A Voice Like Velvet
A sensational wartime crime novel about a BBC announcer who abuses his position to commit crimes against the rich and famous…By day Ernest Bisham is a velvet-voiced announcer for the BBC; the whole country recognises the sound of his meticulous pronouncements. By night, however, Mr Bisham is a cat-burglar, careless about his loot, but revelling in the danger and excitement of his running contest with Scotland Yard. But as he gets away with more and more daring escapades, there will come a time when he goes too far . . .When Donald Henderson’s Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper caused something of a sensation, his publishers were keen to capitalise on their author’s popularity, quickly reissuing The Announcer (originally published under his pen-name ‘D. H. Landels’) with the more alluring title A Voice Like Velvet. Despite a small edition of just 3,000 copies, it was his best reviewed work, as suspenseful and offbeat as his earlier success.This Detective Club classic includes an introduction by The Golden Age of Murder’s Martin Edwards, who explores Henderson’s own BBC career and the long established tradition of books about gentlemen crooks. The book also includes a rare Henderson short story, the chilling ‘The Alarm Bell’.
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COLLINS CRIME CLUB
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This Detective Story Club edition 2018
First published in Great Britain as The Announcer by Hurst and Blackett 1944
‘The Alarm Bell’ first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine by Mercury Publications, Inc. 1945
Introduction © Martin Edwards 2018
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008265342
Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008265359
Version: 2018-04-11
Although the descriptions of Broadcasting House are authentic and come from first-hand experience, all the characters in this book are entirely fictitious. No portrayal of any BBC announcer, or any other person, is in any way intended.
Table of Contents
A VOICE LIKE VELVET recounts the misadventures of Ernest Bisham, a middle-aged BBC radio announcer who just happens to be a highly accomplished cat-burglar. An unlikely premise? Perhaps, yet the author was careful to include a disclaimer making it clear that Ernest isn’t based on anyone in real life, let alone at the BBC. The story is skilfully written and quietly suspenseful. Like the rest of Henderson’s unusual, off-kilter crime fiction, however, it has suffered long and undeserved neglect.
So often, the fate of a novel—whatever its quality—depends upon how effectively it is first presented to the reading public. Hurst and Blackett published this book in October 1944 with the unexciting title The Announcer, and subtitled it simply ‘a novel’. Certainly, Henderson offers an intriguing and perceptive study in character, but it would surely have been wise to market the story as a crime novel—which, unquestionably, it is. Yet it seems to have been regarded as belonging to a different category from the author’s crime writing, and was therefore published under one of his pen-names, D. H. Landels, even though the previous year Constable had published Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper under Henderson’s own name, and that novel became the most successful of his short life.
When Random House published this book in the US in 1946, they changed the title to A Voice Like Velvet (a phrase which crops up in the narrative) and made no bones about the criminous nature of the story: ‘People who have a weakness for stories about gentlemen crooks—and judging by the popularity of Raffles, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, etc., there are thousands of them—will be delighted to make the acquaintance of Ernest Bisham.’ This time, the novel appeared under Henderson’s own name, and the blurb made the most of his earlier success: ‘Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper caused something of a sensation in mystery circles two years ago. His new book is the kind that English writers, for some reason, do much more expertly than our own. You will be seeing it on the screen before long; we hope it will not be too different from this fourteen-karat original.’ This was more like it in terms of exploiting the book’s commercial potential, and the critics were impressed. Kirkus Reviews, for instance, appreciated the way Henderson ‘combines a psychopathic study with [an] effective hare and hounds adventure’. But he was a writer forever dogged by bad luck. He died the very next year, and as far as I have been able to ascertain, no screen version of the novel was ever made. Not even (or perhaps especially not) by the BBC.
