Snobbery With Violence

by Colin Watson

  Why did they? Why, for that matter, did the readers of Sax Rohmer continue to be entranced by his ‘slave girl’ fantasies? And why, in a different sphere of escapist fiction, did Ethel M. Dell’s devotees follow so eagerly the fortunes of one utterly incredible woman after another?

  Several reasons are suggested by cross-reference, so to speak, between the books and their times, between the authors and the kind of people known to have read their work.

  The times, economically, materially, were hard times. For the overwhelming majority of people there was no wealth and very little protection from the effects of poverty. The books, in the main, were bought or borrowed or rented by that section of the community that lay between the very rich and the diligent but chronically hard-up 60 or 70%. To this middle section the writers themselves belonged – by origin and allegiance, if not always by standard of income. The constant preoccupation of most of its members, naturally enough, was the preservation of the structure of society as a whole. They nursed no hopes of climbing into the seats of power, but their contentment always was tinged with the fear of falling. They prayed for a three-fold stability: the stability of the country in relation to the rest of the world, political stability within the country, and moral stability – the continued prevelance of those rules of behaviour which they had been brought up to revere.

  From the turn of the century until the second world war, writers of crime and detection stories took care never to offend patriotic susceptibilities. The political tone was conservative save in a handful of instances. As for morals, it would be difficult to point to any other single branch of popular entertainment that conformed more strictly to current notions of decency.

  ‘Shut the door, Wick,’ she commanded. ‘And then come and sit down here. I want you not to look at me. That’s why I’ve switched off the lights … You’re such an old dear that I know you’ll hardly believe that I could be capable of the limit. I’m afraid I am, or rather, was. On a certain night in December I got as near to it as doesn’t matter. I was fool enough, mad enough, to stay a night at an hotel in Bournemouth – with Mr Barrington.’ Gore stared at her blankly. ‘Hell, Pickles,’ he said at length, softly, ‘what did you do that for?’

  (The Deductions of Colonel Gore)

  Lynn Brock’s readers did not require ‘the limit’ to be physiologically specified. Such public school euphemisms were familiar to them. More than that, they were literally meaningful. Extra-marital copulation – and in Bournemouth, of all places – really was beyond the bounds, and it was a daring writer who for purposes of plot allowed a character to confess to it, however obliquely. Only thirty years later, commentaries on coital encounters were to be a commonplace of the crime novel, but in the 1920s ruttish imaginations had to conjure what they could from passages such as this:

  From the tip of her sprucely-waving golden head to the toes of her smartly-sensible shoes, her orderly freshness and daintiness were without blemish – an estate of jealously guarded, minutely vigilant propriety – sweet, sound English womanliness, scrupulously groomed, meticulously decked for the afternoon.

  The heroine of another thriller of the earlier part of the inter-war period was described as walking

  with magnificent self-assurance and an easy grace. Her flaxen hair was neatly shingled, revealing the contour of a perfectly shaped head; her intense blue eyes danced with the divine fire of youth.

  Blondes – already out of favour with serious novelists, for whom perhaps they represented too brash a taste – were openly preferred by the thriller writers. So were blue eyes and neat hair. It was, after all, the age of the cloche hat. ‘Naturalness’ was frequently emphasized, with a wealth of horticultural simile. ‘This fragrant blossom,’ enthused Ralph Trevor, ‘from the garden of womanhood who sat opposite …’ Less extravagant, but reflecting a similar distrust of cosmetics, was E. R. Punshon’s description of the heroine of The Unexpected Legacy (1929).

  She was about the middle height, with a very light and graceful bearing, and her small face was of a lovely oval, with small, exquisitely shaped features and two very serious, thoughtful, and extremely bright blue eyes. Her complexion was as pure as that of a little child, and evidently owed as little to any artificial aid.

  Two years later, in Proof Counter Proof, Punshon had a character lament the difficulty of telling a woman’s age because, with all of them using make-up, ‘you can’t tell a grandmother from a schoolgirl, except by the schoolgirl knowing so much more’. Discernible here is the resentment aroused in settled and respectable people by the precociousness, as it seems to them, of a younger generation. This was frequently expressed in detective fiction, as was disapproval of overt sexuality. Punshon’s woman of indeterminate age, for example, ‘had dark hair and eyes, dressed up to the nines, and you could smell her from one end of the shop to the other’. She had a sort of foreign way with her and wore her hair long, not shingled or cropped in the current style.

  Long hair was commonly associated with moral laxity until the later 1930s, when it became fashionable once again. A bunch of black ringlets was part of Harriet Vane’s ordinance of seduction when she set off to turn the head of a suspected criminal and to extract information from him. She selected a slinky garment … with a corsage which outlined the figure and a skirt which waved tempestuously about her ankles. An oversized hat hid half her face, while high-heeled beige shoes and sheer silk stockings, with embroidered gloves and handbag, completed this alluring toilette. The ringlets, Dorothy Sayers was careful to add, had been skilfully curled into position by the head hairdresser at the Resplendent.

