Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 19, No. 99, February 1952

The Quick Brown Fox by Edmund Crispin

The port had been round several times, and Wakefield’s temperamental dogmatism was by now somewhat inflamed by it.

“Just the same,” he said, irrupting upon a discussion whose origin and purpose no one could clearly remember, “detective stories are anti-social, and no amount of sophistries can disguise the fact. It’s quite impossible to suppose that criminals don’t collect useful information from them, fantastic and far-fetched though they usually are. No one, I think” — here he glared belligerently at his fellow-guests — “will contest that.”

“I contest it,” said Gervase Fen; and Wakefield groaned dismally. “For all the use criminals make of them, the members of the Detection Club might as well be a chorus of voices crying in the wilderness. Look at the papers and observe what, in spite of detective fiction, criminals actually do. They buy arsenic at the chemist’s, signing their own names in the Poisons Book, and then put stupendous quantities of it in their victims’ tea. They leave their fingerprints on every possible object in the corpse’s vicinity. They invariably forget that burnt paper, if it isn’t reduced to dust, can be reconstituted and read. They spend, with reckless abandon, stolen banknotes whose serial numbers they must know are in the possession of the local police...

“No, on the whole I don’t think criminals get much help from detective stories. And if by any chance they are addicts, that fact by itself is almost certain to scupper them, since their training in imaginary crime — which is almost always extremely complicated — tends to make them overelaborate in the contriving of their own actual misdeeds; and that, of course, means that they’re easy game... For instance, there was the Munsey case.”

“It has always been my opinion,” said Wakefield to the ceiling, “that after-dinner conversation should be general rather than anecdotal. More-over—”

“I’d known the family slightly,” said Fen, unperturbed, “over quite a long period of years. There were five of them, you remember: George Munsey, a little, round, chuckling man who’d made money on the Stock Exchange; his wife Dorothy, vague and stately and benign, who acquired something of a reputation as a poetess in the earlier twenties and lost it again, conclusively, in the later; Judith and Eleanor, the two daughters, aged twenty-two and twenty-five respectively, and both uncommonly pretty; and George Munsey’s sister Ellen, a dour, disapproving woman who battened on them, being herself genuinely penniless. With the exception of Judith, they all endured Aunt Ellen very patiently; and Judith’s dislike of her hadn’t, I think, any rational basis, but was more in the nature of a violent temperamental aversion such as sometimes crops up between dissimilar personalities. Aunt Ellen didn’t reciprocate it, by the way: if anything, she was rather fonder of Judith than of the others.

“Aunt Ellen apart, they were a well-to-do family, since Mrs. Munsey and Judith and Eleanor had all inherited substantially from Mrs. Munsey’s father. However, they kept no servants, preferring, on the whole, to lead a mildly Bohemian existence, looking after themselves. Their house was — is, I suppose I should say — in St. John’s Wood; and I was staying there on the night of the murder.

“I’d traveled up from Oxford to deal with some odd scraps of business and to get myself a new portable typewriter (eventually it was a secondhand one I bought, in Holborn). On the following morning I had to attend a Ministry of Education conference, and I was proposing to stay overnight at the Athenaeum. At lunch-time, however, I chanced on George Munsey in the Authors’ Club bar, and when he heard how I was placed he suggested I should stay with him instead. I warned him I’d have to work — there was a long memorandum to be typed out for presentation at the M. of E. conference — but he was quite agreeable to that; and so at about half-past two in the afternoon I duly appeared on his doorstep, typewriter and all.

“I wasn’t the only guest, it turned out. The second spare bedroom was occupied by Eleanor’s current fiancé, an over-handsome but tolerably pleasant young man called Tony Odell, the owner (I was told) of a chain of milk bars in the West End. In addition to being Eleanor’s fiancé, he was Judith’s ex-fiancé; and I gathered, indirectly, that it was he rather than Judith who had been primarily responsible for the breaking-off of their engagement. However, none of the three seemed much discomfited by the exchange, and until the next day I wasn’t in the least aware of anything’s being amiss in the house.

