YARD LENGTHS: 5 Detective Stories by Donald Shoubridge

In 1946, Pendulum Publications released Yard Lengths, a collection of five detective stories by Donald Shoubridge, the first issue in their short-lived Pendulum Popular Detective Series. The approximate paperback dimensions are 4.75 x 5.75 inches, and contains 120 pages. The cover art is not signed, but features a silhouetted man smoking a cigarette with a drawn gun in one hand. The title refers to Scotland Yard, naturally.

The contents below include the pages each story spans. I was not able to trace each story’s original source of publication.

• (3-25) Murder of the Month
• (25-53) The Case of the Municipal Poet
• (54-61) Hot Water
• (62-86) The Man Who Died Too Easily
• (86-118) The Case of the Property Gun

In Murder of the Month, sales of the Comet are down, and no crime has been reported. The owner calls Comet editor Lloyd Davies in his office and demands answers. Turns out the newspaper has not featured a nice juicy crime or murder in q long while. Readers love crime. Yates Morgan is in charge of the crime column on the Comet newspaper, and his career is to come to an abrupt end should no decent crime headline the Comet. While tossing darts, he smartly offers to kill the Comet’s owner. The month is coming to a close, when Yates has another person phone in a message that he is hot on a crime and will report back in later. Then, mysteriously, the owner is found dead in his office, with a dart lodged against his skull. Scotland Yard’s Chief-Inspector Standiford enters the bloody scene, performs an examination, calls in the coroner, etc., and interviews all relevant persons. Who saw the owner last? The editor. When was Yates last scene? Days ago, reportedly out on a case. The dart? Yates was a master dart tosser, and deadly accurate. A girl with romantic ties to Yates assures he is not capable of murder. Standiford can’t confirm that, but he is 100% certain Yates can’t have used a dart to murder the owner. In order to pull it off, he had to hurl it through the open office window with great force. True dart tossers due not forcefully hurl darts. In the end, Scotland Yard sets a trap that leads to the editor leading them to a derelict warehouse, where the drugged Yates is discovered, slated for death.

In The Case of the Municipal Poet Miss Adams visits Scotland Yard to look into, and overrule the verdict of the local police, coroner’s report, jury, hell, even a suicide note, etc., regarding the death of Leonard May. The Yard send out Detective-Inspector Henderson to satisfy Miss Adams, despite the fact they are assured that May indeed did commit suicide. The story eventually boils down to murder…of course. Seems a friend (Stevenson) was deeply in debt and contract May to write a novel, including a suicide scene, which the friend submitted as his own…and was accepted! Well, clearly May had to be removed from the financial equation. He climbed the wall, broken a chip from the bricked sill, and Henderson knew from that moment that someone had climbed in. The friend utilized the suicide scene but had May rewrite one on fresh paper, and kept it until it could be put to use. Stevenson is missing; turns out he fled to another city. He’s eventually tracked down and surrounded, but smugly boasts he can’t be tried for May’s murder since it was already settled as suicide. Henderson announces he has no intention of arresting him on the murder charge. Fraud will do…for the moment. Stevenson realizes the charge of fraud will be merely a preliminary to facing a murder rap, and a hanging.

Detective-Sergeant Mason isn’t satisfied with the accidental death of elderly Colonel Russell. Mason simply can’t wrap his mind around the old man going to take his regular bath, slip and bang his noodle on the “geyser” (faucet), and eventually drown while unconscious. Something doesn’t jive: the bath water is still quite warm. Certain the servant Collins was responsible, Mason utilizes Isaac Newton’s Law of Cooling, and discovers the bath water couldn’t possibly be as warm as it was hours later if Collins had drawn the bath when he did. Clearly, Collins bumped the old man off over the head, spread blood on the geyser, and turned on the water after Colonel Russell had already had his bath. Seems that Collins is the one in Hot Water….

Mr. Baxter is a man who hasn’t had a good night of sleep in a long time but has finally found it at the Spraypoint Private Hotel. Pleased to have sound sleep, he’s contracted to stay on in Room 9 for many more months. Proprietress Miss Ames is pleased. She hasn’t had steady income and for once, she has secured 11 winter residents. All debts paid! Then Room 9’s neighbor (Mrs. Belling) proclaims that Baxter has kept her up all night with his constant moving about. Ames is nonplussed. How can he keep her awake when Baxter just professed to a full night of sleep? Something smells wrong here, but Miss Ames aims to retain Mrs. Belling as an occupant. Miss Ames moves Mrs. Belling into Room 5. Remarkably, a traveling couple by the name of Mr. and Mrs. Wallace arrive and demand a room. The only room available is Mrs. Belling’s forfeited room, which isn’t readied yet. They don’t care. No rush. So Miss Ames readies the room and they move in. The next morning, the chambermaid discovers a very dead Mr. Baxter. She runs to Mrs. Ames, who worries about the negative publicity of a dead man. The local doctor suggests natural causes, death by heart attack. But Miss Ames, a former nurse, is not satisfied with The Man Who Died Too Easily. She has never seen a heart attack case in which the person did not disturb their sheets. In fact, Baxter looks calm, and the sheets are smooth. Eventually she convinces the doctor to bring in the police. The Wallaces refuse to remain in the hotel after hearing hotel gossip of Baxter’s death. She asks if they slept well, to which they say they did. Yet, both look like they hadn’t a night of sleep, haggard expressions on both. They pay and Miss Ames leaves them, feigning she needs to go make change. While gone, the Wallaces decide to depart rather than wait for their change. I won’t ruin a perfectly good plot with details, but it runs like a good Agatha Christie mystery, entwining various parties to secure Baxter’s death. The down-low is Baxter led a rather unscrupulous life as a young man, getting involved with wealthy women, securing their funds and vanishing. Well, the heirs of one elderly woman spent time locating Baxter, as the Will provided they would not get the estate until Baxter himself passed away. With one of the assassins being diabetic, they injected insulin into Baxter. The affects of an insulin overdose in a person with not enough sugar in their system is that they simply fade away and die…