  Miss Vane obtained the information she was after, then calmly disengaged from the suspect without having allowed him the slightest liberty in return. It may be objected that a branch of fiction that always had enshrined the ideals of fairness and sportsmanship was no medium for sexual sharp practice by a heroine ruthless enough to wear a tight corsage and a floppy hat. But the victim of the subterfuge had even more to suffer. When, understandably, he spoke later of his experience in ungentlemanly terms, there was revealed to him that side of the British aristocratic character which normally is glimpsed only by fleeing foreign soldiery or by importunate tradesmen:

  ‘Manners, please!’ said Wimsey. ‘You will kindly refer to Miss Vane in a proper way and spare me the boring nuisance of pushing your teeth out at the back of your neck.’

  The fact is that there was a certain elasticity in the ethical posture of Miss Sayers and the people for whom she wrote. This permitted acceptance of the ineligibility of certain classes of people to receive the benefits of fair play. Lord Peter once listed such outsiders as ‘liars and half-wits and prostitutes and dagoes’. It was a hasty, off-the-cuff inventory, but it can be elaborated in the light of extended reading of Miss Sayers’s novels. Liars would include all who failed to observe the law, particularly those substantial sections of it devoted to the protection of property and privilege. Into the half-wit category would be put anyone who fell down on jokes about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also people guilty of sartorial gaffes and errors of pronunciation and mistakes with fish knives. Prostitute presumably applied to any woman who exploited her sexual attractions for money, as distinct from social advancement; while dago would be a generic term for all non-British persons and particularly those of swarthy complexion.

  To cheat or treat shabbily anyone in these categories was permissible. One did not lose caste by doing so. Nor did a lady – a real lady – put her reputation at risk by associating with such people for the purpose of worming confidences out of them in a good cause, as when

  Miss Harriet Vane, in a claret-coloured frock, swayed round the dance floor of the Hotel Resplendent in the arms of Mr Antoine, the fair-haired gigolo … who was rather surprisingly neither Jew nor South American dago, nor Central European mongrel, but French.

  This and Miss Vane’s earlier encounter of a similar nature were in public, needless to say. Thriller writers were more circumspect on behalf of he
roines who found themselves alone with a man of unpredictable or evil intent. The possibility of sexual molestation was one that had to be treated carefully. Commenting on what he called the ‘mealy-mouthed’ quality of detective fiction, Cyril Hare observed that this was to be expected of the ‘favourite reading of the very classes who are most easily shocked by frankness in such matters as sexual behaviour’. An almost Victorian reticence continued to be observed in crime fiction for decades after treatment of unsavoury topics had come to be accepted, within limits, as a legitimate feature of the straight novel.

  John Rhode, who turned to writing solid, workmanlike detective fiction after retiring from a military career as Major Cecil John Charles Street, was not ashamed to declare one of his heroines ‘as straight as they make them’. In his Tragedy at the Unicorn (1928) a girl is included on a list of suspects simply because the murder victim had, on one occasion, caught her in his arms and tried to kiss her.

  Edgar Wallace was constantly putting his women in desperate straits, but lascivious hands were never laid upon them. It could be argued that the pace of the action never gave venery a chance. Seduction, even ravishment, does take time; the instant rapists of the Chase–Spillane–Janson school were yet to be unloosed upon an age of even greater credulity than the 1920s. However, what in that coming time would be termed programming difficulties were not the reason why Wallace and his contemporaries spared their heroines’ maidenheads. They simply did not feel any compulsion to treat of sensuality in the context of the thriller. Margaret Belman removed her skirt readily enough at the behest and in the presence of Mr J. G. Reeder, but this was only because the water in the cellar where they were trapped had risen to a level which made swimming unavoidable. The public, Wallace considered, was more interested in the couple’s survival and ultimate escape than in the reaction of the hero to the baring of his beloved’s thighs.

  A theme that often recurred in the tales of Wallace and others was that of a girl physically held under duress or intimidated by other means, including threats to injure or expose someone dear to her, until she acceded to her tormentor’s demands. It was a very old, one might almost say venerable, theme, but it was acceptable only so long as a woman’s ‘honour’ was deemed to be a commodity, and a negotiable commodity at that. Few readers now would accept seriously the idea of a villain restraining not only the girl but his own appetite until after the wedding. The modern conception of a criminal is that of an utterly amoral opportunist. He is witty, photogenic, sadistic, sexy and clever. That is how the public, conditioned largely by television, likes him to be. Wallace’s public, many of whom were also readers of Oppenheim and Anthony Hope, Sabatini and Conan Doyle, John Buchan and William Le Queux, cherished a different kind of fantasy. The preferred criminal was daring, dangerous and vaguely anti-social; but he was honourable according to his lights, a giver and taker of sporting chances, and, on all the evidence, as highly sexed as a muffin. Girls were abducted by him or his hirelings but never for on-the-spot enjoyment. Either the object was to put pressure on a father, husband or fiancé, or it was to get the girl herself to the altar, with benefit of clergy and a photograph in The Tatler.

  Respectability, such stories implied, was a universal currency that not even a burglar or a bank robber would think of debasing. In books without number its defence was propounded as a motive for murder. And what is blackmail, the second most common crime in the detection calendar, if it is not a means of putting respectability at hazard?