“On arrival, I found that Judith was in the kitchen, concocting something or other; that Aunt Ellen was upstairs refreshing herself with an afternoon nap; and that the other four — Mr. and Mrs. Munsey, Eleanor and Odell — were playing Racing Demon in the drawing-room. Now, I have a fondness for Racing Demon, so having dumped my bag and typewriter in my room, I joined in; and the five of us played uninterruptedly for the next two hours. At half-past four, on the Munseys’ departing in a body to make tea, I retrieved my typewriter and settled down in the library to work. There I stayed — recruited by food and drink which the family brought in to me at irregular intervals — until nearly midnight. I hadn’t any occasion to leave the library, so I’ve no idea what the others did with themselves; and I don’t remember that anything more eventful happened to me, during the remainder of the day, than having to put a new ribbon into my machine. By the time I’d finished my job they’d all gone to bed, and I wasn’t at all sorry to follow them.

“But next morning, Odell being not yet up and the others unitedly engaged in cooking breakfast, Judith took me aside, in a state of considerable agitation, and confided to me certain matters which I must confess disturbed me a good deal. Summarized — for conciseness’ and Wakefield’s sake — what she told me was as follows:

“She’d heard me come up to bed at midnight, and having finished her book, and being still sleepless, had set off, as soon as the closing of my bedroom door signaled me out of the way (she was a modest child, and apparently had very little on), to fetch a magazine from the hall. Arriving at the head of the stairs, however, she had looked down and seen Odell slip quietly out of the drawing-room and into the library, whence shortly afterwards she heard the rattle of my typewriter, which I’d left down there, In the normal way she wouldn’t have thought much about this, but Odell’s manner had struck her as distinctly furtive, and she was curious to know what he was up to. She hid in the hall closet, and after about ten minutes Odell emerged and crept upstairs to his room. Then she went into the library to see if she could find any indication of what he’d been doing there. Well, she did find something, and in due course showed it to me...”

Fen broke off rather abruptly; and when he resumed, it was to say: “You know that when you’re using thin typing-paper you usually put a second-sheet behind the sheet you’re actually typing on?”

Haldane nodded. “Yes, I know.”

“That’s what he’d done. And he’d left the second-sheet in the waste-paper basket. And you could read what he’d typed by the indentations on it. And what he’d typed was not in the least pleasant.”

Fen paused to refill his glass. “As I recall it,” he went on after a moment, “the message ran like this: You remember what happened at Manchester on December 4th, 1945? So do I. But a thousand pounds might persuade me, I think, to forget about it. I’ll write again and tell you where to leave the money. It will be the worse for you if you try to find out who I am.”

Haldane nodded again. “Blackmail,” he murmured thoughtfully.

“Quite so. But there was just one odd thing about the message on that revealing second-sheet, and that was its heading. It consisted of four words: ‘The quick brown fox.’ ”

There was an instant’s bemused silence. Someone said: “What on earth...?”

“Yes. A little mystifying, I agree. But anyway, there it was — and there too, more importantly, was the impression of the blackmail note. And if Odell was blackmailing someone in the house, then the situation required very delicate handling indeed. Judith wanted my advice, naturally enough,” (“Tcha,” said Wakefield) “as to what she ought to do. But I never had a chance to give it to her, because it was at that point in our conversation that we heard Eleanor’s scream. Eleanor had gone to call her fiancé down to breakfast, and had found him dead in his bed.

“Well, the police came, and the Ministry awaited me vainly, and as soon as the routine of the investigation was over, Superintendent Yolland took me into consultation. The facts he had to offer were singularly un-enlightening. Odell had been killed by a single blow on the forehead. The weapon was a heavy brass poker from the drawing-room, and no great strength would have been needed to wield it effectively. Death had occurred between five and six A.M. and had been instantaneous. There were no fingerprints and no helpful traces of any kind.

“Naturally, I felt bound to tell the Superintendent what Judith had told me; and by way of response, he produced for my inspection two sheets of typing-paper which he’d found hidden away in one of Odell’s drawers. The first one I looked at bore, in a faint and spidery typescript, the blackmail message I’ve already quoted — but not the — odd superscription. The other was identical with the first in every possible respect, except that it was addressed, like the second-sheet, to ‘The quick brown fox.’ And that being so—”

“That being so,” Wakefield interrupted, “you didn’t, I trust, have to do any very strenuous thinking in order to solve your mystery.”

“You think the solution obvious?” said Fen mildly.

