A Taste for Honey (1941) introduced Mr. Mycroft, a tall, slender gentleman who had retired to Sussex to keep bees. The story is told by Sydney Silchester, a reclusive man who loves honey, which he obtains from Mr. and Mrs. Heregrove, the village beekeepers, until he discovers the lady’s body, black and swollen from bee stings. After the coroner’s inquest, Silchester turns to Mr. Mycroft for a fresh supply of honey and receives a warning about Heregrove’s killer bees.

Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho (1959) and many other novels and stories, and Anthony Marriott adapted the novel for a truly awful contemporary screenplay titled The Deadly Bees (1966). For an episode of television’s The Elgin Hour, Alvin Sapinsley wrote the script for “Sting of Death,” which starred Boris Karloff as Mr. Mycroft; it aired on February 22, 1955.

Mr. Mycroft appeared in two additional novels by Heard: Reply Paid (1942) and The Notched Hairpin (1949). Among Heard’s other science fiction and mystery novels, perhaps his best-known work is the short story “The President of the United States of America, Detective,” which won the first prize in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s contest in 1947.

“The Enchanted Garden” was originally published in the March 1949 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

The Enchanted Garden

By H. F. Heard

NATURE’S A queer one,’ said Mr. Squeers,” I remarked.

“I know what moves you to misquote Dickens,” was Mr. Mycroft’s reply.

Here was a double provocation: first, there was the injury of being told that the subject on which one was going to inform someone was already known to him, and secondly, there was the insult that the happy literary quotation with which the information was to be introduced was dismissed as inaccurate. Still it’s no use getting irritated with Mr. Mycroft. The only hope was to lure his pride onto the brink of ignorance.

“Then tell me,” I remarked demurely, “what I have just been reading?”

“The sad, and it is to be feared, fatal accident that befell Miss Hetty Hess who is said to be extremely rich, and a ‘colorful personality’ and ‘young for her years’—the evidence for these last two statements being a color photograph in the photogravure section of the paper which establishes that her frock made up for its brevity only by the intense viridity of its green color.”

I am seldom untruthful deliberately, even when considerably nonplussed; besides it was no use: Mr. Mycroft was as usual one move ahead. He filled in the silence with: “I should have countered that naturalists are the queer ones.”

I had had a moment to recover, and felt that I could retrieve at least a portion of my lost initiative. “But there’s no reason to link the accident with the death. The notice only mentions that she had had a fall a few weeks previously. The cause of death was ‘intestinal stasis’.”