Death By Two Hands
A review of Death by Two Hands by Peter Drax – 241003
Peter Drax, the nom de plume of Eric Addis, wrote six crime novels , of which Death by Two Hands, originally published in 1937 and reissued by Dean Street Press, is the third. It goes by the alternative title of Crime Within Crime. He was killed in action in 1941 in Egypt and left an unfinished novel, his sixth, which was later completed by his wife and published. It is fascinating to speculate how his literary career would have developed.
His novels are full of gritty realism and inhabit a world where both the police and the criminals are human, warts and all, rather than endowed with superhuman powers. There is more than a little of the Sophoclean tragedy at work where individuals seemingly make choices of their own free will but each choice embeds them deeper into a web of fate from which they cannot escape. The consequences of their actions become inevitable.
In the background is their hum-drum, hand-to-mouth existence, scraping a living but always on the lookout for a chance to make a little extra. When it presents itself, they go for it with gusto but simple choices and twists of fate lead them to the edge of catastrophe. Take Barney Withers, who scratches a living selling wares in the local markets, his signature trade mark a couple of tame mice which run around his hat. When he goes into the countryside to take his niece, Alma Robinson, under his wing, he learns of a consignment of valuable black fox furs which are to be transported to London.
Withers interests the local Mr Big, Mr Rivers, in the idea of a hold up and Rivers recruits Spike Morgan and Len Harmon to carry out the heist and lines up a fence, Hyams, to dispose of the furs. Barney, unwillingly, is roped in as look-out. The robbery is pulled off, the furs are delivered to Hyams, but there are two small problems.
Firstly, too much force is used in dealing with one of the people in the cab and John Brook dies from his injuries. Secondly, in an attempt to impress Alma Spike has a tie made from one of the furs and it has a dodgy tie. Add to this, the understandable caution of Hyams, the inability of Rivers to come up with the promised monies as quickly as Spike would like, and Spike’s volatile temper and there is another murder on our hands. The attempt to cover up Rivers’ death and to dispose of the body stretch their intellectual capacities to their limits.
There is no mystery as to the identity of the killers nor is the book really a thriller. Instead it charts the gradual unravelling of the fates of several characters and the steady, unswerving pursuit of the police led by Inspector Thompson. There is a growing sense of inevitability as the police pick up a clue here, a dark fox hair, and there, a dead brown mouse, and through painstaking observation and investigation begin to assemble enough evidence to reconstruct what has gone on. All the characters are just bit players in a greater tragedy that engulfs them all and the outcome, no matter how hard they kick against it, is inevitable.
Drax’s strength is in his sense of character and of time and place. His characters come to life off the page and the squalor and poverty in which they live is easy to picture. This is crime and poverty at its most realistic and Drax makes a powerful and valuable contribution to the genre of detective fiction. If you are looking for a different perspective on a genre that is often hackneyed and cliched, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
