Death on the Air Read Free Page B

projected through pipes. All these elements made their impressions, and I felt a great itch for a paint brush between my fingers.
    The ship drew away, the wharf receded, and I was left with an unattempted, non-existent picture that is as vivid today as it was then.
    I don’t think it is overdoing it to say that when I began
Artists in Crime
, it was this feeling of unfulfilment that led me to put another painter on another boat deck making a sketch of the wharf at Suva and that she made a much better job of it than I ever would have done.
    This was Troy. It was in this setting that she and Alleyn first met.
    I have always tried to keep the settings of my books as far as possible within the confines of my own experience. Having found Troy and decided that Alleyn was to find her, too, the rest of the book developed in the milieu of a painters’ community. It was written before capital punishment wasabolished in Great Britain, and Troy shared my own repugnance for that terrible practice: I had talked with a detective-inspector and learnt that there were more men in the force who were for abolition than was commonly supposed. I knew Alleyn would be one of them. He would sense that the shadow of the death penalty lay between himself and Troy. It was not until the end of the next book,
Death in a White Tie
, that they came finally together. In
Death and the Dancing Footman
, they are already married.
    My London agent, I remember, was a bit dubious about marrying Alleyn off. There is a school of thought that considers love interest, where the investigating character is involved, should be kept off stage in detective fiction or at least handled in a rather gingerly fashion and got rid of with alacrity. Conan Doyle seems to have taken this view.
    â€˜To Sherlock Holmes she is always
the
woman’, he begins, writing of Irene Adler. But after a couple of sentences expressive of romantic attachment, he knocks that idea sideways by stating that, as far as Holmes was concerned, all emotions (sexual attraction in particular) were ‘abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind’.
    So much for Miss Adler.
    An exception to the negative attitude appears in Bentley’s classic
Trent’s Last Case
, where the devotion of Trent for one of the suspects is a basic ingredient of the investigation. Dorothy L Sayers, however, turns the whole thing inside out by herself regrettably falling in love with her own creation and making rather an ass of both of them in the process.
    Troy came along at a time when thoroughly nice girls were often called Dulcie, Edith, Cecily, Mona, Madeleine. Even, alas, Gladys. I wanted her to have a plain, rather down-to-earth first name and thought of Agatha – not because of Christie – and a rather odd surname that went well with it, so she became Agatha Troy and always signed her pictures ‘Troy’ and was so addressed by everyone.
Death in a White Tie
might have been called
Siege of Troy
.
    Her painting is far from academic but not always non-figurative. One of its most distinguished characteristics is a very subtle sense of movement brought about by the interrelationships of form and line. Her greatest regret is that she never painted the portrait of Isabella Sommita, which was commissioned in the book I am at present writing. The diva was to have been portrayed with her mouth wide open, letting fly with her celebrated A above high C. It is questionable whether she would have been pleased with the result. It would have been called
Top Note
.
    Troy and Alleyn suit each other. Neither impinges upon the other’s work without being asked, with the result that in Troy’s case she does ask pretty often, sometimes gets argumentative and uptight over the answer and almost always ends up by following the suggestion. She misses Alleyn very much when they are separated. This is often the case, given the nature of their work, and on such occasions each feels incomplete