Snobbery With Violence

by Colin Watson

Once a vice has been rendered ridiculous, it somehow is felt to be endearing. Conan Doyle did Holmes a similar service when he made his display of superiority so theatrical that failure on his part to produce an arrogant remark at the right moment would have seemed a let-down. And in the cases both of Holmes and of Poirot a foil was provided, a companion-chronicler so obtuse, so good-naturedly dense, as to swing the reader’s sympathy firmly to the detective. The device was cunning. It meant that one either was tolerant of the monumental priggishness of Holmes or risked being equated intellectually with poor old Watson. The alternative to allowing Poirot his air of omniscience was admission to being no smarter than a Captain Hastings.

  Another means of strengthening the detective in the public regard was to contrast the success of his methods with the failure of those of the regular police, the representatives of established authority. Many crime writers adopted this method. It was favoured chiefly by the amateurs, who felt perhaps that it absolved them from the task of learning the facts about real-life investigation and legal process, but from Conan Doyle onward some of the most respected authors persisted in glorifying their own characters at the expense of stupid, pompous policemen. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, the propensity of men like Inspector Lestrade and Inspector Athelney Jones for misunderstanding the simplest clue and consequently committing heinous blunders was equalled only by Holmes’s generosity in letting them take the ultimate credit for his inspiration. Mrs Christie’s men from Scotland Yard were more responsible figures than the capering idiots propounded by Conan Doyle, but they clearly were not in the same league as Poirot.

  Mrs Christie’s detective-hero was intended to personify an orderly and methodical approach to life’s problems. Order and method were words he used a good deal in conversation, and he never tired of emphasizing the virtue of employing ‘the little grey cells’. His quaint form of speech helped to establish him as a character who would be remembered easily from book to book, and the impression grew that here was cleverness of an authoritative kind. As salesmen of encyclopaedias know well, the public is inclined to be in awe of knowledge but to distrust intelligence. In Poirot, though, seemingly disparate qualities existed side by side. He had an appealing continental politeness, was whimsically aware of the comic element in being foreign, respected True Love, British Justice and le Bon Dieu, and was just human enough to preface his brilliant solutions with the occasional faulty deduction (‘Hurry, Hastings, and let us hope we are not too late!’). It did not matter that a great deal of his apparently deeply significant commentary turned out to have had only the most tenuous connection with the case. The red herring convention had not yet become discredited and crime writers were getting away with much worse than murder in their manufacture of distraction, false trails, unlikely motives and long coincidence. Even the great Holmes had been involved in more than one corny situation, so Mrs Christie’s readers presumably saw nothing preposterous in Poirot’s feigning death (after pouring his cup of poisoned camomile tea ‘into a little bottle’ for later analysis) in order to deceive his would-be assassin; or entrapping a murderess by confronting her with an actor made up as her dead husband, phosphorescent paint and all. Ironically, it was a Christie character who delivered the opinion: ‘I myself think the Sherlock Holmes stories grossly overrated. The fallacies – the really amazing fallacies that there are in those stories …’

  If the little Belgian invariably scored with intuitive brilliance, it was because most readers were not inclined to examine closely his lines of reasoning. The stories, after all, had been written not as academic exercises in logic but as escapist entertainment. For the customers of Phillips Oppenheim and Anthony Hope and William Le Queux, escape had meant transference into a world of riches and romance, of beautiful women and handsome men where duellists and maîtres d’hôtel and millionaires abounded but where no one, apparently, ever delivered milk or drove a tram or went back to Oldham or Milwaukee. Agatha Christie and her imitators offered something very different. It was a dream, but not of marble halls. The picture was of familiar homeliness and it was populated with stock characters observing approved rules of behaviour according to station, and isolated utterly from all such anxieties and unpleasantness as were not responsive to religion, medicine and the law.

