A Taste for Honey

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—

NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

A Taste for Honey

A Mycroft Holmes Mystery

H. F. Heard

Foreword by Stacy Gillis, Ph.D.

Afterword by John Roger Barrie

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

TO
CHRISTOPHER WOOD

A CONNOISSEUR
,

THIS UNCLASSIFIED VINTAGE

CONTENTS

Foreword by Stacy Gillis, Ph.D.

1. The Solitary Fly

2. The New Beekeeper

3. Rolanding the Oliver

4. Fly to Spider

5. The Fly Is Missed

6. Fly Made to Introduce Wasp to Spider

7. Double-crossing Destiny

8. Wasp Strikes Spider

9. Fly Breaks from Wasp

10. As We Were?

Afterword by John Roger Barrie

Preview:
Reply Paid

About the Author

FOREWORD

Stacy Gillis, Ph.D.

Who was this old stranger, pushing his advice on me and directing what I should do and whom I should see and in whose care?

It is extremely difficult to escape from Sherlock Holmes. Making his first appearance in
A Study in Scarlet
, published in
Beeton's Christmas Annual
in 1887, Holmes straddles the history of detective fiction. He has become the archetypal detective and his influence is felt across the genres of crime, mystery and detective fiction—whether through an attempt to be as unlike him as possible (as with Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot), through overt references (as with Ian Rankin's DC Brian Holmes) or through the possession of Holmesian attributes (as with
House, M.D.
's Dr Gregory House). Holmes appeared in a number of rewritings, pastiches and parodies, even during Arthur Conan Doyle's lifetime, and throughout the twentieth century. H. F. Heard is rare, however, amongst these writers, in that he ostensibly chose to concentrate not on the highly recognizable figure of Sherlock but instead on his less well-known, yet intellectually far superior, brother Mycroft. Conan Doyle's Mycroft may have possessed deductive abilities which surpassed those of his younger brother, but he was either incapable of (or perhaps highly disinclined for) the physical activity which marked much of his brother's detecting exertions. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” (1908), Mycroft has an undeniable presence:

Heavily built and massive, there was a suggestion of uncouth physical inertia in the figure, but above this unwieldy frame there was perched a head so masterful in its brow, so alert in its steel-gray, deep-set eyes, so firm in its lips, and so subtle in its play of expression, that after the first glance one forgot the gross body and remembered only the dominant mind. (916)

Here Mycroft's gross build and extreme physical inertia are in evidence, yet the attention is drawn to those intellectual abilities so clearly evident in his physiognomy.

Despite being described by his brother as, at times,
being
the British government, Mycroft remains a physically inactive individual, one who simply does not care enough to verify his hypotheses, as his brother indicates in “The Greek Interpreter” (1893): “he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right.… [he] is absolutely incapable of working out the practical points” (436). This Mycroft appears to simply not
care
enough to work through—or is not corporeally capable of working through—the intellectual, the physical and particularly the emotional demands of detecting. Considering this, the individual we meet in
A Taste for Honey
(1941) is singularly unfamiliar. Heard's Mycroft is not only a man of science who takes a tremendous sense of achievement from his work, but a humanist who
cares
about the behavior of those around him, to the extent of taking upon himself the moral (albeit illegal) prerogative of punishing the villain with death. Possessed of supreme deductive skills, this Mycroft actively hunts Heregrove: “No doubt he was an amazing actor, but it was equally clear to me that he was really in high spirits, an old hunter, finding itself once again following a breast-high scent, a veteran adventurer looking once more into the bright eyes of danger” (78). This is certainly not the Mycroft of the Holmes stories—although Conan Doyle's Mycroft
was
largely presented to the reader by the only
apparently
trustworthy medium of Sherlock—but a Mycroft who is both a superb detective and who cares enough to pass ethical judgments and to follow through on these decisions.

Of course, one possibility is that this is not Mycroft at all—but his more famous brother, seeking an anonymous bee-keeping retirement. This possibility, albeit never admitted by Heard, has been discussed for years by Sherlock aficionados—beginning soon after the novel's publication, a preface to a Heard short story in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
(1945), stated that “although a certain name never once appeared in the [
A Taste for Honey
], it became increasing certain that Mr Heard had written a full-length pastiche of the Great Master himself” (98). Whether or not this is a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes or a story about his lesser-known brother is not vital: what is important is that this Mycroft—whether Sherlock, the Mycroft of the Holmes stories or a version of what Mycroft might have been—is merely another re-envisioning, another permutation, of the Holmesian myth, so common in British detective fiction.

British detective fiction has traditionally been understood as more embedded in rural locales than its American counterpart, although this is not to say that all British detective stories are set in country villages and all American detective fiction is set on the “mean streets.” In “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), Raymond Chandler notoriously claimed that British detective fiction was resolutely formulaic and had neither realistic characters nor plot. Chandler was particularly concerned with what we now know as the Golden Age of British detective fiction—populated by such detectives as Poirot, Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn and Margery Allingham's Albert Campion. While this Golden Age is often understood as belonging to the inter-war years (strictly restricted, for some, to the period between the publication of Christie's first detective novel
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
in 1921 and the publication of Sayers' last detective novel
Busman's Honeymoon
in 1936), its style and rural setting have continued to impact on British detective fiction. Published in 1941,
A Taste for Honey
was firmly in step with this tradition—the village of Ashton Clearwater, with its class stratifications, gossip and local tensions, will be familiar to detective fiction aficionados for its resemblance to such Golden Age locales as St. Mary Mead. The novel clearly places itself in this tradition—albeit playfully—when it opens on the remark that “I read a novel not long ago that made out of every village, however peaceful it looked, to be a little hell of all the seven deadly sins” (3). As with Golden Age detective fiction, the bucolic idyll of Ashton Clearwater is itself revealed to be, in fact, a “little hell.” There is a homicidal maniac in the village who, as Mycroft discovers, is killing for the sake of killing.

It is rare to find a random killer in early British detective fiction—the random killer is someone far more common in the novels of such late twentieth-century authors as Val McDermid and Ian Rankin. In most Golden Age detective fiction the villain kills for a motive: an inheritance, desire for someone's spouse, fear that a long-kept secret is about to be revealed. In
A Taste for Honey
, Heregrove kills because he
loves
to kill. While his apparent first victim is his wife—killed because, as village gossip reveals, their relationship is highly acrimonious—Heregrove goes on to kill because of the pleasure in it:

Here was a desperately cunning man who, starting perhaps with some slight suspicion of me, now evidently for sport, if for no other reason, was set on killing me and in an abominably agonizing way, just to show off his malicious power and to experiment with an instrument of death, which, when perfected, he could employ with absolute precision and equal impunity. (58)

In perfecting a new kind of death—one that means he can kill without concern of a motive leading back to him—Heregrove is the perfect killer able to commit the perfect crime: no motive and a “trackless killer” (78). Yet it is the ability to kill without fear of recrimination that leads to Heregrove's downfall, as Mycroft recognizes: