Acting on Impulse Read online

  I should like to make a point quite clear to the lady. If she reads an M.S. of mine &, disliking it, turns it down, I have no cause for complaint. But when she holds my M.S. from the beginning of December to the middle of January without giving me any definite reply, & in the knowledge that by so doing she is ruining all chance of finding another market for it I have a great deal of cause for complaint.

  It would be as well if she were to ask herself whether I am very likely to offer her any further stories. And I will take the opportunity to repeat in writing what I think I said to you the other day: If Miss Sutherland refuses the M.S., or postpones its publication in serial form to the prejudice of H. &S's publication of it in book form no further MSs of mine are to be offered to her. I am now working on the Waterloo** book, which, though not precisely a sequel, follows on to [sic] Regency Buck. If she wants this she’d better get a move on with They Found Him Dead. If she doesn’t – well, she knows what to do about it.

  If she finds it incredible that I should be prepared to sever relations with her you can, if you choose, tell her that her handling of my work has from start to finish been an annoyance to me; her criticisms always seem to me illiterate, & her alterations even more so. Accompany these compliments by any rude gesture that suggests itself to you.

  If she pulls herself together, & sends you a cheque, I think she might as well have the Waterloo book.

  But as she doesn’t seem to me to like my mysteries I should much prefer to tackle a different market for the next. I shall do my best to let you have it in good time, so that you will have plenty of opportunity to find another opening.

  ** This is An Infamous Army, of course. And Woman’s Journal never did end up serializing it.

  Wow. Leaving aside the “folly of Woman at the Helm” crack, which had been quoted in the biography – oh, Georgette! – this letter helped make a few things more abundantly clear. One, They Found Him Dead was under option as a serial to Woman’s Journal as early as December 1936, months before its publication in May of 1937. (This makes sense, since the purpose of these serials was to drum up interest in, and sales of, the novels when they were released, so they would necessarily have to be organized far in advance of each book’s launch). Two, Woman’s Journal editor Dorothy Sutherland did not think it was good enough as-is, and asked Heyer to make some considerable changes before it could be published in her august pages. Three, we already know that Sutherland had a propensity for altering Heyer’s titles – hence Gay Adventure instead of Regency Buck – and so could very well have changed the title of They Found Him Dead, especially as she wanted Heyer to “stress on the love interest” (Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller, pg. 163), perhaps making it into more of the “romantic thriller” that the 2GB radio sessions claimed: They Found Him Dead does have some romance, as do most Heyer works, but that designation does seem something of a stretch for it as it exists to us, quite honestly.

  And then there is this, also from Jen’s biography:

  In December, King Edward VIII abdicated to marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson. The change in the Succession meant a change in Woman’s Journal editorial policy. Dorothy Sutherland felt that a murder mystery was not wanted in an edition about the abdication and the Royal family and consequently had decided not to serialize They Found Him Dead.

  It was in response to this move that the above-printed letter was so furious – and, as the biography points out, it would be ten years before Woman’s Journal got to serialize another Heyer work.

  But none of that really explained how the Australian Women’s Weekly ended up serializing on the radio a book that was probably They Found Him Dead under an alternate title most likely bestowed upon it by Dorothy Sutherland.

  Jen and I discussed this at length, over a number of days, eventually referring once more to the original sales list on which the discovery of “On Such a Night” as a “short story” hung. The list, in part, read:

  TITLE SOLD TO RIGHTS LANGUAGE

  HAZARD

  1936 Australian Women’s Weekly One Serial Use Australian

  1938 Ullstrated Familie Journal " Scandinavian

  ON SUCH A NIGHT

  1935 Australian Women’s Weekly Serial rights Australian

  GAY ADVENTURE

  1935 Australian Women’s Weekly Serial rights Australian

  So, Gay Adventure was included in that list, and we know that was not a short story. And while the definite short story that is “Hazard” was sold to both the Women’s Weekly and “Ullstrated” [sic] Familie Journal (most likely Danish publication Illustreret Familie Journal, aka Familie Journalen, also published in Sweden and Norway) for “One Serial Use,” both the ersatz On Such a Night and Gay Adventure were sold as proper serials. (Let us also take note that “Scandinavian” and “Australian” are both, apparently, languages.)

  Another piece of the puzzle. This was all very much coming together. Except…

  “Hey! Why did the Women’s Weekly title Regency Buck as Gay Adventure when they serialized it, when we know that it was Woman’s Journal’s Dorothy Sutherland who changed the title? Why would that have happened? Are they related publications?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Hmm. So… what? Maybe the Women’s Weekly used the same abridged version of the novel that Woman’s Journal did? Maybe they even bought it from them, to save doing it themselves?”

  “That’s very possible.”

  “And since Dorothy Sutherland apparently liked retitling Heyer’s works, maybe she also retitled They Found Him Dead as On Such a Night, and that is how the Women’s Weekly bought it. But then Sutherland never published it, ostensibly because of the abdication—and perhaps the Women’s Weekly never did either, for the same reason. But, unlike Sutherland, they never revoked their serial rights, because they really valued their relationship with Heyer, and so still paid for them. So when, a couple of years later, they were looking for a story to read aloud during their revamped radio sessions with Dorothea Vautier – and remember, the Heyer serial was the first one they broadcast in that timeslot, before that it was dedicated to sections from the magazine; it also seems to have been a pretty hasty decision on their part, given that they didn’t have time to alert the Wireless Weekly to the change in programming in enough time for them to amend the listings – they dug it up out of their archives.”

  Silence.

  “That makes sense,” Jen said.

  AND with that, I am considering this case closed.

  Because the upshot of all of this, after hours upon hours, across months and years, of exhaustive, exhausting research and obsessive cross-correlation, is that I am now one hundred percent convinced that “On Such a Night” never was. Most likely, Georgette (or her assistant, agent, or accountant – that portion of her records is type-written and could have been done by anyone) simply made a mistake when she listed the title under her “Short Story” sales, as she did with Gay Adventure, and neglected to note that it was an alternate title to an existing work. After all, what is more probable – that there is a whole other Georgette Heyer novel-length story out there, that she inexplicably sold only to an Australian magazine, and never had published in book form anywhere, at all; or that mistakes were made and titles were changed and incorrect listings were published and muddled records were kept, and On Such a Night is merely the title of a book we already know and (probably) love?

  I vote the latter.

  So is “On Such a Night” indeed They Found Him Dead? Or is it Death in the Stocks? Is it The Talisman Ring? Is this reasoning even more faulty, and it is indeed An Infamous Army, or The Unfinished Clue? Does it even matter?

  Honestly, not a whit. In the final analysis, all that matters is that “On Such a Night” does not, in fact, exist.

  But oh, how I wish it did.

  * Turns out the reason was that Georgette Heyer’s working title for Envious Casca was “Christmas Party” – and when the publishers at Random House found out that little tidbit from Jen, the