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96 pages

English

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'Where do they go, the forgotten people? Where do they go?' London, 1910: A mystery is begun in Lyons Corner House when innocent Ethel Braund meets blowsy singer Belle Elmore and mistakenly leaves with Belle's handbag.Fifty years later, a company of pensionable music-hall artistes are brought together on Cromer Pier for a last hurrah. Among them are the ageing duettists Grenville and Elsie, soubrette Dorothy Driscoll (known as 'The Doll With The Dimple'), Parliamentary Pete (who has recently had one leg amputated), an out-of-practice conjuror and his assistant Len and murderous Heron Makepeace. Topping the Bill is the formidable Hattie Prince, 'England's Greatest Male Impersonator'.In a novel inhabited by a host of colourful characters, against a background of echoing music hall songs, the boy detectives Francis and Gordon Jones unravel a story of illusion, death and remembrance.

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	06 février 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838598303
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

About The Author
Adrian Wright is the acclaimed author of several biographies including the life of L P Hartley Foreign Country , the life of John Lehmann A Pagan Adventure , the life of William Alwyn The Innumerable Dance , and a collection of theatre pieces No Laughing Matter . His three books on British musical theatre, A Tanner’s Worth of Tune , West End Broadway and Must Close Saturday , are standard works, and his survey of British musical films Cheer Up! is published in 2020. His fiction includes the novel Maroon , and two of his ‘Francis and Gordon Jones’ series, The Voice of Doom and The Coming Day . He lives in Norfolk.

Copyright © 2020 Adrian Wright

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781838598303

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for Stephen Boswell

‘Say hello to pretty Lily
When you see her in the ’dilly
For she’s the little donor I adore
There’s not a finer filly
Than Piccadilly Lily
A masher couldn’t want for any more.
You may dream through life
Of a girl beyond compare
With eyes that have more pep than piccalilli,
On a pudding she’s the custard
She’s as hot as Colman’s Mustard
None other than the Lil of Piccadilly!’

(H. Baynes and Reginald Seamore, 1907)

