A Gentleman's Murder

by Christopher Huang

  “Mawkish spiritualists! Some very respectable people are spiritualists. Just today, somebody showed me a newspaper story about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle getting an apology from Lord Northcliffe, who’s been dead for two years.”

  Avery had been full of that account in The People about Doyle’s séance all morning, and Eric began to tune him out in favour of his correspondence. Ah, it appeared that Private Clark was now managing a pub in the East End. That was good to know. Eric assumed that Parker wouldn’t be taking Penny to any East End pubs, though.

  “The séance will turn out to be just another parlour trick,” Wolfe told Avery. “I’ve yet to meet a spirit medium who wasn’t a charlatan.”

  “You don’t honestly expect a fellow of Doyle’s calibre to be taken in, do you?”

  “I think he needs to be taken in. He’s clearly had too much sun.”

  Corporal Butler was a partner now in a motorcar repair shop in the Midlands. Eric made a note to motor out there one of these days.

  “I know several mediums I’d stake my reputation on,” Avery declared.

  “Your reputation!” Wolfe scoffed. “I’ll tell you what: ten shillings says that any spirit medium you care to bring into the Britannia, I can—”

  “Don’t do it, Avery,” Eric said, without looking up from his next letter. Private Collins had gone back into the Army and was now a sergeant.

  But Avery, rather rashly, had already put ten shillings on the wager, and Wolfe’s eyes were gleaming wickedly.

  “We’ll want someone to act as referee,” Wolfe said. “Ordinarily, I’d ask Peterkin here, as he never seems to have anything better to do with his life, but he seems a bit preoccupied at the moment.”

  The next nearest person was Saxon, still sitting at the end of the bar with an apple in his mouth. His eyes met Wolfe’s, and Eric didn’t have to look up to note the standoffish glare in them. Besides, here was a letter from Sergeant Forrester, who’d cut off his correspondence so abruptly some years before.

  Eric read it once through, then a second time with a frown.

  “This isn’t Forrester’s handwriting,” he said, interrupting the discussion between Wolfe and Avery. The two turned to look curiously at him, and he went on, “It says he’s very well, and he’s got a job on a ship, which means he’ll be hard to reach … Forrester’s useless on water. He gets more violently seasick than anyone else I know. Something’s wrong, Avery.”

  “Already? But … what about this bet?”

  “Bother the bet. Forrester was one of my men, and I’m responsible for him. We’ve got to see what’s going on.”

  “The more things change,” Wolfe murmured, smirking as Eric hurriedly shoved the rest of the correspondence into his pocket. “Bon voyage, Peterkin! Maybe we’ll have some sport when you get back.”

  But Eric had already marched out of the lounge, his stride swift and purposeful, and Avery had to trot to catch up.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  My relationship with detective fiction began when I picked up a copy of The Mystery of the Flying Express, a Hardy Boys mystery, at a school book fair. I was eight years old. From there, I went to Encyclopedia Brown, McGurk, and onwards. By the time I was fourteen, I was stalking Brother Cadfael in the local library and trading Christies with classmates. I got interested enough to make a study of the genre for a school project—at which point I expanded my exposure to include Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ellery Queen. It was Ellery Queen who first articulated to me to the fundamental principle of the genre: that it was a game played with the reader, and that the reader ought to be given every clue and opportunity to solve the mystery for themselves before the detective delivers the solution. And then, everything made sense.

  Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 1841, is credited as the first modern detective story, but this understanding of the detective story as a game seems to have only really taken off around the period between the two world wars—the Golden Age of detective fiction. Ronald Knox compiled his decalogue of rules, and the Detection Club had its initiation oath. All of it was directed at how the game should be played. Detective fiction wasn’t just literature; it was interactive entertainment. There is no Encyclopedia Brown equivalent in any other genre.

