The Empty Grave of Edgar Allan Poe

THE LIBRARY OF THADDEUS TRIPP

8. Thaddeus Tripp and the Case of the Rich Tea Biscuits

          “No one knows who wrote them, although Monteros takes credit for the translation into English.”
          Thaddeus was talking about The Casebook of Lu Chow: Chinese Detective. Again.
          “Which is odd since Monteros did not know the language at all and always handed his own stories to Arnold Beckman to translate. Interesting fellow, Beckman.”
          I doubted it.
          “Moved to Argentina after the war. Ostensibly to hunt down Nazis - he had some connection with the Intelligence Corps. - but he went native. Literally, became a gaucho for a while, then opened a bookshop in Buenos Aires on Warnes Street. That’s how he made the acquaintance of Monteros. He offered his services as a translator and the rest, as they say, is history.”
          I didn’t believe a word of it. I knew the owners of bookshops. They were not the type to gauch or hunt down the Nazi - more the other way about.
          “One theory is that Beckman himself wrote The Casebook of Lu Chow: Chinese Detective and wished to remain anonymous in case critics, seeing his name, would assign true authorship to Monteros. Beckman was in awe of the man, and would not risk despoiling his reputation. Ironic then that Monteros should claim to have translated the stories into English. Don’t you think?”
          That needed some kind of response and I was too busy breathing smoke and letting it kill me. “Yes, very ironic.”
          Thaddeus gave a small harrumph and went to make the tea. I could see I had upset him. He wanted to engage me in literary conversation and pretend that we were sitting in huge leather armchairs in the Athenæum with our snifters of fine Napoleon brandy, whereas I was sat on his sofa from Argos and he was in the back kitchen boiling the kettle. I would have to make an effort, but it was becoming more and more difficult. As he brought the tea and the biscuit tin, apologising for the lack of gingers and telling me I’d have to make do with Rich Tea - perhaps the least interesting biscuit in the world - I asked him why The Casebook of Lu Chow: Chinese Detective was called The Casebook of Lu Chow: Chinese Detective since the Chinese detective not only did not detect anything, he was also not Chinese.
          “Exactly,” said Thaddeus. “Do you think it’s surreal? Or more dadaistic?”
          “It’s not tacky enough to be surrealist. Melting clocks and men in bowler hats, although we all know where Magritte got that idea.”
          “We do?”
          “Besides,” I chose to ignore the question, “nothing can surpass the surrealist films of Godfrey Ho.”
          “Surely you mean Luis Bunuel?”
          That’s one trick you learn when dealing with know-it-alls like Thaddeus Tripp, there’s too much stuff in the world and so they have to be selective. All their information has been filtered through the correct channels so if you chuck in someone like Godfrey Ho they flounder. “No, Ho. Don’t tell me you’ve never encountered his work? It’s marvelous. Out-surreals anything else, Bunuel, Lynch, all those interminable Russian films about a man with a bucket.” Maybe it was the Rich Tea talking, minor disappointments can have major consequences, but I’d had enough. Monteros was bad enough but The Casebook of Lu Chow: Chinese Detective really took the biscuit. I had decided to fight back. “No, it’s not surrealist, and if it’s dada then, again, we know where they stole their ideas.”
          “We do?”
          “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the Transformationalists. Why, man, they originated here in Stoke. Years before the Frenchies tied a baguette to their hat.” I then proceeded to tell Thaddeus all about a group of disenchanted artists from the Potteries and its environs, back at the end of the 19th century, and how they tried to change the world through art and how their motto was ‘everybody is an artist’, and how they put on strange exhibitions which caused riots and how they wrote one word poems and how they wrote silent music and music for thousand piece orchestras. I made up names and dates and convinced Thaddeus that look as hard as he could he would find no mention of them in any reference book or history of art in England. “Don’t bother with the old Sentinels up Hanley Library either,” I added, “they were shunned by the Press and ignored by the public. If it weren’t for a bloke from Denmark, who was over here visiting Marie Reymond, then the word would never have got out at all. But he stopped off in Montmartre for a month or two on his way back wom and that’s how dada and surrealism and all the rest got born.” I lit a cigarette and sat back in the Argos sofa and gave some serious puff.
          For once, Thaddeus was silent. Whether he believed me, I don’t know, but it was pleasant to watch the smoke curl around his fat face and know that for once I had beaten him at his own game.

When I returned home I went for a stroll on the internet. I looked up Transformationalists and found that it was quite a popular term, cropping up in religious, political and linguistic circles. It was also used in a novel by Norman Spinrad called The Mind Game where the Transformationalists are a thinly disguised version of the Scientologists. And I thought I had made it up. A tad disappointed, I put Arnold Beckman into the engine and discovered that he was the translator of Monteros, a former agent for M.I.6, a gaucho and the owner of a secondhand bookshop on Warnes Street in Buenos Aires.