by Colin Watson
Upon the divans some eight or nine men were seated, fully half of whom were Orientals or half-castes. Before each stood a little inlaid table bearing a brass tray; and upon the trays were various boxes, some apparently containing sweet-meats, others cigarettes. One or two of the visitors smoked curious, long-stemmed pipes and sipped coffee. Even as I leaned from the platform, surveying that incredible scene (incredible in a street of Soho), another devotee of hashish entered – a tall, distinguished-looking man, wearing a light coat over his evening dress. ‘Gad!’ whispered Smith, beside me – ‘Sir Byngham Pyne of the India Office! You see, Petrie! You see! This place is a lure. My God!’
In 1924, John Rhode’s mystery novel A.S.F. was based on the proposition that
despite the most desperate efforts of the Criminal Investigation Department and the police generally, the cocaine habit was alarmingly on the increase in England … Some master-brain was directing the cocaine traffic.
Who, asked Rhode, was this figure and whence did he conduct his plan of operations? The answer was sensational indeed. The organizer of the ring was none other than the brother of the Home Secretary. Scandal was averted in a way that neatly foreshadowed the non-ethic of secret service fiction forty years ahead. The criminal confessed all, then lit a poisoned cigarette. ‘One of the Home Office doctors’ hurried into the room in time to declare “The man’s dead, sir,” whereupon a high official took him aside …
‘It’s the Home Secretary’s brother,’ he whispered. ‘He always had a weak heart, he’s had to live in a warm climate and avoid exertion for years. There’ll be no need of an inquest under the circumstances. It would be a great grief to the Home Secretary and Lady Westwood.’
‘Oh, no, of course not. I can give a certificate,’ replied the doctor readily. ‘Dear me, how tragic!’
An interesting aspect of the use of the drug theme in crime novels of the period is the preoccupation with loss of will-power that it reveals. The fact that half the habitués of the Rohmer hashish house were foreigners was unremarkable; it was the presence among them of a British Civil Servant – a titled one, at that – which was intended to make the readers’ flesh creep. If Sir Byngham Pyne had succumbed to the lure of an alien vice, who could say what secrets he might not betray to the enemies of his country?
In the Moorcroft Manor Mystery, a character says of another, a man of shifty aspect: ‘Don’t admire the old man’s choice. Looks a regular doper from Limehouse.’
And in one of the popular ‘Colonel Gore’ detective stories, a woman of odd appearance excited the comment:
‘I bet the old thing dopes … She’s as yellow as a Chink. Weird old frump … gets up at three o’clock in the day, Sylvia says, and floats around in a dressing gown until she goes to bed again.’
These and countless similar references suggest wide acceptance of the idea that drugs not only delivered their users into the power of an alien race, but actually imparted to them some of the characteristics of that race. Here was a variation on the ancient belief that a person who had sold his soul to the devil acquired from his master certain diabolical trade-marks – the inability to cast a shadow, for instance. It was less disturbing to hold some outside agency responsible for the scandalous behaviour of one’s fellow citizens than to have doubts about the stability of the social order. A similar desire to transfer blame would be evidenced by the spate of espionage fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. This was to feature ‘brain-washing’ rather than drugs as the evil device whereby foreign conspirators try to erode the will of free and decent people.
One of the true contributory causes of the growth of drug addiction in the 1920s was the return to civilian life of large numbers of servicemen already reliant on the morphia they had been given to relieve the pain of wounds. So it may fairly be said that war, and the feelings of disgust and guilt associated with it, contributed to the drug phobia so persistently reflected in crime novels. Perhaps reaction to the war, and in particular to the ‘cold steel’ aspect of bayonet fighting, was also responsible to some extent for the fascination that knives and daggers held for readers. The number of deaths by stabbing offered for investigation by the police and detectives of fiction was remarkably high in relation to actual crime statistics. Every second or third murder victim on the library shelves had died by puncture. Writers tried hard to reconcile this apparent indulgence of public morbidity with their duty to assuage public conscience. The most obvious device was to make the criminal a foreigner, but because it was obvious and therefore inimical to the mystery element, this method eventually fell out of favour. Emphasis came to be laid instead on the un-Englishness of the knife as a weapon. It was commonly termed ‘wicked-looking’ or ‘evil’ and some of the higher-flown prose of the thriller writers was reserved to describe the elaborate workmanship of this alien cutlery and to convey the sense of revulsion it inspired:
… a long, fifteenth century Italian dagger. The hilt was an exquisite piece of workmanship, beautifully chased and encrusted at the upper end with uncut jewels … The blade … was very slender and exquisitely graceful, fashioned from steel that had in it a curious greenish tinge which lent the whole weapon an unmistakably sinister appearance.
Margery Allingham, The Crime at Black Dudley (1929).
A catalogue of all the daggers meticulously identified in crime fiction would be a long one, embracing weapons from Italy, Spain, Corsica, France, North Africa, Arabia, Malaya, Mexico, China, Mongolia and even Ancient Egypt. There were poniards, stilettos, pangas, krishes, sacrificial knives – everything, in fact, but the good old-fashioned Sheffield carver (a leading choice, it may be noted, of the English domestic murderer in real life). Readers seem to have been invited to suppose that such weapons possessed some kind of compulsive quality, derived from the nasty nature of their original owners, which was more to blame for the crimes than the actual perpetrators.