  The setting for the crime stories by what we might call the Mayhem Parva school would be a cross between a village and a commuters’ dormitory in the South of England, self-contained and largely self-sufficient. It would have a well-attended church, an inn with reasonable accommodation for itinerant detective-inspectors, a village institute, library and shops – including a chemist’s where weed killer and hair dye might conveniently be bought. The district would be rural, but not uncompromisingly so – there would be a good bus service for the keeping of suspicious appointments in the nearby town, for instance – but its general character would be sufficiently picturesque to chime with the English suburb dweller’s sadly uninformed hankering after retirement to ‘the country’.

  There would dwell in Mayhem Parva a number of well-to-do people, some in professional practice of various kinds, some retired, some just plain rich and for ever messing about with their wills. The rest of the population would be working folk, static in habit and thought. Their talk, modelled on middle-class notions of the vernacular of shop assistants and garage hands, would be a standardized compound of ungrammatical, cheerful humility. Characters would not be easy to distinguish as individuals, but class would be easily identifiable and the sheep would be separable from the goats without much trouble.

  Four people were in the room: a somewhat flashily dressed man with a shifty, unpleasant face to whom I took an immediate dislike; a woman of much the same type, though handsome in a coarse fashion; another woman dressed in neat black who stood apart from the rest and whom I took to be the housekeeper; and a tall man dressed in sporting tweeds, with a clever, capable face, and who was clearly in command of the situation. ‘Dr Giles,’ said the constable…

  (Thirteen for luck, 1966)

  A brigadier would talk like a brigadier, a vicar like a vicar, a wealthy hypochondriac would be unmistakably given to spite and self-pity, and her paid companion would be as meek and dowdy as are all paid companions. There would exist for these people no really sordid, intractable problems, such as growing old or losing faith or being abandoned or going mad. One or more would get murdered; the rest would be suspected for a while; one of them would ultimately be trussed for the gallows, if he or she had not first bitten on a pill smelling of bitter almonds or fallen from a train or something. And then, the air cleared, everything would be set to continue as before, right, tight, and reliable.

  Such was England as represented by Mayhem Parva. It was, of course, a mythical kingdom, a fly-in-amber land. It was derived in part from the ways and values of a society that had begun to fade away from the very moment of the shots at Sarajevo; in part from that remarkably durable sentimentality which, even today, can be expressed in the proposition that every church clock has stopped at 14.50 hours and honey is a perpetual comestible at vicarages.

  It offered not outward escape, as did books of travel, adventure, international intrigue, but inward – into a sort of museum of nostalgia. The word ‘cosy’ often has been applied, and in no pejorative sense, to the Mayhem Parva writers. Their choice of scene is held to have been calculated on the principle that the eruption of violence in the midst of the ordinary, the familiar, the respectable, is more shocking and therefore more satisfying than the older-fashioned presentation of villainy in surroundings unremittingly sinister. But was this their plan? Did they really expect readers to be horror-stricken by the discovery of a corpse in the tea tent at the church garden fête? The answer would be yes only if crime at Mayhem Parva had been the province of writers concerned with reality, writers such as Francis Iles, Raymond Postgate and C. Day Lewis before the second war and Julian Symons, William Mole and Mary Kelly after it. Real murder arouses in ordinary people terror, revulsion and dismay.
Description of how the members of a small isolated community would in fact react to violent death in their midst is an altogether different matter from the presentation of an entertaining puzzle. And it was the puzzle-setters who dominated the field of crime fiction up to the 1940s and beyond. Their policy was to keep the griefs of their characters short and formal and to hurry everyone along to the interviews in the library in good time for them to dress for dinner – a social obligation that not even the most extravagant multiples of homicide were allowed to disrupt.

