Below the Clock
A classic Golden Age detective novel set at the heart of Westminster, when the murder of the Chancellor of the Exchequer threatens to topple the whole House of Cards…Many highly dramatic and historic scenes have been enacted below the clock of Big Ben, but none more sensational than on that April afternoon when, before the eyes of a chamber crowded to capacity for the Budget Speech, the Chancellor fell headlong to the floor with a resounding crash. For the first time a murder had been committed in the House of Commons itself – and Amos Petrie faced the toughest case of his career.In Below the Clock, John Victor Turner – a journalist who as David Hume had become known as ‘the new Edgar Wallace’ for creating Britain’s first hardboiled detective series – returned to classic Golden Age writing with an ingenious whodunit set at the heart of the establishment, a novel that did the unthinkable by turning Parliament into a crime scene and all its Members into murder suspects.This Detective Club classic is introduced by David Brawn, who looks at the distinguished crime-writing career of J. V. Turner and his alter egos Nicholas Brady and David Hume, who achieved remarkable success with nearly 50 books in only 14 years.
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BELOW THE CLOCK
A STORY OF CRIME
BY
J. V. TURNER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
DAVID BRAWN
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain for The Crime Club
by W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1936
Introduction © David Brawn 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: 9780008280260
Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008280277
Version: 2018-03-23
Table of Contents
‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’
Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929
Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.
THE Elizabeth Tower is purportedly the most photographed building in the UK, and yet most people would not be able to name it. But as the clock tower that dominates the Palace of Westminster and houses the great bell of Big Ben, it is an instantly recognisable global landmark. Completed in 1859 as part of a 30-year rebuild of the Houses of Parliament after the original palace complex was all but destroyed by fire in 1834, the tower and its clock face quickly became the defining symbol both of the mother of parliaments and of London itself, and the hourly chimes of its 14-tonne bell indelibly associated over 157 years with national stability and resilience. When the bell was silenced on 21 August 2017 for an unprecedented four-year programme of essential maintenance, for some it was as though a death had occurred at the heart of Westminster.
In the annals of crime fiction, of course, deaths at Westminster are all too common. But this was not always the case. When Collins’ Crime Club published J. V. Turner’s Below the Clock in May 1936, the idea of a minister being killed in the chamber was rather sensational, not to say disrespectful of the high office. Ngaio Marsh had dispatched the Home Secretary in The Nursing Home Murder in 1935, although even she hadn’t the audacity to have him drop dead at the Despatch Box. But then Marsh’s stories were not as audacious as those of J. V. Turner.
John Victor Turner, known to family and friends as Jack, was the youngest of three boys in a family of six children. His father Alfred was a saddle-maker, who married Agnes Hume in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, in 1890. Jack was too young to serve in the First World War, but his eldest brother Alfred (after his father) joined up at only 16 and was profoundly affected by shell-shock for the rest of his life. The middle brother, Joseph, moved to London and joined the police, and eventually attained a senior rank at Scotland Yard. Jack himself attended Warwick School and worked on a local newspaper before moving to Fleet Street, where he worked for the Press Association, Daily Mail, Financial Times and as a crime reporter on the Daily Herald. Turner was seemingly married twice, his first wife having tragically drowned.
At first sight, J. V. Turner was not a prolific author, having written seven detective novels under his own name, all of them featuring the solicitor-detective Amos Petrie, published between 1932 and 1936. However, under the pseudonyms Nicholas Brady and more famously David Hume, Turner wrote almost 50 crime novels in a relatively short writing career. He wrote impressively quickly, publishing up to five books a year, with his obituary in the
