Toward the
GOLDEN AGE
DOVER MYSTERY CLASSICS
Toward the
GOLDEN AGE
The Stories that Turned Crime to Gold
Edited by
Mike Ashley
Dover Publications, Inc.
Mineola, New York
Copyright
Introduction copyright © 2016 by Mike Ashley
Copyright © 2016 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
Toward the Golden Age: The Stories That Turned Crime to Gold, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2016, is a new anthology of fifteen stories reprinted from texts as noted in the Acknowledgments and Story Sources section. A new Introduction, written by Mike Ashley, has been specially prepared for this volume.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ashley, Michael, editor.
Title: Toward the golden age : the stories that turned crime to gold / edited by Mike Ashley.
Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, 2016. | Series: Dover mystery classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2016004681| ISBN 9780486806099 (paperback) | ISBN 048680609X (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Detective and mystery stories, American. | Detective and mystery stories, English. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Historical.
Classification: LCC PS648.D4 T68 2016 | DDC 813/.087208—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016004681
Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley
80609X01 2016
www.doverpublications.com
Contents
Introduction by Mike Ashley
Christabel’s Crystal
Carolyn Wells
The Crime at Big Tree Portage
Hesketh Prichard
The Case of Oscar Brodski
R. Austin Freeman
The Tragedy on the London and Mid-Northern
Victor L. Whitechurch
Spontaneous Combustion
Arthur B. Reeve
The Case of the Scientific Murderer
Jacques Futrelle
The Blue Cross
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Lived at Clapham
Edgar Wallace
Naboth’s Vineyard
Melville Davisson Post
The Game Played in the Dark
Ernest Bramah
The Ninescore Mystery
Baroness Orczy
The Three Knocks
Edith Macvane
Whither Thou Goest
Edward H. Hurlbut
The Second Bullet
Anna Katharine Green
The Papered Door
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Acknowledgments and Story Sources
Introduction
Toward The Golden Age
Mike Ashley
WE often use the phrase “the Golden Age,” but what do we really mean? It was originally used by the Greek and Roman poets to describe a near mythical past of great heroes, wonderful achievements, and a life of near perfection, the implication being that the quality of life has somewhat declined since then. By inference this would suggest that by applying the term to crime fiction there must have once been a period when crime fiction was at its best, a zenith it has not since attained.
Clearly that is not the case, and the term “Golden Age” is more often used when we remember the good things about the past, a blossoming of talent that caused excitement and joy. So what was so special about this so-called Golden Age of crime fiction and when was it?
The earliest application of the term that I can find was in an essay, “The Golden Age of English Detection,” by the politician and author John Strachey, written in early January 1939. Strachey did not define the term but observed that he believed detective fiction was currently in its Golden Age because it was “flourishing” when so much else in English fiction was stagnating. Strachey did not seek to set any parameters for crime fiction but simply named its leading authors—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, Marjorie Allingham, and newcomers Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake (the alias of C. Day Lewis). Notice that these were all from the British Isles. Strachey was less enamoured of American crime fiction, though he confessed he had not read any of it because he believed it was too “socially conscious” and did not like the idea of the real world intruding upon the fantasy of the detective novel. Curiously, the American author Carolyn Wells felt exactly the same, as we shall see.
Soon after Strachey’s essay, the American publisher, editor and literary devotee Howard Haycraft produced his groundbreaking study of detective fiction, Murder for Pleasure, published in 1941. He divided the history of the field into several eras, calling the period from 1890 to 1914 “The Romantic Era” and the post-war period, from 1918 to 1930, “The Golden Age.” He chose 1918 primarily because it was the end of the First World War, but he believed that the change in detective fiction to a more realistic level had come just before the War with the publication of Trent’s Last Case (1913) by Edmund Clerihew Bentley—a novel which John Strachey had called “a still unsurpassed classic.” The reason the novel was singled out as “epoch-making,” in Haycraft’s words, is that Bentley had introduced a fallible detective, one whose reasoning and deduction actually led him to wrong conclusions. Hitherto most detectives (usually private rather than police) followed the Sherlock Holmes model of making remarkable deductions from the minutiae of evidence overlooked by most.