Sergeant Long compressed his lips beneath his heavy moustache. ‘It was no accident, Colonel. He was stabbed in three places. It’s an ugly business, this. I saw the knife myself, sir. A nasty little affair. I’d say it was a black man’s or a yellow man’s knife, myself. I saw a knife once something just like it with a stoker I had to take off a West African cargo boat … A native knife of some sort that was – the chap had got it from a nigger, he told us.’
Lynn Brock, The Deductions of Colonel Gore.
Lynn Brock’s real name was Allister McAllister and he was a prolific writer of detective stories during the 1920s. The attitudes he expressed were shared by scores of his fellow authors who, like McAllister, saw no reason why they should not state them explicitly in novels of entertainment. Publishers presumably had no fear of such sentiments being considered offensive by readers, or they would have discouraged them. As it was, huge sales continued to be enjoyed by ‘Sapper’, a rabid racialist; by John Buchan, whose characters frequently made disparaging remarks about Jews and Negroes; by the anti-Semitic G. K. Chesterton; and by other equally famous and equally psychotic authors. Not even Victor Gollancz, a man of international sympathies and a declared champion of minorities, seems to have thought of trying to restrain Dorothy L. Sayers from the snide remarks which she was always slipping into the detective stories that Gollancz published, for example:
This gentleman, rather curly in the nose and fleshy about the eyelids, nevertheless came under Mr Chesterton’s definition of a nice Jew, for his name was neither Montagu nor McDonald, but Nathan Abrahams, and he greeted Lord Peter with a hospitality amounting to enthusiasm.
‘I want you to come and dine at the Soviet Club with me tonight.’ ‘Good God, Mary, why? You know I hate the place. Cooking’s beastly, the men don’t shave, and the conversation gets my goat.’
‘… awkward little Italian fellow, with a knife – active as a monkey.’
(Lord Peter Views the Body, 1928)
Margery Allingham became a highly accomplished and an unfailingly literate contributor to mystery fiction. Her later books won the approval of the m
ore serious critics and were read by professional and academic people. Here, though, are two of her early villians:
He was a foreigner, grossly fat, and heavily jowled … heavily-lidded eyes, broad nose, shock of hair, worn long and brushed straight back from the amazingly high forehead.
The man was a foreigner, so much was evident at a glance; but that in itself was not sufficient to interest him so particularly … He was white-haired, very small and delicately made, with long graceful hands which he used a great deal in his conversation, making gestures, swaying his long, pale fingers gracefully, easily. Under the sleek white hair which waved straight back from a high forehead his face was grey, vivacious, and peculiarly wicked.
(The Crime at Black Dudley)
The descriptions are of a more skilful kind than the average thriller writer would have managed to produce, but they are calculated to chime with the same sort of prejudices as those cherished by ‘Sapper’ or Rohmer. Thus, the first man was not just fat – as a jolly English yeoman might be fat – but grossly so. He was, in fact, a German, or, as the author put it, a Hun. His hair being worn long was in 1929 a sure sign of ‘artiness’ and the high forehead betokened intellectualism, another extremely suspect affectation. Height of forehead was also a noticeable feature of the second villain, but in his case it went with long and graceful hands and a small, delicate body. Odd sexual proclivities are here implied. That these would have been Continental in origin readers might have inferred from the mention of the man’s use of gestures in conversation. The phrase ‘peculiarly wicked’ is made understandable by the preceding adjective ‘vivacious’. An Englishman with white hair (which has strong sentimental connotations) is most unlikely to be wicked, but the possibility is just conceivable. That he should combine wickedness with vivacity, however, is altogether out of the question. Peculiar to foreigners, as Miss Allingham’s public well knew, is the capacity to sin and look pleased about it at the same time.
German villains were stock furniture of the crime novel from 1918 onwards, although few were as sophisticated as Miss Allingham’s gentleman with white hair. The majority were scowlers and snarlers. They had ‘bullet-shaped’ heads and thick necks and were much given to muttering ‘hein.’ Their names were generally short and gravelly, like their tempers, and they treated their fellow malefactors with even less respect than they showed their opponents. Crude, two-dimensional copies of the wartime caricatures of the national enemy, the German crooks of fiction were plainly in the wrong profession. Their accents alone would have aroused the suspicion of the dimmest detective, while choleric disposition and sadistic habits must have been disastrous encumbrances in a calling that demands self-effacement above all things. The unconvincing behaviour of these evildoers suggests that writers continued to employ them simply because they felt that the hatred of Germans stimulated during the war was a normal and permanent public emotion. An element of laziness was involved too. Whole paragraphs of descriptions of sinister attributes could be dispensed with simply by calling a character Karl. Popular literature is full of mental short cuts, no less acceptable to author than to reader, and any convention or cliché which signals adoption of the appropriate attitude, tends to be self-perpetuating. For this reason, clumsy Teutonic criminals continued to swagger through crime fiction long after the passions of 1914–18 had cooled and the traditional pro-German sympathy of the British Establishment had begun to reassert itself. ‘Sapper’ hinted at the uneasiness aroused in some jingoistic writers by failure to let bygones be bygones and to find some new and politically more deserving object of vilification:
‘I know they’re Huns. I know it’s just one’s bounden duty to use every gift one has been given to beat ’em. But, damn it, John, they’re men too. They go back to their womenkind.’
