Murder Must Appetize

by H. R. F. Keating

  FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS (1879-1952). Nowadays members of the Detection Club annually pledge themselves to “hold the banners high alofts Of alibis that test the brains And timetables for railway trains,” alofts, needless almost to say, forcefully rhyming with “Freeman Wills (God bless him) Crofts”, creator of Inspector French, ploddingest of detectives. Crofts was a civil and railway engineer who retired in 1929, having written his first puzzle story while recovering from an illness in 1919. French, and a few other heroes, lasted him well until his final book Anything to Declare? (1957). He was at one time parish-church organist at Coleraine in Northern Ireland and late in life he produced a modern-speech version of the Gospels.

  ELIZABETH FERRARS (1907- ) brought to life Toby Dyke in her first crime book (her first novel had been published some nine years earlier). After six Dykes, Miss Ferrars (She was married in the year of her hero’s first appearance to Robert Brown, now Professor of Botany at Edinburgh) “got to hate him so much I dropped him.” Splash. However, since then she has given us a steady stream of good grainy murder stories, some forty books in all, and has entered that quite large and much-to-be-thanked band of crime authors who were writing in the good old days and are writing still in today’s yet better ones. In America, in response to her publisher’s worrited request, she is E.X. Ferrars.

  MARY FITT (1897-1959) was Miss Kathleen Freeman, D. Litt. And that honour was gained not by writing whodunnits but by studies in Classical Greek, in which she was a Lecturer at the University College of South Wales from 1919 till 1946. Between 1936 and 1959 she wrote more than thirty crime books. She specialised in what one critic has called “a reflective kind of character-detection.”

  R. AUSTIN FREEMAN M.D., M.R.C.S. (1862-1943), creator of Dr John Evelyn Thorndyke M.D., F.R.C.P., was for a time in 1901 Acting Medical Officer at Holloway Prison. He wrote accounts of his earlier travels in Africa and in 1902 collaborated with John James Pitcairn as ‘Clifford Ashdown’ to write The Adventures of Romany Tringle. In 1907 came his own The Red Thumb Mark, which introduced a hero who was to gain such a following that the book was eventually re-issued as (thrilling title) The Debut of Dr Thorndyke. On they rolled afterwards, some forty volumes in all, till The Jacob Street Mystery (in America The Unconscious Witness—and no wonder) in 1942. Freeman took his art seriously, writing in The Nineteenth Century for May 1924 a measured defence of “the detective story, to adopt the unprepossessing name by which this class of fiction is now universally known.” It pays brusque tribute to the virtues of characterisation and story but then puts all its weight behind the intellectual element, claiming as the ideal audience “a clergyman of studious and scholarly habit”.

  ANTHONY GILBERT (1905-1973), who was Lucy Malleson, modestly chose a pseudonym so as to avoid cashing in at all on the reputation of her uncle, the actor Miles Malleson, at the start of a strong name-in-lights phase in 1927 when her first book Tragedy at Frayneappeared. From then on she entertained us book after book, year after year, more than sixty in all, often starring her outrageous dodgy solicitor Arthur Crook (Life, plodding away behind Art, came eventually to produce a real Arthur Crook as longtime and most respectable editor of the Times Literary Supplement). An early member of the Detection Club, she was its first Secretary.

  CYRIL HARE (1900-1958) was the pseudonym used by one of that band of legal lights who in their leisure time have siphoned off their knowledge and experience into the whisky of the detective story. Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark was called to the Bar in 1924 and between 1940 and 1945 was a temporary legal assistant to the Director of Public Prosecutions. In 1950 he was made a County Court judge. In all he published only ten books, but they are each worth reading still. Several feature a pleasant self-deprecating barrister named Francis Pettigrew.

