked full efficiency one way or the other.
‘Then your sidings foreman gave away that your suppliers have recently been changed, and I learnt that these suppliers are receiving consignments of what can only be coccodium. The inference is obvious. Experiments, using an alloy with coccodium to combine high resistance to both shock and friction have been successful, consignments of this coccodium steel are now reaching you, and are being tried out for six-inch naval guns. If Hitler had any idea of it, the works would be blown sky-high within 24 hours. So what?—And after all, why talk at all?’
‘Look here, Sheringham,’ pleaded the unfortunate man …
In the end Roger magnanimously promised to carry the matter no further. He decided that the managing director had learned his lesson—and it was quite certain that he would teach the others theirs.
Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971) is one of the most important writers of the Golden Age. Cox had a playful approach to the business of writing crime and detective fiction. His penchant for twisting tropes and confounding expectations undoubtedly played a major role in the genre’s development away from a simple linear narrative—in which characters are introduced, a crime is committed, clues are solved and the criminal is detected—into a more complex form in which almost anything can happen. Cox’s ‘great detective’, Roger Sheringham, is virtually the antithesis of Sherlock Holmes, arrogant rather than showily omniscient and unlikeable rather than unclubbable. Nonetheless, with only a few lapses from greatness, the detective stories that Cox wrote as ‘Anthony Berkeley’, as well as the smaller number of psychological thrillers published as by ‘Francis Iles’, should be on the bookshelf of anyone who professes to love crime fiction.
Cox was born in Watford, north of London, and educated at Sherborne, a boarding school in Dorset. After school he went to Oxford and after coming down in 1916 with a Bachelor of Arts degree from University College, Oxford, he enlisted in the British Army, serving in France. After being demobbed, Cox embarked on a career as a humourist, producing countless short stories and comic sketches for a huge range of magazines while, working with J. J. Sterling Hill, he expanded a twenty-minute vignette into a futuristic opera, The Merchant Prince. He also started to write crime fiction, exclusively so once he found it paid better than other genres. His earliest novels were published anonymously and Cox’s career took off with the publication as ‘Anthony Berkeley’ of Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (1927) and, as A. B. Cox, Mr Priestley’s Problem (1927), which he went on to adapt for the stage the following year as Mr Priestley’s Night Out. Cox was never without a sense of humour and in all of his Anthony Berkeley novels his tongue is firmly in his cheek, a tendency deplored by some contemporary reviewers. As well as incorporating humour and taking an iconoclastic approach to the genre’s ‘rules’, Cox found the history of crime a ready source of inspiration, using several infamous crimes as the starting point for a detective story. He also broadcast on the BBC and its predecessor 2LO. Finally, as the self-styled ‘first freeman’ of the Detection Club, the dining society for crime writers that he and others had created in 1929, Cox played a key role in developing ideas to raise funds, including an anthology of crime writing as well as the Club’s novel The Floating Admiral (1931) and other multi-authored stories.
Cox never made any secret of the fact that his motivation was money and at the end of the 1930s he stopped writing crime fiction when he found that he could be paid well for simply reviewing it, which he did up until shortly before his death in 1971. Since Cox’s death his books have drifted in and out of print, but many will be familiar with his Francis Iles book Before the Fact (1932) in the form of one of Hitchcock’s most successful films, Suspicion (1941) with Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine, as well as the late Philip Mackie’s superb 1979 serial for the BBC of Malice Aforethought (1931), starring Hywel Bennett.
‘Hot Steel’ was one of two syndicated stories written specially to raise awareness of the dangers of loose chatter during the Second World War. The story was published in the Gloucester Citizen on 27 April 1943, with the postscript:
