The Trail of the Purple Python

Tsar Nicholas II with his son: thanks to Commons Wikimedia

Title: The Trail of the Purple Python

Author: not known 

Publisher: not known 

Source book: Have His Carcase by Dorothy L Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey #8)

Paul Alexis, a professional dancer at a smart seaside resort, suffers from haemophilia and delusions of grandeur. He claims to be a member of the Russian Imperial family and thinks he is involved in a conspiracy to replace the revolutionary government with himself installed as Tsar. He goes to meet his destiny on a Devon beach with £300 in gold in a money belt [worth more than £22,000 today].

A little sketch of Paul’s family tree falls out of a book called The Girl who gave All. Unfortunately the haemophilia that afflicted Alexis, son of Nicholas II, was inherited from Queen Victoria, who does not feature in Paul’s ancestry. Possibly Queen Victoria’s unique contribution to the royal families of Europe was not fully understood in the early 1930s when Have His Carcase was written. 

Paul is much addicted to reading light novels and improbable adventure stories, as is his ex-girlfriend Leila. On his shelf are books in Russian, and one called A Bid for the Throne.  Leila tells Harriet about The Trail of the Purple Python: ‘the Purple Python was a Turkish millionaire, and he had a house full of steel-lined rooms, and luxurious divans and obelisks….’

Obelisks? asks Harriet

‘Well, you know. Ladies who weren’t quite respectable.’ [She means odalisques*.] Anyway, ‘he had agents in every country in Europe, who bought up compromising letters and he wrote to his victims in cypher and signed his missives with a squiggle in purple ink. Only the English detective’s young lady [girlfriend] found out his secret by disguising herself as an obelisk and the detective who was really Lord Humphrey Chillingford arrived with the police just in time to rescue her from the loathsome embrace of the Purple Python.’

Leila thinks it a terribly exciting book. Paul, she says, read lots of books like that. [I’m not surprised! It sounds utterly gripping.]

Sadly, Paul’s conspiracy has been concocted by his, rather sweet but much older, fiancée’s jealous son. Mr Henry Weldon is deeply in debt and determined that his mother’s fortune should not pass out of the family. [Spoiler alert: definitely a motive for murder.]

Thanks to Wikipedia 

*odalisque: a female slave or concubine, especially one in the harem of the Sultan of Turkey