Eric Elrington Addis (1899-1941) served in the Royal Navy until 1928. He studied law, practicing as a barrister to the Admiralty bar until he was recalled to the Navy at the start of World War II. He was killed in action in August 1941, leaving six novels of crime fiction published between 1936 and 1939 under the name Peter Drax. His novelist wife completed his seventh book and published it in 1944. For more about Drax, see blog posts on Crime Is Afoot, https://jiescribano.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/peter-drax-1899-1941/ and The Passing Tramp, https://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2017/05/peter-draxs-golden-age-crime-fiction.html.
The original editions of the Drax novels are exceedingly rare. Fortunately for all of us Dean Street Press has come to the reader’s rescue again and reprinted the first six.
Death by Two Hands, the third book by Drax, was published in the UK in 1937 by Hutchinson and in the US by Appleton-Century in 1938 under the name Crime within Crime. Despite being written during the height of the Golden Age, it is startlingly different from any crime novel of the period I have read. No country manors, no weekend house parties, no aristocratic investigators, and no footsteps in the snow. Rather than deciding which set of gold studs to wear to dinner, the characters here find themselves going without dinner far too often. If there is such a thing as Golden Age noir, this is it.
Drax must have had the work of Charles Dickens in mind when he wrote this particular book, as it has strong parallels to Oliver Twist. Alma Robinson, the Oliver of this story, had spent all of her 24 years in the country leading a modestly respectable life with an aunt, who recently died, leaving Alma’s uncle as her only relative. Barney Withers in sharp contrast operated on the edges of the underworld, scraping by selling patent medicines to the gullible and passing information to the more criminally active of his acquaintance. He keeps two pet mice which are adorable. Alma of course did not know about her uncle’s questionable activities when she artlessly told him about a fox farm near her Surrey home that would soon be making a delivery of valuable pelts to a London furrier.
Barney saw a way to make a few shillings and told a local crime organizer named Rivers, think Fagin, who promptly hired a couple of hoodlums to rob the van on an isolated part of the road. Barney dumps Alma with a disreputable couple named Kemp living in squalor and advises her to make herself useful to Mrs. Kemp, who is a holy terror. Between the Kemps and their equally seedy visitors, Alma is first stunned and then frightened.
The thugs, being thugs, applied their energies too forcefully to the robbery and killed one of the passengers in the van. The police led by Chief Inspector Thompson of Scotland Yard turned out in force for the robbery and the murder. Drax describes the painstaking and tedious steps of evidence collection and suspect identification, more in line with the realistic police procedurals of much later in the century than the crime investigations of the 1930s.
I was riveted by this book. The characters are ignorant, often stupid, sometimes cruel, and deeply pathetic. They lead hard-scrabble lives in grinding poverty, scrounging for their next meal and occasionally searching for shelter for the coming night. They see no way out but crime, hoping to avoid law enforcement but generally too short-sighted or thoughtless to escape. Fascinating but not cheerful.
See Martin Edwards’ comments here: https://doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.com/2017/07/forgotten-book-death-by-two-hands.html