Christopher St John Sprigg (1907-1937) was a versatile English writer of poetry, plays, short stories, detective novels, and aeronautics textbooks. In his mid-20s he became fascinated by Marxism and his writing from then on reflected this new interest. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he joined the International Brigade, despite the active discouragement of family and friends. He was killed in the first day of fighting during the Battle of the Jarama River in February 1937.
Sprigg was amazingly productive in his short life. He wrote adventure stories under the names Arthur Cave and Icarus, he used St. John Lewis for his articles about aeronautics, Christopher Caudwell for his Marxist writing and poetry, and Christopher Beaumont for his book reviews. Seven of his crime novels were published under his given name between 1933 and 1937, of which Crime in Kensington (Eldon Press, 1933) is the first.
Charles Venables has moved to London, having obtained a position as gossip columnist in the Mercury newspaper after not doing much of anything with his Oxford degree. His childhood friend Lady Viola, daughter of the Earl of Buxley, who declined Venables’ proposal of marriage, has established a commercial artist’s studio in Fleet Street. She recommended that Venables stay in the hotel where she was boarding while he searched for long-term housing. The story begins upon his arrival at the Garden Hotel, finding it full of eccentric characters, including a wealthy lady devoted to her cats and to seances, a bacteriologist who was also an ordained Anglo-Catholic priest, a small Egyptian gentleman who professed to know Venables upon sight but declined to explain how, a lady given to uttering prophetic messages sent to her by spirit guides, and a retired Army colonel.
In short order, the hotel becomes the site of kidnapping, murder, dismemberment, blackmail, narcotics trafficking, and marital entanglements not sanctioned by society. The police overrun the place. As a suspect Venables is not allowed to leave the hotel, putting him in prime position to deliver scoop after scoop to his new employer that competitors could not hope to match, scoring points with the publisher before he’d scarcely drawn his first pay packet.
I enjoyed this Sprigg tale more than his second one, perhaps because it is so witty or perhaps because it shows clearly that Sprigg was a cat person. I would never have known from the somber photos of Sprigg online, but the story demonstrates he was well acquainted with felines. He gave the Garden Hotel five cats and three kittens that appear when least expected, such as when Charles tries to slip downstairs at night and steps on a cat in the dark: “Suddenly he stepped on something soft. It wriggled, and Charles felt a sensation like five wasp stings on his bare skin. He and the cat screamed together, and he fell down the flight with a series of thuds.” Then there is the cat who is a trained tracker, according to his owner, the kitten sitting in a bread plate at dinner, and the cat who discovers a human hand in the hotel parlor. I was enthralled.
For readers more interested in the mystery, multiple clues are only available late in the story as they are uncovered by Venables, so I suspect devotees of the fair play plot will be disappointed. Inspector Bray and Venables work together cooperatively, with neither seeking to hide information from the other, which is a nice change from the oneupmanship that can occur in professional-amateur relationships. At one point Lady Viola tries her hand at running down a clue. The culprit is completely unexpected.
Students of the Golden Age will want to look at this story for its characters, wit, and slightly over-the-top plot.