  MICHAEL INNES (1906- ) donniest of the dons’ school, is J.I.M. Stewart, Reader in English Literature at Oxford since 1969 and author of several literary studies and a number of mainstream novels (which refrain from doing all they might). Since he burst upon the detection world in 1936 with Death at the President’s Lodgings (pusillanimously re-titled in America Seven Suspects) he has given us some fifty crime books, in recent years unmitigated and self-acknowledged jeux d’esprit, though always apt to contain some dazzling jeux indeed. His hero is John Appleby, who has risen from mere Inspectordom to a knighthood and retirement after a stint (unrecorded) as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. He even spawned a detecting heir, young Bobby, though not with great literary success.

  RONALD KNOX was a Balliol contemporary of the darkly dynamic Douglas Cole. A man “of frail drooping figure … and unobtrusive chin,” says one biographer, deep into theology (his father was Bishop of Manchester and his mother the daughter of a Bishop of Lahore), a-fizz with limericks and failing to get the First confidently expected of him because he neglected to read the prescribed books. Already while at Eton he had broken into print with a volume of verse in English, Latin and Greek. From Oxford he went into the Church of England and wrote theology, mostly in the form of literary parody. Before long he moved across to the Church of Rome in which he took Holy Orders in 1919 and was made a Monsignor in 1936. In 1926 he both became chaplain to the Roman Catholic students of Oxford, a post he held till 1939, and caused a happy sensation by broadcasting a parody bulletin describing revolutionary rioting in the streets of London. Apart from his parodies and his Ximenes crosswords, Ronald Knox produced five rather characterless detective stories, an essay exposing Sherlock Holmes’s howler in the matter of detecting the direction of a bicycle from the superimposition of tyre marks (The Priory School) and a rationale for the sternly humorous rules of the Detection Club forbidding the use of mysterious Chinamen and confining secret passages to a strict minimum of one per book. And in the meanwhile work went steadily forward on what was to be his magnum opus, a new translation of the Bible, a version sadly now superseded for general Catholic use.

  E.C.R. LORAC (1894-1958) I have recorded already my slight sense of shock on discovering that this trenchantly logical, pipe smoke-wreathed hero of my boyhood was Miss Edith Caroline Rivett, elegant practitioner of the arts of embroidery and calligraphy with a stitched tunicle and an illuminated book of benefactors to be seen in Westminster Abbey. She even was also—prolific lady—that decidedly lesser light, as it then seemed to me, Carol Carnac. Why did I never guess? And had I once read her The Dog It Was that Died before using that title myself?

  Dame NGAIO MARSH (1899- ) was honoured not for her crime novels, though the body of her work deserves it, but for her services to the theatre in her native New Zealand. Yet it was a literary work, a play, that brought her into the theatrical world. She had taken this to a Shakespearian actor-manager; he rejected the work but recruited the writer. Dame Ngaio (you pronounce the Maori name ‘Ny-o’) has gone on not just to act but to direct and to lecture in drama at the university of Canterbury. Perhaps something in her blood turned her to crime. “My father,” she has written, “is a descendant of an ancient English family, the piratical de Mariscos, Lords of Lundy. They were kicked out of Lundy on general grounds of lawlessness and turned up in Kent [the one permitted secret passage?] where they changed their name to Marsh.” The hero of most of the books that began appearing in 1934 (thus making her another of the happily long-lived crime authors who to all our pleasures bridge the gap between a now classical past and the hurly-burly of today) is Roderick Alleyn, named after the actor-manager, Shakespeare’s contemporary. Alleyn, a figure of delicious romance, has urbanely proceeded up the ranks at Scotland Yard as well as wooing and marrying the sculptress Agatha Troy (Dame Ngaio studied art at university).

  GLADYS MITCHELL (1901- ) is one more with feet sturdily planted in the past and present whose fiftieth book, due out shortly, Late, Late in the Evening, is set in the Cowley, Oxfordshire, where she was born long before the advent of Morris motors. She has also written as Stephen Hockaby. She trained as a teacher at Goldsmiths College, London, and for many years taught English and history while th
e saga of Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley unfolded, often reflecting the author’s particular interest in ghosts and witchcraft. Goodwill radiates from the books and Miss Mitchell says charmingly of herself that she is “far too lazy to hate anybody.”

