A VOICE LIKE VELVET recounts the misadventures of Ernest Bisham, a middle-aged BBC radio announcer who just happens to be a highly accomplished cat-burglar. An unlikely premise? Perhaps, yet the author was careful to include a disclaimer making it clear that Ernest isn’t based on anyone in real life, let alone at the BBC. The story is skilfully written and quietly suspenseful. Like the rest of Henderson’s unusual, off-kilter crime fiction, however, it has suffered long and undeserved neglect.
So often, the fate of a novel—whatever its quality—depends upon how effectively it is first presented to the reading public. Hurst and Blackett published this book in October 1944 with the unexciting title The Announcer, and subtitled it simply ‘a novel’. Certainly, Henderson offers an intriguing and perceptive study in character, but it would surely have been wise to market the story as a crime novel—which, unquestionably, it is. Yet it seems to have been regarded as belonging to a different category from the author’s crime writing, and was therefore published under one of his pen-names, D. H. Landels, even though the previous year Constable had published Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper under Henderson’s own name, and that novel became the most successful of his short life.
When Random House published this book in the US in 1946, they changed the title to A Voice Like Velvet (a phrase which crops up in the narrative) and made no bones about the criminous nature of the story: ‘People who have a weakness for stories about gentlemen crooks—and judging by the popularity of Raffles, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, etc., there are thousands of them—will be delighted to make the acquaintance of Ernest Bisham.’ This time, the novel appeared under Henderson’s own name, and the blurb made the most of his earlier success: ‘Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper caused something of a sensation in mystery circles two years ago. His new book is the kind that English writers, for some reason, do much more expertly than our own. You will be seeing it on the screen before long; we hope it will not be too different from this fourteen-karat original.’ This was more like it in terms of exploiting the book’s commercial potential, and the critics were impressed. Kirkus Reviews, for instance, appreciated the way Henderson ‘combines a psychopathic study with [an] effective hare and hounds adventure’. But he was a writer forever dogged by bad luck. He died the very next year, and as far as I have been able to ascertain, no screen version of the novel was ever made. Not even (or perhaps especially not) by the BBC.
The crime story focusing on a criminal, rather than a detective, pre-dates Raffles, the ‘amateur cracksman’ created by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law E. W. Hornung towards the end of the nineteenth century; in fact it pre-dates the detective fiction genre. William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) was published almost half a century before Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, which is commonly regarded as the first detective story. Through the years, the criminal protagonist has maintained an appeal to readers, as witness the success of Patricia Highsmith’s books about Tom Ripley and Jeff Lindsay’s about Dexter Morgan. (Incidentally, British readers unfamiliar with Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford may like to know that he was a swindler created by George Randolph Chester early in the twentieth century.)
So Henderson was working in a long-established tradition, but A Voice Like Velvet has a distinctive flavour. Ernest’s activities may remind us of Raffles, but Henderson explores his character’s state of mind in a way that Hornung never attempted. He also teases his readers, who cannot be sure what fate has in store for Ernest. As a crime writer, Henderson belongs to that loose group of authors who were influenced, directly or indirectly, by the work of Anthony Berkeley’s alter ego Francis Iles, author of two ground-breaking crime novels of the early Thirties, Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact. Richard Hull, Bruce Hamilton, C. E. Vulliamy and Henderson were among those whose mysteries, like Iles’ masterpieces, brimmed with irony and an awareness of the fallibility and limitations of conventional systems of justice.
It would be a step too far to describe Ernest as a self-portrait, but certainly he and Henderson had much in common, including a failed first marriage. Both men worked for the BBC, and A Voice Like Velvet wittily portrays everyday life at Broadcasting House. Before the Second World War, Henderson had spent years as an actor, as well as writing novels and plays, but success in all these fields proved elusive and he was often desperately short of cash. In his unpublished and incomplete memoir The Brink, rescued from oblivion by Paul T. Harding in 2010, Henderson said: ‘I offered my services to the BBC, feeling that my experience as a writer might be of some use in wartime … Knowing little or nothing of the BBC until this date, I was a bit surprised … to be offered a technical job in no way suited to a writer … I was an assistant in a department … called the Recorded Programmes Department, and my duties were twofold; I had to put on gramophone records whenever told to do so, by day or by night—and I had to give “ten second cues”, in studios, when various programmes were to be recorded for transmission at later dates … The most restful of the transmissions I was called upon to do was undoubtedly The Morning Service, as this only involved one disc lasting the conventional three minutes. There was always a soothing hymn.’
Although Henderson resented the BBC’s bureaucracy, the salary compensated for the need to battle with red tape. After years of poverty and struggle, a steady job ‘meant marriage and starting a home at last … As I was getting on for forty, I got more money than much cleverer people, simply and solely because they were younger.’ It was while Henderson was at the BBC that Constable accepted Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper, and this boosted his confidence. He proceeded to write a light comedy called A Man of Character, and then wrote this book.
In The Brink, he said: ‘By the time I was working on [A Voice Like Velvet] I had been appointed an “assistant” in the Home News Talks Department … Here I was in a splendid position to study “announcers”, for they would come into the News Room—an enormous, noisy place filled with erudite and striking literary personalities—a quarter of an hour or so before each news bulletin was due to be read to the waiting world.’
For Henderson, Broadcasting House had ‘none of the glamour or romance of the theatre. There seems to me to be a continual safety-first feeling in the air.’ So far as the BBC was concerned, he was an outsider. A rather different picture of life in Portland Place is presented in Death at Broadcasting House, published in 1934 by Val Gielgud and (under the pen-name Holt Marvell) Eric Maschwitz, both of whom were senior and experienced Corporation men. Their novel, an entertaining if relatively orthodox whodunit, proved highly successful and was filmed, with Gielgud himself playing one of the suspects.
Restless by nature, Henderson wasn’t suited to conventional working life. He moved to the Features & Drama Department, concentrating on the former rather than the latter. However, curiosity was apt to get the better of him. On one occasion, he was sent ‘to visit a factory on the outskirts of London where they were making Rose Hip Syrup, as well as extracting certain properties from the glands of animals. Both the rose hips and the glands appeared to be stacked overnight in a vast refrigerator thick with artificial snow. I was so absorbed by this that I stayed in it far too long and nearly caught pneumonia.’
As his personal finances improved, Henderson felt he could afford to resign from the BBC staff. However, he continued to work for the Corporation on a freelance basis, which ‘seemed more fitting for a writer, rather than continuing on the inside, posing as a producer’. He wrote occasional radio plays for the BBC, including The Trial of Lizzie Borden which, like several passing references in A Voice Like Velvet, illustrates