  Even the pulp magazine market was sensible in the 1930s of the need to preserve a certain decorum for the benefit of those whom the publishers of Spicy Detective rather nervously called ‘certain groups of people in different parts of the country’. In a circular to contributors on both sides of the Atlantic, they laid down, inter alia, the following rules:

  In describing breasts of a female character, avoid anatomical descriptions. If it is necessary for the story to have the girl give herself to a man, or be taken by him, do not go too carefully into the details … Whenever possible, avoid complete nudity of the female characters. You can have a girl strip to her underwear, or transparent negligee or nightgown, or the thin torn shreds of her garments, but while the girl is alive and in contact with a man, we do not want complete nudity. A nude female corpse is allowable, of course. Also a girl undressing in the privacy of her own room, but when men are in the action try to keep at least a shred of something on the girls. Do not have men in underwear in scenes with women, and no nude men at all. The idea is to have a very strong sex element in these stories without anything that might be interpreted as being vulgar or obscene.

  CHAPTER 13

  The little world of Mayhem Parva

  In 1925 A. E. W. Mason wrote: ‘All the great detective novels are known by and live on account of their detectives.’ This is true. For every person in the world who has heard of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle there are scores to whom the name of Sherlock Holmes is familiar and that of Doyle quite meaningless. Father Brown exists vividly as a podgy, innocent-looking priest in imaginations that retain only the dimmest image of his very solid creator. Wimsey, Poirot, Dr Thorndyke, Albert Campion, Roger Sheringham, Dr Fell, Sir Henry Merrivale were – and still are – asked for by name in libraries, as though they were waiting friends rather than characters in books.

  Towards the end of the first world war, the young wife of an English officer amused herself by writing a story about the investigation of a crime in a country house. She called it The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The book was accepted by the seventh publisher approached and was printed in 1920. The career of Agatha Christie had been launched. So had that of Hercule Poirot.

  Public acceptance of Poirot meant for Agatha Christie the difference between remaining a competent but only moderately well-paid member of the detective story industry and promotion to that small group of writers who, because their names or those of their creations are universally familiar, enjoy self-proliferating success. For half a century after the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, readers continued faithfully to follow the adventures of the egotistic, moustachioed little man who had quit the Brussels Police in 1904 and devoted a retirement in England to the pursuit and unmasking of criminals. Poirot novels have been published at an average rate of nearly one a year; nineteen were written between 1920 and the outbreak of the second world war.

  Poirot, one might imagine, was not a character calculated to win the confidence and affection of the British library public of the 1920s. For one thing, he was an alien. Apart from A. E. W. Mason’s Hanaud, no foreign detectives – not even Arsène Lupin – had been thought of very highly; Charlie Chan, Mr Moto and other exotics would not cross the Atlantic for several more years. Poirot was short and had a noticeably egg-shaped head. Neither feature would have commended him to a people at once sensitive to deficiency in stature and readily amused by minor deformities. His eyes went green when he was excited and he was an incorrigible moustache-twirler. He carried a cane, smoked sissy cigarettes, was a somewhat fancy dresser, dyed his hair and spoke English with comic literalness. Without doubt, a Froggie and an effeminate Froggie at that. Was it not natural enough that six publishers had turned down The Mysterious Affair at Styles?

  But of course Poirot was not a Froggie. He was a Belgian. The distinction was an important one in 1920. Not only had the British unaccountably neglected to coin a derogatory epithet for the inhabitants of Belgium but they still were inclined to think of that country as the military propagandists of five or six years earlier had encouraged them to think – with indulgent sentimentality. Poirot’s five-feet-four, his slight limp, his aggressive moustaches – these, in the context of ‘gallant little Belgium’, were admirable. So was his fastidiousness, which would have been deemed odious affectation had he been one of the French, those unreliable allies who now were making a thorough nuisance of themselves just when England wanted only to put a poppy wreath on the nice new Unknown Soldier’s Tomb at Westminster Abbey and then settle d
own to crosswords and detective stories. For the detective story was playing an increasingly important part in the attempts by the middle class to restore its nerve and to take its mind off the irrational and disconcerting things that other people, in other places, continued so wantonly to do.

  In essence, Poirot was neither French nor Belgian. He was an altogether English creation – as English as a Moorish cinema foyer or hotel curry or comic yodellers. He personified English ideas about foreignness and was therefore immediately familiar to readers and acceptable by them. As a detective he had special qualities calculated to make him an enduring figure of fiction. He was knowing. He had an instinct for discovering the truth. He could, by a quick twist of his nimble mind, dispose of an alibi or uncover a guilty secret. If only there were more Poirots about, one felt, life and property would be much safer. And yet his extraordinary capacity for thwarting criminals and the predictable, if elaborate, triumphs of his intellect did not impose – as they well might have done – too great a strain upon the goodwill of a public traditionally impatient of the over-clever. Mrs Christie had forestalled this danger by emphasizing one of Poirot’s characteristically ‘foreign’ qualities – his cockiness – to a point of amiable absurdity.

  ‘Ah, it was a clever plan, but he did not reckon on the cleverness of Hercule Poirot!’