The final case present in this collection is The Case of the Property Gun once more features Chief-Inspector Standiford. Invited by Major Kerring to attend a locally enacted crime-play with him, Kerring is embarrassed to watch a horrible presentation unfold before his eyes with Standiford as his guest, who has never attended a crime-play prior. The principal actor (Nigel Brook) continuously makes mistakes and finally at the close of the first part, the curtains close. It is announced that Brook took ill and was sent home. Rather than end the play, the producer, Robert Morgan, assumes Nigel Brook’s role, being fully versed in all the actor’s roles. In the ensuing love-triangle betrayal scene, the wronged husband walks in, and wielding a revolver, fires twice at point-blank range. Stunningly, the producer takes two very real bullets to his body, and dies immediately on the stage. Kerring and Standiford realize that the following scenes are not part of the play and leap into action. Thus ensues a wide variety of interviews and cross-examinations, including Standiford instructing all members of the cast to reenact their every date-stamped move during the course of the day, so that Standiford may discover who had the time to switch out the fakes for two live rounds. Our author Donald Shoubridge tries his best to misdirect the reader into agreeing with Standiford’s conclusions, but I had earlier on already suspected that the reportedly ill Nigel Brook played his best role: he faked his illness and swapped out the bullets himself, knowing full well that Robert Morgan would assume his role. He needed the man out of the way, because the romantic interest he played on stage was his real-life love interest. However, she wasn’t the least bit interested in he! She is in love with Robert Morgan. Standiford discovers his mistake once the love-triangle is revealed, and Nigel Brook escapes a right proper hanging by making a significant drop of his own, out a window to a very rapid deathly splat far below….

Honestly, I started out not enjoying the first story, but as I read each successive tale, I found myself immersed in Donald Shoubridge’s world, and thoroughly looking forward to tackling the next crime. Many writers back then wrote simple, straight-forward crimes with a simple honest conclusion. No twist. Shoubridge manages to eke out twists and turns whenever possible, enough to maintain my interest.

But first: who is Donald Shoubridge?
He doesn’t appear on the UK Birth-Marriage-Death Index site nor on Family Search, although there are plenty of persons bearing the surname. Shoubridge authored many stories from 1935 to 1940; did the author die in 1940, during World War Two? Hopefully a relation to the author may one day discover this blog and reveal more details. But, with 1940 as a starting point, I searched for any possible Shoubridge dying between 1940 and 1941.

Two possibles came back:

1. Charles Alfred Shoubridge (Jan 1858 – Dec 1940)
   Teddington, London Borough of Richmond upon Thames
2. Kenneth Ray Shoubridge (unknown – 28 April 1941)
   Torpoint, Cornwall Unitary Authority, Cornwall
   Sapper with the Royal Engineers

Neither grave record mentioned author, so I leave both men as thus.

Now, I was surprised to find Chief-Inspector Standiford making a second appearance. Was Standiford a recurring character in any other stories? When I decided to research Standiford, on a whim, color me surprised to discover less than a handful of persons by that name alive during the 1800s in England! The name seems honestly to have died out by 1870.

However, one Ray A. Standiford marriage shows up in 1945 to Dora Fisher. Where on earth did he come from? I couldn’t find a birth in the UK for him, so I turned to Dora. The FamilySearch site showed that she immigrated as a British citizen to America in 1951, with a 4-year old daughter, Linda, who herself had an American passport! Their destination was 3715 Huntington Avenue, Covington, Kentucky. Linda’s American passport opened new doors. Clearly Ray is an American citizen. So I switched to FindaGrave and found that Linda died in Riverside, California. Born in 1922, she died 2012, and is linked to Ray Alexander Standiford. He was born 23 July 1923 in Kentucky and died 12 November 1992 in Riverside, California. He likely enlisted or was drafted for WW2 and met Dora was in England. Clearly, this Standiford could NOT be Donald Shoubridge, whose earliest known works appear in 1935. Ray would have been a young teen. Still, in 1945, he did marry Englishwoman Dora Fisher when he was aged 21. Likely he was there during the war years. Ray’s father was Charles, likewise born in Kentucky, in 1882. I was hoping that records would indicate he was born in England, or his wife was. Alas, no luck!

So, if the Standiford name was already dead in England by 1870 (assuming no others are missing from the Birth/Death index) then how on earth did the pseudonymous Donald Shoubridge learn of the name? Could the author be somehow related to the Standiford line? It seems unlikely, but so does using a surname that hadn’t actively existed for fifty years! I genuinely hope somehow, someway, someone out there in the world can solve this mystery!