  But even as I was discovering the joys of Golden Age detective fiction, the efficiency of modern forensics made me uneasy. It was fascinating to see a killer brought to heel by the DNA analysis of a single speck of spit, but I got the sense that the resources available to modern police put the amateur sleuth increasingly out of their league. Aunt Charity might have a keen eye for human nature, but what are the chances that she’d know enough to put her ahead of Inspector Dogsworth and his team? What are the chances that Inspector Dogsworth would share any clues with Aunt Charity?

  And I wanted an amateur sleuth. I wanted someone who could be a stand-in for the reader, someone who could bring the entire detection process within the realm of possibility for the ordinary civilian. It seemed to me that there was a greater scope for such things in the world of the 1920s and 1930s, when things like police protocol were, perhaps, a little less set in stone, and the investigative procedures a little less dependent on specialised training and equipment.

  Mind you, there are dozens of writers out there with amateur sleuths in the modern age. They’ve managed it, and I congratulate them; I just wonder if I could do it convincingly myself.

  In any case, the 1920s were a delicious time to consider. It was an age of transition, and such times are always exciting. We still had many of the manners and mores of the Victorian era, but also the birth of much of the modern world. Telephones, radio, cars, electricity … some of this technology was new; some of it had been around for a while but was only just now becoming freely available to the masses. Someone coming out of the Victorian or Edwardian eras would have been bowled over by this explosion of modern innovation.

  Some things that we take for granted today were exceptional in that era, or simply didn’t exist. Searching the newspaper archives, for one thing—nowadays, Eric and Avery might have accomplished all they did with under an hour of internet research. And cars then were rare enough that simply having one could be enough to constitute a clue.

  Looking at behaviour, much seemed the same as it is today; but then little things crop up, like whether or not one addresses someone by their first or last name, and what it means either way. One of my most treasured possessions is an etiquette book from 1915—just nine years off—which provides me with such gems as how you always introduce men to women and never the other way around. Looking at the literature of the time, one finds certain words and phrases that have fallen out of fashion but are still perfectly understandable. Take the word ghastly, for instance: We know what it means, but who says it nowadays without an eye to effect? And then there are the other words and phrases whose meanings have shifted, but whose older meanings are still recognised. The world was just similar enough to our modern day to be familiar, but just different enough to be remarkable. Curious. Exotic.

  As fantastic as it looked, the 1920s was also an era shadowed by the devastation of the First World War. A great deal of the joie de vivre stemmed from a rejection of the horrors of the war. It did occur to me to wonder why this didn’t seem to figure more prominently in the works I was reading. I mean, it was certainly acknowledged to have happened, but the long-lasting effects seemed only barely touched. Perhaps I wasn’t reading the right books … or perhaps it was, on some level, so much a normal part of everyday life that nobody thought to remark on it. But it really did seem to me that, to understand the era, I had to understand the war that gave birth to it—all the first principles that added up to this exotic creature they called the Roaring Twenties.

  We did cover some of the First World War in school, as I recall. In history class, we saw the tangle of ententes and alliances that resulted in a conflagration that few people on the ground could adequately explain. That was all very cerebral for me. More
visceral was literature class, where we compared Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” to Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” This was in Singapore, though; we had less at stake there. In Canada, where I live now, I find that nearly everyone knows John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” by heart. It seems to be part of the national mythology that Canada really became truly itself—not an appendage of the United Kingdom—on Vimy Ridge, and I think Australia and New Zealand have a similar relationship with Gallipoli. Whether or not you understand why it happened, this was a war with an impact.

  The devastation was greater than ever before, inflicted with technology for which the old tactics were ill-prepared to handle. Poison gas—chlorine, mustard, and phosgene—was a new thing in this war; the military uses of aviation had only just begun to be explored in 1911; and the guns, of course, grew more powerful with each passing year. The war was fought on more fronts than just the trenches across Flanders, but Flanders remains in the popular imagination for its four long, frustrating years of stalemate: a standing target against which everything could be thrown. This was the war for which Bradshaw trained his men but the nature of which he could not himself conceive.