  E.R. PUNSHON (1872-1900), enormously fecund, left little trace of himself in the reference books of the world, save long lists of titles. His first novel Earth’s Great Lord appeared in 1901, his last, a crime story, Six Were Present came out in 1957. The initials E.R. concealed the names Ernest and Robert, and his Proof Counter Proof (1931) was one of the books included by the American critic Alexander Woollcott in his list of titles for the White House.

  JOHN RHODE (1884-1964) was another author who put many thousands of words into print but let little of himself appear. Shortly after he died indeed a semi-anonymous E.C. wrote in The Times obituary columns: “The recent death of Major C.J. Street, O.B.E., M.C., does not seem to have called forth any appropriate reference to his contribution to the world of letters. Hungary and Democracy (1923) was regarded as an important contribution to the series The Story of the Nations, published by Fisher Unwin, and the four books he wrote under the pseudonyms I.O. and F.O.C, are a clue to a gallant military career. But for the last forty years his writing was confined to mystery stories under the pseudonym John Rhode. He was an exponent of the classic mystery story, and each of his seventy-seven books was based on a scientific idea, which only appeared to the master mind of Dr Priestley …”

  DOROTHY L. SAYERS (1893-1957) was also a highly reticent person. A recent biography discloses that this daughter of the vicarage became, while working at Benson’s advertising agency in the 1920s, the mother of an illegitimate child, a fact which would greatly have embarrassed her later in life when, largely as the result of her then controversial bringing to radio of the voice of Jesus Christ in her series play The Man Born to be King, she became a poor person’s instant theologian. Indeed, even her marriage in 1926 to Oswold Fleming, an ex-soldier of little or no occupation, was not generally known about. Her first book Whose Body?, written to make some money before she got her job at Benson’s, was rejected by more than one publisher chiefly on the grounds of “coarseness” (a substantial clue being the uncircumsized state of the mysterious naked body) but after tactful alteration it was accepted and sold well enough to encourage a second. Success mounted with the Wimsey books following one by one, as well as perhaps her most interesting work (full of clues to the mind behind as well as possessing a considerable theme) The Documents in the Case and plentiful short stories including those featuring the unlikely but not unenga-ging Montague Egg, wine salesman. In the end she tired of her hero, like Conan Doyle, and Elizabeth Ferrars, before her. She did not kill Wimsey off: she married him off (Busman’s Honeymoon, 1937). He appears thereafter only in one or two ugh-making short stories and a series of imaginary letters written to boost morale in the earliest days of the Second World War. An old edition of Dante, snatched up on the way to the cellar as a wartime doodlebug boomed overhead, led to the monumental venture of making a new translation of the Divine Comedy, a task she had not quite completed when death, that force she had so often written of, overtook her.

  JOSEPHINE TEY (1897-1952) was another writer to have a great success in a field other than crime. As Gordon Daviot she wrote Richard of Bordeaux, a play that ran for over a year with the young John Gielgud in the lead, as well as other dramatic works and a biography of Claverhouse. Her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh and she spent much of her life as a physical training teacher, though she retired early to look after her father in Scotland. There are ten Tey crime books, of which The Franchise Affair is a perennial seller in Penguins.

  HENRY WADE (1887-1969). Detective stories are put in their place in the Who Was Who entry for Major Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, Bart., C.V.O. (1957), D.S.O. (1918), M.V.O. (1910), Grenadier Guards (1908-1920), J.P. for Buckinghamshire and Lord Lieutenant for the county from 1954-61, Standard Bearer in 1956 of H.M. Bodyguard of the Hon. Corps of Gentlemen-of-Arms. It lists under publications A History of the Foot Guards to 1958 and “author of several novels under the pen name of Henry Wade.” There are in fact twenty-three such books.

  Of the twenty-seven authors here discussed, thirteen are women, fourteen men. Nine were Oxford graduates, two Cambridge and four were at other universities. One, Agatha Christie, attended no school.

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Copyright © H.R.F. Keating 1975

  First published in 1975 by The Lemon Tree Press Ltd

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  ISBN: 9781448200993

  eISBN:9781448202317

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