Note

Words taken from Victorian and Edwardian music-hall songs are used throughout the text
Contents
About The Author
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Envoi
Prologue
1910
I
‘Sing us one of the old songs, George!’
‘Let the chorus go!’
‘Yes, George, try old man. Do what you can. We can’t forget what you used to be in the days when life was new. Sing us a song!’
‘If you go wrong, we’ll help to pull you through!’
While London sleeps, and all the lamps are gleaming, millions of its people now lie sweetly dreaming. Some have no homes, and o’er their sorrows weep. Oh, it’s all right in the summertime. In the summertime it’s lovely. Others laugh and play the game while London’s fast asleep.
George is playing the game right enough, leaning on Gertie in an alley off the Strand at the rear end of the Adelphi, togged up like a toff, puffing at a cigar and boasting of his royal connections with his flies open.
‘I know the Emperor of Japan.’
Gertie and the others (Flo, two dancers from the Metropolitan and one of the lah-dee-dah boys from the Empire) try not to encourage him.
‘Very likely,’ says Gertie.
‘I’ve had cigars and ginger ale with the Duke of Baden Baden and the Prince of Wales. He’s a bosom friend of mine.’
George does the wobbley walk he does in Margate when he’s on the prom, as if he’s as nancy as any of the genuine nancy boys and off he goes about how he likes to be beside the seaside where the brass bands play. The Strand might as well be the front at Worthing the way he goes on.
‘If Margate were down in Regent Street,’ says George, ‘and the Isle of Man were somewhere down the Strand, wouldn’t it be grand, listening to the band! If Brighton fair were in Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly all surrounded by the sea, and you could bathe with all the girls down Bond Street – what a grand place London Town would be.’
The curtain’s down at the old Mo, the girls at the Trocadero peek from the top windows of their dressing-rooms, tippy-toed on ballerina legs to see if Stage Door Johnnies are at the Stage Door where Stage Door Johnnies should be. They point and whisper and giggle and decide which shall be theirs. The pretty heads draw back from the windows when they catch the cries from below.
‘We’ll have oysters and wine at two a.m., two a.m., two a.m.! Oysters and wine at two a.m.!’
There’s a crowd of them, tipsy-elbowed, heading for the Cri, passing by the gulley that lets in to the alley, when George and Flo and the nancy boys rush out into the Strand almost into the arms of the seekers of oysters and wine at whatever hour. They cry out at each other as old friends, colliding strangers uncertain of where they might be headed. The Cri or the public house? The brothel or the back passage? Their legs mish-mash, the thighs of the nancy boys shining in neatly pleated trousers, Gertie pouting and winking the other eye at the prospect of better things to become of the night, Flo lifting her skirt above her ankle as she slides against the toff who with luck might take her back to the Albany for an aristocratic deflowering.
Of course, it’s George who links their arms together, gathers up their bodies and leads them on. So they all walk the wibbley wobbley walk, and they all talk the wibbley wobbley talk, they all smile the wibbley wobbley smile when the day is dawning. Then all through the wibbley wobbley walk, they get a wibbley wobbley feeling in the morning.
The cut runs down Villiers Street towards the Thames. Something slightly mystical gives them pause as they see ahead the slope running to the Embankment, as if the murky water were calling them. The shared pursuit of happiness stills, their voices soft now, as if a temple has sprung up invisible around them.
‘Or there’s Hattie Prince at the Tivoli!’
They heard the voice, never knowing where it came from, but there can be no doubt.
‘Oh yes! Hattie at the Tivoli! The Tivoli! The Tivoli!’
It’s not a decision they’ll regret, although Flo and the Empire boys had been hoping for a night off from fairyland, and George is past it, supposedly headed for stardom in another theatrical sphere, but the thought of Hattie, resplendently masculine, pulls them on.
‘I want to sing in opera!’ George shouts, but nobody’s listening much. ‘I’ve got that kind of voice!’
It’s a frog’s, really and truly, but Flo’s too kind to say.
‘What kind of voice have you got, George?’ asks someone, spluttering because of the drink and wanting to lead him on.
‘I’d always sing in opera if I could have my choice.’
George is underneath the lamplight’s glitter, his throat open like a nightingale’s.
‘Signor Caruso told me I ought to do so, that’s why I want to sing in…’
And then he’s away. Trilling.
‘Op-op-op-op-era!’ he sings, letting the falsetto airs into the soft night.
II
Oh, England is thriving!
Selfridges has a shop in London, Woolworths has opened its first store in Liverpool, no less than the King and Queen have opened the Victoria and Albert Museum. It’s the year of Halley’s Comet, dangling somewhere infinitesimal above Edwardian London. The stories of a foreigner called Balzac are denounced as mucky reading and seized by the police. Another foreigner, Guglielmo Marconi, has invented a thing called the wireless telegraph, which will play a part in the capture of an infamous Edwardian murderer and his mistress. On 5 May, Edward VII, wearying of his very own era, insists ‘I shall not give in. I shall go on’ and dies the next day. Miners, possibly ignorant of the serene image of Edwardian England, strike for an eight-hour day. Within weeks, Charles Rolls, the first British man to cross the Channel in a British aeroplane, gains new fame as the first British man to be killed in a British aeroplane. Arty types flock to the Grafton Galleries for Roger Fry’s exhibition of post-impressionism. Those who appreciate more hearty diversion lament the death of Lottie Collins, destined for music-hall immortality.
A gramophone company has expressed interest in making a recording of Belle Elmore’s ‘She Never Went Further Than That’, but thinks better of it after listening to its suggestive lyrics. The papers say that theatre is dead, as if only the year before Maud Allan hadn’t got into the headlines with her scandalous Salome at the Palace Theatre, but now the Palace is showing Kinemacolor films between the music-hall turns, and people are beginning to prefer the Kinemacolor. Is music-hall dying? Never! Marie Lloyd’s still doing the rounds of the halls although she’s got the most appalling cough and oh, the innuendo.
Mrs Ormiston Chant wants the halls closed. ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ she insists, ‘but do away with the foul spots where temptation exists. Sweep them away and London shall be happier and Engla