  As to the human cost, the numbers vary. The British death toll is estimated at between 700,000 and 800,000: roughly 500 a day over a four-year period. When the War first broke out, before volunteer recruitment and conscription, the British Army had a manpower strength of 733,514. Let that sink in for a moment, and note that many other world powers had it worse. In total, some ten million soldiers were killed in the service of the War to End All Wars.

  Statistics are dry. Could I relate to any of this on a more human level? My own personal experience with the military came in my two years of National Service with the Singapore Army, but this was in peacetime and I’d never been thrust into any armed conflicts.

  I was able to pick up a battered copy of J. C. Dunn’s The War the Infantry Knew, 1914–1919 back in 2012. It’s compiled from the journals of multiple soldiers, including Dunn himself, and I learned from it that life in the trenches was not an unrelenting misery. There were bright moments. One of the most fantastic sections comes in an entry for the twentieth of June 1916, in which the officers, after a dinner welcoming a few new faces into their ranks, engage in a spirited romp across the devastated countryside, playing follow-my-leader like a bunch of six-year-olds. I imagine they must have been drunk, though if not—well, more power to them.

  The next entry mentions taking one of those new faces out for his first look at the trenches, and the lines, “He was thrilled … Poor boy! three hours later he was dead.” And the entry after that is a hair-raising account of being trapped in no-man’s-land with one dead private and another whose legs had both been broken.

  As I write this, it is seven months short of the centennial anniversary of the armistice, not something I thought about when writing the first draft of this book seven years ago. There is no one left who actually remembers the First World War as a personal experience. All we have is documentation and the things they left behind. One hopes, at least, that these preserved memories will function as a great “USE WITH CAUTION” stamp on the war machine, and that nothing ever escalates to the same levels of devastation as was seen then. As Siegfried Sassoon wrote, “Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.”

  In the midst of those dark memories, though, I should like to hold on to that image of a group of grown men, experienced warriors, playing follow-my-leader through a war zone. I think it is a testament to the human spirit, this ability to carve a little humour out of the horror and thereby maintain one’s sanity. And perhaps it is also a precursor to that postwar impulse to make a game out of murder.

  One of the things to come out of the Great War was the term shell shock, and it wasn’t a stretch to recognise it as an older name for what we call PTSD today. Many of the men I encountered in my reading ought to be at least familiar with it, if not suffering from some mild form of it themselves. But it turns out that not only was shell shock a much narrower definition of the phenomenon, the entire concept of post-traumatic stress was barely understood at all. It had once been believed, for instance, that actual exposure to enemy artillery fire was required for shell shock to occur, but the evidence of symptoms among unexposed soldiers soon proved otherwise.

  I have no doubt that many soldiers over the centuries, in countless wars since Cain first raised a rock at Abel, have experienced some form of PTSD, but nobody ever really thought of it as anything unusual. Because of the increased scope and intensity of its devastation, though, the First World War brought out the affected soldiers in greater quantities than ever before, and with greater severity of symptoms. The phenomenon became impossible to ignore.

  The first use of the term shell shock in a medical journal was by Charles Myers in 1915, though he claimed not to have invented it. He was frustrated by the military’s unwillingness to recognise the dimensions of the problem, and it appears he was dissatisfied with the implied limited scope of its name. Other medical professionals joined him, though. After the War, hospitals like Craiglockhart and Seale Hayne took on the rehabilitation of shell-shocked survivors, some with notable success. The two texts mentioned in the story are real; and in one case, the choice of war neurosis as a better name certainly comes from a desire to expand the definition to include more of the behavioural anomalies that arise as a result of traumatic experiences.

