This is a guest post by the writer David Quantick.
“You didn’t have time to think about the dangers of a raid in the cipher room of the secret service sabotage organisation. You were too bloody annoyed.”
There are many mysteries about this book: they start before the book has even begun, in the authorial blurb, and they continue even after the book has ended.
In the endpapers of the dust jacket, an anonymous writer says of S-s-s-sh that “readers of her Contract for a Corpse should find this, her latest book, even more satisfying”. There is, in actual fact, no evidence of that a book called Contract for a Corpse ever existed, while the only other novel published under Kathleen Mary Carmel’s name – Secret Service – turns out to be a French translation of S-s-s-sh. “Kathleen Mary Carmel” is itself a pen name, made out of the author’s real names, and S-s-s-sh, while a small classic of genre fiction, is not what the writer is most famous for.
Kathleen Mary Carmel was best known as Carmel Withers. Nicknamed, inevitably, Caramel, she was a brilliant and highly respected bridge player, and it was through that game she met her future husband S. J. “Skid” Simon. They both represented their country at bridge and even appeared on TV television programmes playing bridge before World War Two.
Skid was a household name, a brilliant analyst and a formidable player who was not only the author of the influential Why You Lose At Bridge (a book that is immensely readable even if you know nothing about bridge) but also, with Caryl Brahms, one of the most popular writers of the 1930s and 40s. (I shan’t write about Brahms and Simon here, except to say it was as a lifelong fan of their work that I came to Kathleen Mary Carmel and S-s-s-sh: despite their own reduction in fame, Brahms and Simon’s work, which ranged from historical comedies to ballet-related detective novels, has had many fans, from the late Ned Sherrin, who wrote with Caryl Brahms and completed her autobiography, Too Dirty For The Windmill, and Neil Gaiman, who ranks Brahms and Simon’s No Bed For Bacon very highly indeed.)
When I came across mention of Kathleen Withers in Too Dirty For The Windmill, I wanted to find out more about her, but there was very little information out there. I managed to acquire a copy of S-s-s-sh (as well as its French translation) and spent a while trying to find the elusive Contract for a Corpse without any luck. All I knew was that she had a file in the National Archives related to her real-life work in ciphers during the Second World War, that she was a champion bridge player, and that she had been married to SJ Simon, who predeceased her by only a year.
S-s-s-sh is an excellent book. From its dedication – FOR THE CIPHER ROOM MICHAEL HOUSE – via its unsentimental tone, appropriate for a murder mystery set during the carnage of a world war, to its satisfactory conclusion, this is a novel that’s entirely convincing in its milieu and entirely chilling in the way it follows its murders and the reason for those murders. Along the way, we are engrossed in the minutiae of life in a wartime cipher department – the flirtations between male officers and female staff, the triumph at cadging an extra piece of toast and marmalade, the sheer exhaustion of working in near-impossible conditions to save the lives of countless men and women – and we are caught up in a bigger picture: this killer’s agenda is, unsurprisingly, entirely connected to the greater drama of worldwide conflict.
It is also a funny book, a suspenseful book and at times a chilling book. The scene where the narrator reports that she has found a woman’s body stuffed into a cupboard plays out with humour at her superior’s bureaucratic bluster but also with casual horror – “I was tired, the smell was sickening and now into the bargain I was getting bored”. And, as befits a story set in the small, cramped world of a cipher unit, where everything is a secret and everyone lives in each other’s pocket, throughout there is a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia quite at odds with the increasingly cosy way that current WW2 novels portray Britain at war, all country lanes and boffins cycling off to Bletchley. S-s-s-sh is a book that’s full of the mundanity of war and all that it implies.
By the sound of it, this dry, half-humorous, half-serious tone was entirely typical of the author, whose death in 1948 (it was reported as suicide) was deeply mourned by her fellow bridge players. “It is at this moment at once a pride and a tragedy of remembrance that the writer of this brief memorial recalls that he was for long her partner and her friend,” wrote one of her obituarists, Guy Ramsey. Friends and fellow players recalled her wit and intelligence, and it is clear that she was more than a match for her anarchic, chaotic and popular husband (who died of a heart attack after a television appearance).
Kathleen Mary Carmel Skidelsky, née Withers, deserves to be remembered for more than one excellent novel (I am hopeful that one day S-s-s-sh will be reprinted), and it looks likely that she will be: while researching this piece, I came across the work of Shireen Mohandes, a writer and expert on bridge history. Ms Mohandes has been researching Kathleen’s life in some detail, and brought several important facts to my attention: you can read her work at www.mrbridge.co.uk/library (she was also kind enough to source the accompanying photograph and to ask permission from Kathleen’s family to reproduce it).
For now, however, it’s enough to read S-s-s-sh for its lucid, convincing depiction of a novel world of terror, and to remember Kathleen Mary Carmel as both a writer and a person of distinction.
[Editor’s note: When S. J. Simon died in July 1948, just hours after appearing on television with Terence Reese, it was front-page news on most British papers, even though the Times incorrectly identified Caryl Brahms as his wife. His death devastated his wife, who suffered from severe depression thereafter and took her own life with an overdose of barbiturates just days short of its first anniversary. S-s-s-sh is so rare that the only copy listed in Worldcat.org is at the British Library.]
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.