“I think it child’s play,” said Wakefield with much complacency. “With what, after all, does one associate the words ‘the quick brown fox’? One associates them, of course, with the sentence ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,’ which has the peculiarity of containing all the letters of the alphabet. To cut a long story short, Odell wasn’t writing a blackmail note: he was copying one, in order to find out if it had been typed on that particular typewriter. In other words, he was not the blackmailer, but the blackmailer’s victim.

“He started to type out ‘the quick brown fox’ sentence, as a means of comparison, and then decided it would be simpler just to copy the complete message. And the original, together with his copy, was naturally enough found in his drawer. I take it that he wasn’t the man to accede meekly to blackmail, and that he’d made up his mind to find out who was threatening him; at which the blackmailer took fright and brained him while he slept.

“As to who the blackmailer was, that’s easy, too. As I understand it, both messages were in fact typed on Professor Fen’s machine.” Fen assented. “Just so. Well, then, between the time Professor Fen entered the house and the time Odell made his copy, what opportunity was there for anyone to use the typewriter? One, and one only — the period during the afternoon when Professor Fen was playing Racing Demon in the drawing-room. And — well, we know there were only two people who weren’t uninterruptedly engaged in that game: to wit, Judith and Aunt Ellen. Judith you can eliminate on the simple grounds that if she’d been the blackmailer she’d scarcely have told Professor Fen what she did tell him. And that leaves Aunt Ellen... Did you ever find out anything about Odell and Manchester and that date?”

“Yes,” said Fen. “Odell (and that wasn’t his real name) had deserted from the army on that date and in that place. And Aunt Ellen, who’d been in the ATS, had access, at one time, to the dossiers relating to deserters. In one of those dossiers she’d seen a photograph of Odell, and consequently she recognized him the first time he entered the house.”

“She didn’t attempt to deny having recognized him?”

“Oh, no. She couldn’t very well deny it, because — having discreetly checked back to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake — she’d confided the facts to Judith after Odell became engaged to Eleanor; and Judith had advised her to do and say nothing, on the grounds that Odell had a first-rate fighting record, and that his desertion, at the end of the war, was therefore a technical rather than a moral offense.”

“Well,” said Wakefield smugly, “I’m not asserting that on the case I’ve outlined you could convict Aunt Ellen of the murder — even though it’s pretty certain she did it. But she was arrested, I take it, for the blackmail?”

“Oh, dear, no. You see, Wakefield,” said Fen with aggravating kindness, “your answer to the problem, though immensely cogent and logical, has one grave defect: it doesn’t happen to be the right answer.”

Wakefield was much offended. “If it isn’t the right answer,” he returned sourly, “that’s only because you’ve not given us all the relevant facts.”

“Oh, but I have. You remember my telling you about changing the ribbon in my typewriter?”

“Yes.”

“And you remember my saying that one of the blackmail messages was in ‘a faint and spidery typescript’?”

“So it would be, if it was typed in the afternoon, before you changed the ribbon.”

“But you remember also, no doubt, my saying that apart from ‘The quick brown fox’, the second sheet of typing-paper was identical with the first in every possible respect?”

For once Wakefield was bereft of speech; he subsided, breathing heavily through his nose.

“Therefore,” said Fen, “both messages were in faint, spidery typescript. Therefore they were both typed in the afternoon while I was playing Racing Demon! And therefore Judith’s story about Odell using the typewriter after midnight was a deliberate pack of lies from beginning to end.

“Under police examination she broke down and confessed to the murder; and in due course she was tried and convicted, though the death sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment. She hated Odell for jilting her in favor of her sister; and if she hadn’t planted the messages in Odell’s room, and spun me her fairy tale about blackmail in a sophisticated, double-bluff attempt to incriminate Aunt Ellen, she might have got away with the killing. But the trouble was, she read detective stories; and what she dreamed up — in the hope that everyone Would make the very deductions Wakefield has just been making, and probe no further — was a typical detective-story device... I hope no one will imagine I’m mocking at detective-story devices. In point of fact, I dote on them. But so long as criminals take them for a model, the police are going to have a very easy time; because, like the wretched Judith, your genuinely murderous addict will dig his cunning and complicated pits for the investigators — only, in the upshot, to fall head-first into one of his own very extravagant traps.”