(The Final Count)
‘Sapper’s’ recurrent arch-villain, it may be noted, was not a German. He was called Peterson, a name much more suggestive of Scandinavian origin.
Compared with the somewhat half-hearted presentation of Hunnish criminals, the supposed characteristics of some other nationalities were depicted in a way that left no doubt of the real dislike many authors felt for them. It is in the aside, the casual reference, the quoted remark of a character, that a novelist’s true opinion is to be found, rather than in the main body of his narrative. William Le Queux, for instance, left to a minor figure in one of his stories the job of telling the public what an insufferable lot were the native inhabitants of the French Mediterranean coast. This man announced his intention to
‘pitch my quarters in Cairo, where English-speaking visitors are protected, properly treated, and have their comfort looked after. … The Riviera has declined terribly these past five years. Why the people here actually hissed the Union Jack at the last Battle of Flowers!’
(The Gamblers)
Dorothy Sayers also took a poor view of the French, who had no public schools. She deputed her Lord Peter Wimsey to point out that
‘owing to the system of State education in that country, though all the French write vilely, it is rare to find one who writes very much more vilely than the rest.’
(The Nine Tailors)
Wimsey was given further witty things to say about the bad quality of French envelopes, pens, ink and government departments.
Sydney Horler’s special aversion was to ‘stinking Italianos’ but otherwise his contempt for non-Britishers was fairly equitably distributed. He considered the French dishonest, the Americans absurd. ‘The Average Swiss,’ he wrote, ‘has a curiously wooden expression – but an alert look comes into his eyes directly you begin to move your hand pocketward.’ As for European footballers, ‘I suggest that if any more of these ridiculous international matches … are played, the visitors be searched before they go on the field; they may have a knife or so hidden in their stockings.’ He addressed the following plea to Gilbert Frankau, bestselling romantic and adventure novelist:
‘Let me implore you, with all the force at my command, if you write any more Secret service novels, not to give your hero the name of ‘Marcus Orlando’ and not to make him wear boots with cloth uppers. Levantines may have their place in fiction, but they should not figure as beaux chevaliers in British novels of adventure.’
(More Strictly Personal)
Horler’s references to Jews, although sly, invariably had that self-congratulatory tone used by people who believe they are saying something agreeable to their hearers. He was only one of several popular authors of the period who put anti-Semitic sentiments into print and there is nothing to suggest that their assumption of the approval of their readers was misplaced. The Jew was, without question, the favourite object of British middle class scorn. His mere existence was felt to be an affront. Horler in 1933 had only to take a walk by the sea to be moved to protest:
The choicest collection of Hebraic types I have yet seen (even in New York) was to be observed; what it is about Bournemouth that attracts these pronouncedly Asiatic-looking Jews I do not know …’
(Strictly Personal)
while a few years earlier Allister McAllister described the similarly mortifying state of affairs that awaited a British Army Officer on his return from service abroad.
Two days after his forty-second birthday he had landed in England, spent a week interviewing solicitors and tailors and such things [sic], and, bored to extinction by a London which seemed to him entirely populated by Jews, had fled westwards in search of such of his kith and kin as still survived.
(Deductions of Colonel Gore)
It is a matter of conjecture whether the rise of fascism in Europe and the outbreak of a second world war were helped along by the attitudes of the large section of British society that found echo in Mr McAllister’s books. About one thing, though, there can be no argument. By the time the Nazis had had their way, it was a vastly greater multitude of mankind than the kith and kin of a bored British officer whose survival was past praying for.
CHAPTER 11
Below
Stairs
When Bulldog Drummond was making inquiries in the London suburb of Peckham about a gang of international criminals, one of the first questions he put to a householder was whether anything suspicious had been seen by her servants. The house was shabby, the woman down-at-heel, the neighbourhood seedy. And yet, because the woman was the owner of property, Drummond took it for granted that she employed two or more servants.
The assumption was not a piece of simple-mindedness in the tradition of Marie Antoinette’s ‘Why don’t they eat cake’? ‘Sapper’ might have been a lieutenant-colonel, but he was no aristocrat, insulated from the realities of life. He expected a woman living in her own house to keep servants. It was the rule, even in Peckham.
During the first world war, nearly half a million men and women left domestic service to enter the armed forces or industry. Few of them returned to their old jobs. And yet, in 1921, one third of all employed women were still classified as being in service. The number was three times as great as that of women in the textile industry. Women servants outnumbered women teachers by nine to one. Ten years earlier, in the final glow of Edwardian self-indulgence, every fourth middle-class family in London had equipped itself with a resident servant. Only one family in eight could boast this advantage in the early 1920s, although in the wealthier areas the proportion was as high as 50%.