The Hammersmith Maggot (1955) by William Mole is a crime fiction novel prized among the cognoscenti. It introduces a louche series character, Casson, a wine merchant who also enjoys amateur detection: he has a conscientious business partner who looks after things while he is sleuthing.
The Maggot is an unusual novel about an aesthetical blackmailer. At least, he is a would-be aesthete, a lover of rare and beautiful things from a modest background who considers that he has a perfect right to possess what he wishes. He uses blackmail discreetly and with restraint, learning just enough about his victims to exploit ambiguous situations. Usually, his victims are in fact without real fault, but apprehensive, or else have only minor peccadilloes. The blackmailer chooses them with care and plays them deftly. The portrait of this character is cunning, although undoubtedly with a dash of snobbery: how dare this vulgar interloper want the finer things in life?
There is an excellent fuller review of the book at the Pretty Sinister Books blog.
Two further thrillers in the Casson series followed: Goodbye is Not Worthwhile (1956) and Skin Trap (1957). All three of the books tend to rely on what may now seem rather over-confident psychological analysis. The plotting is rather cold-hearted. Nevertheless, they create a morbid interest in their amoral villains and build up a strong feeling of tension. These and the panache of the suave wine merchant hero, who has aspects of Bond to him (he appeared just two years after Casino Royale) give the novels a distinctive flavour.
Mole had earlier written two novels of a different type, Trample An Empire (1952) and The Lobster Guerillas (1953). The first of these is a romping adventure and chase thriller in which two young people pit themselves against a sinister government Minister whose autocratic plans they have uncovered. It was compared with Chesterton’s romances. There is also something of the swift breezy quality of Edmund Crispin’s novels. The Sunday Times called it ‘stylish and civilised’.
The second concerns an attempt by a motley band of partisans, smugglers and insouciant bravadoes to set up an independent enclave in the Camargue in Southern France in the aftermath of WWII. The Daily Telegraph described it as ‘written in the true swashbuckling fashion . . . people with strange picturesque characters.’ A peevish reader might think Mole’s books are a bit too swaggering and archly sophisticated, but on the other hand they certainly have a vivid, vigorous quality. And they linger.
William Mole was in fact the pseudonym of William Anthony Younger (1917-61), the son of Sir William Younger, Bart, of Auchen Castle, Moffat, Scotland: but he was later a step-son of Dennis Wheatley. It was presumably the latter who introduced him to the wine trade, in which Wheatley was keenly interested.
He was educated at Canford, a modern co-educational private school in Dorset, and at Christ Church, Oxford. As Younger he wrote four volumes of poetry, which was romantic and sensuous, rather archaic, but with a certain rich elegance. He also wrote articles on wine and travel, and with bis wife Elizabeth a book about Portugal. She also wrote her own crime novel, as Elizabeth Hely, I’ll Be Judge I’ll be Jury (1959). William Younger died in Greece in 1961 aged 43 from a fever.
A Checklist of Books by William Younger
As William Younger
Madonna and Other Poems (Boar's Head Press, 1935)
Inconstant Conqueror. Poems (Hutchinson & Co., [1938])
The Dreaming Falcons. Poems (Hutchinson & Co., [1944])
The Singing Vision [poems] (1946)
Blue Moon in Portugal by W & E Younger (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956)
Gods, Men and Wine (Wine and Food Society; Michael Joseph, [1966])
Orpheus. Selected Poems 1939 – 1960 (Flixton Press, 1985)
As William Mole
Trample an Empire (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1952)
The Lobster Guerillas (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953)
The Hammersmith Maggot (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955). Also in Penguin (1963)
Goodbye is Not Worthwhile (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956)
Skin Trap (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1957)
(Mark Valentine)
Image: Temple Bar Bookshop, Dublin
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