  So long as such conventions ruled it was quite impossible to believe in the commission of a crime in the sense of finding room in the mind for the true blackness of spilled blood, the obscene vacuity of a murdered face. One noted instead the game’s familiar counters and symbols; its clues, harmless as play money – gun, dagger, paperweight, poisoned thorn, spreading stain, body slumped, acrid reek of cordite, expression of terror as if, clutched in stiffening fingers, not a pretty sight, watch-glass smashed at 3.27 … Who was supposed to be dead, anyway? More often than not someone of wealth or of substantial expectations, a blackmailer perhaps, or a business rival, or somebody about to expose a piece of trickery, or simply a man or woman hated by everyone in sight. Very rarely was the corpse that of an innocent or venerated person. A young girl, other than one of specified immorality, was seldom the victim, a child never. Religion played no part in these crimes, save when the faith concerned was non-Christian, in which case it was described as a ‘cult’. In short, sympathy for the departed was not solicited; rather was there an implication that getting murdered was, if not actually culpable, at least a misfortune involving contributory negligence. Agatha Christie’s view of the casualties in her stories is a consistently detached one. The plot, the puzzle, is all, and apart from an occasional reiteration by Poirot of his own basic principle (‘I have a bourgeois attitude to murder. I disapprove of it’) no one wastes time on moral argument. The employment of the least-likely-person technique would nullify such statements, anyway. Appearing to be cynical is one of the occupational hazards of mystery authorship.

  To characterize the fiction of the Mayhem Parva school as ‘two dimensional’ is not to question its adequacy as entertainment. It could not have offered what it did – relaxation, diversion, reassurance – if it had possessed that third dimension which gives a story power to affect the reader in much the same way as actual experience. Here was a plain, an area of immense contentedness and what people who do not care much for explorative thought call ‘common sense’. It featured no dramatic heights, no chasms of desperation – just the neat little box hedges of the maze, the puzzle, at whose centre awaited a figure labelled Murderer. One was not afraid of meeting this unknown. There was in one’s pursuit of the winding paths a sort of cheerful curiosity, quite unmixed with that feeling which the anonymous slayer inspires in reality, whether from Whitechapel in 1888 or from London left luggage offices in the 1930s – the feeling of dread. One cumulative effect of regular reading of this kind of fiction might have been to blunt temporarily the fear of death. Sympathy was not being solicited: that was a relief to start with. Then the method of murder was often bizarre, occasionally gruesome, but seldom credible enough to be really shocking. Pronouncement that the victim’s death had been ‘instantaneous’ was made in enough books to encourage a personal hope that lingering ends were exceptional.

  The atmosphere throughout the case usually was businesslike, with too much going on to allow of brooding. The detective did not stray beyond questions of time-tables, poison analyses, shoe prints, and so on, except when opportunity occurred for him to emphasize one or another of the idiosyncracies calculated to make him seem amusing or likable. Otherwise he kept his counsel and thereby the reader’s confidence, venturing fragments of the most homely and unexceptionable psychology only to lend significance to clues or to cast doubts upon alibis. The detective was far too occupied with serving justice to indulge in the morbid philosophizing that constant encounters with corpses might have induced in less dedicated operators. Most important of all, the inevitable solving of the crime, the identification and rendering harmless of the murderer at the very end of the book, somehow had the effect of cancelling out the death or deaths which had gone before. It was as if murder had been merely an engine that had set the story going and then been jettisoned. In more than one novel, the reader needed to glance back from the denouement to remind himself of who had been murdered in the first place.

  Agatha Christie maintained, after her very earliest books, an air of slightly sardonic detachment from the events of which she wrote. One feels it to be an attitude characteristic of an astute professional author. The sellers’ market in crime fiction which lasted throughout the 1920s and 1930s permitted the publication of many books that not only lacked literary merit but, by being gauchely imitative, brought into ridicule a number of contrivances that had been used with discretion and therefore effectively by more capable writers. By 1926 when The Murder of Roger Ackroyd consolidated Mrs Christie’s reputation, already it was inadvisable to postulate crimes committed by hypnotists, men armed with South American blowpipes, purveyors of untraceable poisons, and butlers. Murders of, or by, identical twins and long lost brothers were also questionable propositions. The last chapter gathering of suspects calculated to encompass the dramatic self-betrayal of the guilty party was not yet discredited, but a few sophisticated readers were beginning to wince at each recurrence of the device.