  I don’t think it takes much to imagine what the attitudes of the time might have been like. Already, a soldier who folded under bombardment was called a coward. Once shell shock was recognised as a mental issue, it was probably not a large step to decide that sufferers must be “mad,” and no one wants to think of themselves as “mad.” Psychoanalysis was still in its infancy, and it wasn’t so long ago that mental illness meant straitjackets, dirty cells, and a complete loss of human dignity. And to fall was to admit weakness—or worse, cowardice. No one wants to do that, either. It’s only natural that many soldiers, those who could hide it, tried to keep their distance from any suggestion that they might have been adversely affected by their experiences—to remain in denial that there was ever anything wrong. And of course, public perception was limited to whatever extreme cases made the news.

  It’s tempting to say we know better now, but I think that human understanding will never quite attain the truth of anything. We still have a lot to learn, and we always will.

  As prominent as PTSD is in military circles, I was surprised to discover that “the soldier’s disease” actually referred to morphine addiction. As Aldershott says in the story, it was a term coined in the American Civil War, when rampant use of the drug resulted in widespread addiction. North America had more serious troubles with addiction than the United Kingdom did, apparently. It was such a nonissue in the UK that, until 1916, anyone could buy morphine over the counter there. When the issue of morphine addiction began to appear on English soil, it was seen as a Canadian problem, as the addicts causing trouble were mostly Canadian soldiers. A law was passed imposing a fine on anyone selling morphine (among other drugs) to soldiers—though regular civilians were still free to do as they pleased. It wasn’t until after the war, in 1920, that the law was extended to include civilians in the ban. Even with the press now harping on the dangers of drug use, I suspect that many of the older generation still saw drug addiction as essentially the same thing as alcoholism. Remember that when Conan Doyle gave Sherlock Holmes a cocaine addiction, it was more with a view to giving him an interesting personal quirk than to imply any depravity on the part of the character.

  So, just as the fashions and the technology were changing, the old attitudes to drug use were changing as well. And meanwhile, among the soldiers … a generation of them, already traumatised, came home to a prewar attitude to medication and a postwar fear of addiction. Perhaps the medical professionals were more careful after the lessons of the American Civil War, but morphine was still used to treat, for ex
ample, pneumonia. People would still self-medicate. Given the trauma to which these soldiers had just been subjected, it is hardly surprising if they were more susceptible than most to the addiction of painkiller drugs. Norris was hardly alone here.

  One unfortunate side effect of the rising awareness of drug use as a criminal issue seems to have been a vilification of the Chinese community. The Chinese had long been associated with opium, and when it disappeared from the ordinary English chemist’s shelf, it was assumed that anyone with opium—or the related opiate drugs—must have got it through the Chinese. There evolved myths of far-reaching criminal empires headed by Chinese masterminds, and Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, though his first appearance predated the ban on hard drugs by seven years, was the quintessential example of this: sophisticated, educated, intelligent, and utterly immoral.

  Perhaps there was an element of blame shifting involved, a desire for a scapegoat who wasn’t “one of us.” Certainly, there was an element of romantic exoticism mixed in. My decision to make the opium den here an Orientalist pastiche is far from merely humorous. It’s about the lure of the exotic when limited to only its trappings—something empty and exploitative.

  And this brings us back to the rules of the game: specifically, Ronald Knox’s decalogue and the infamous fifth rule, that “no Chinaman must figure in the story.” It’s a much misunderstood rule, I think. Anytime I bring it up, people assume that Knox was speaking against the appearance of Asians in general. In fact, he was speaking against the then-prevalent trope of the malevolent Chinese arch-criminal, and pointing out the unfairness of the stereotype. People today assume the opposite because they don’t know the context in which the rule was made. We’re not surrounded today by “yellow peril” stories, the very sort of thing Knox found so noxious—and thank goodness for that.

  I’ve been very lucky. Even as a first-generation immigrant, I’ve never felt that my race was held against me in any way. I’m tickled that the offensive racist stereotype attached to me and mine should be a sophisticated supervillain—tomorrow, I shall take over the world—but the idea that I might once have been associated with a depraved “other” still comes as something of a shock.