  A less shrewd practitioner than Mrs Christie would have been tempted to bar all those elements of crime fiction that had become absurdities in the eyes of intelligent people. But she seems to have been well aware that intelligence and readership-potential are quite unrelated. So she hedged her bets. While preserving the essential artificialities, unlikelihoods and clichés of the bestselling whodunnit, she evolved a style of narration that hinted, just delicately enough not to offend British sensitivity to ‘sarcasm’, at self-parody. Here is her description of a rich foreigner, soon to be murdered:

  He was tall and thin, his face was long and melancholy, his eyebrows were heavily accented and jet black, he wore a moustache with stiff waxed ends and a tiny black imperial. His clothes were works of art – of exquisite cut – but with a suggestion of bizarre. Every healthy Englishman who saw him longed earnestly and fervently to kick him. They said, with a singular lack of originality: ‘There’s that damned Dago, Shaitana!’

  (Cards on the Table, 1936)

  The passage shows Mrs Christie’s awareness of how widespread in the England of 1936 was xenophobia, her own disapproval of which she implied in the phrase ‘with a singular lack of originality’. But it would have taken someone with a little more subtlety than that of the average reader to notice that here was not just another routine sneer at the foreigner.

  In Death in the Clouds, published the year before, Mrs Christie had included in the plot a figure traditionally venerated by the public and therefore not to be presented facetiously by any novelist who valued sales – a lord. One sees him first standing by the ancestral sideboard at breakfast time and helping himself to kidneys. Then, riding on the estate, he happens to meet the girl, not his wife, who has

  always loved Stephen, always since the old days of dancing classes and cubbing and birds’ nesting. … Pictures floated before his eyes: hunting – tea and muffins – the smell of wet earth and leaves – children…. All the things that Cicely could never share with him, that Cicely would never give him. A kind of mist came over his eyes.

  This sounds like a send-up of the middle-class conception of upper-class romance but one cannot be quite sure. After all, reams of exactly similar stuff were, and still are, being turned out by writers profitably equipped with the sort of fire-and-water-proof ingenuousness which their publishers call ‘sincerity’. And so there existed no serious danger of alienating loyal if somewhat simple-minded aristophiles so long as tongue went no more obtrusively into cheek than:

  Aloud she said. ‘So there’s no
thing doing?’

  He shook his head. Then he said. ‘If I were free, Venetia, would you marry me?’

  Looking very straight between her horse’s ears, Venetia said in a voice carefully devoid of emotion, ‘I suppose I would.’

  CHAPTER 14

  Gifted amateurs

  When Sherlock Holmes solved the mystery of the disappearance of the son of the Duke of Holdernesse in the Adventure of the Priory School, he named as his fee six thousand pounds. His Grace, aware that Holmes had traced not only his son but a skeleton in the family cupboard, made out his cheque for twelve thousand. Holmes admonished him about the skeleton but took the cheque. ‘I am a poor man,’ he said, with one of his very rare flashes of drollery.

  Rewards are seldom specified in stories of private detectives. Philip Marlowe, of course, was a genuinely poor man. No one in the Holdernesse class would have persevered past that dingy little waiting-room. Marlowe’s clients had the unprofitable tendency to become either broke or dead. But his terms were clearly enough stated. Forty bucks a day and expenses. To judge from Marlowe’s case, the rate for the job had considerably diminished in the forty-three years since Holmes’s little commission for the Duke. What had other investigators been making during that same period? There is scarcely any evidence. The policemen, from Inspector French to Sir John Appleby, would have received the pay appropriate to their rank and nothing else. Poirot had his Belgian pension; perhaps wariness on this score dictated his silence about the fees he presumably received on being called in to solve English crimes. Mrs Bradley always managed to do her detecting in her professional role of a Home Office consultant psychiatrist. Father Brown sleuthed exclusively for the salvation of souls, and blind Max Carrados because, as he put it, ‘I am just interested in things’. The reformed criminal, Blackshirt, followed up the crimes of others simply for adventure; his new profession of authorship had made him independent of burgling. Criminology was in the way of being a relaxation from Dr Priestley’s more serious work (‘a monograph upon the nature of the human mind’) and he was stated to be not a bit interested in justice as such.