Whilst the infallibility of detectives might be a major criterion of fiction in Haycraft’s “Romantic Era,” there were some interesting diversions as this anthology will show. Bentley was inspired in his writing by his good friend G. K. Chesterton whose singular creation, Father Brown, liked to blend into the background as rather meek and mild and not display the mental pyrotechnics of the Holmesian school, for all that he was eminently capable of them. The roots of the Golden Age, at least in this respect, stretch back far before 1918.
Haycraft highlighted three factors that distinguished the Golden Age from the earlier period: the improved “literacy” of the detective story, a new insistence upon plausibility and fidelity (rather than melodrama and “hokum”), and an emphasis on character. As we shall see in this volume, all three factors were developing in the earlier years, predominantly in the short story rather than the novel.
Indeed, it was the growth in the detective novel that Strachey saw as marking the Golden Age and which Julian Symons recognized in his history of the detective story, Bloody Murder, in 1972. Writing thirty years after Haycraft, Symons had the advantage of historical perspective and hindsight, and he defined the Golden Age of the crime novel as being in the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike Haycraft, Symons recognized another, earlier, Golden Age, which belonged to the short story. The popularity of the crime and detective story had started with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes short stories (as distinct from the two earlier novels) which began in The Strand in 1891. Their success inevitably saw the growth of imitators, both in rival magazines and in The Strand itself, when Doyle decided to kill off Holmes in 1893. The 1890s is thus a distinct period in its own right, that of the short-story series featuring remarkable and often eccentric detectives. This continued beyond 1900, as we shall see, but it was with the dawn of the new century that writers strove for more originality. This was a period which saw the start of the forensic scientist who enhanced Holmes’s deductive reasoning with rigorous scientific and psychological analysis. This was when Holmes’s skills were utilized in more diverse forms, such as with the woodsman November Joe who, in the stories by Hesketh Prichard, uses hi
s abilities as a tracker and hunter to find criminals, and in the Max Carrados stories by Ernest Bramah, whose detective is blind and thus uses his other senses to resolve crimes.
It was easier to develop these ideas in the short story, which did not require the full structure of a novel and where both character and concept could be explored from story to story. We thus see more specialist detectives. There is the railway detective in the stories by Victor L. Whitechurch; we reach the height of the ratiocinative detective in the Thinking Machine stories by Jacques Futrelle, the emergence of the forensic detective in the Dr. Thorndyke stories by R. Austin Freeman and of the psychological detective in the Craig Kennedy stories by Arthur B. Reeve.
The period between 1900 and 1918 also saw the development of the fighter for justice: individuals who operated outside the law in order to achieve their ends. The most famous of these were the Four Just Men created in the eponymous novel by Edgar Wallace published in 1905. Wallace returned to these characters (by then the Three Just Men) in a series of short stories, one of which is included here.
One author who knew the law inside out, because he was an attorney, and knew the loopholes was Melville Davisson Post, another of the landmark authors whose work was a significant contribution toward the Golden Age. Not only did he create the renegade attorney Randolph Mason, but he also introduced one of the first historical mystery series featuring that upholder of justice in pre-Civil War Virginia, Uncle Abner. Ellery Queen, writing in The Detective Short Story in 1942, called the Uncle Abner series the “finest book of detective short stories written by an American author since Poe.”
One of the factors that distinguished the Golden Age was the number of women writers—notably Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham, but there were many worthy women writers prior to the 1920s. Anna Katharine Green was regarded as the Mother of Detective Fiction, and had been producing quality fiction since 1878—even before Conan Doyle— and continued to do so until her death in 1935. In Britain, Baroness Orczy introduced the first female police detective in Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. Other women writers of this period, included in this book, were Edith Macvane, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Carolyn Wells.
Several of the above—Arthur B. Reeve, Melville Davisson Post, Jacques Futrelle, Anna Katharine Green, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Carolyn Wells—were American though their work was clearly influenced by British writers. What distinguished the American detective story of the 1920s and 1930s was the growth of the hard-boiled school of fiction, best exemplified by the works of Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler—all of whom were associated with the magazine Black Mask, that began in 1926—but the roots of the hard-boiled school were evident earlier. To some extent it grew from the rather lighthearted stories of New York low-life by Damon Runyon, but the darker and more violent side will be found in the Lanagan stories by Edward H. Hurlbut, which date from 1912, the first of which is included here. Furthermore, the story I have selected by Mary Roberts Rinehart, from 1914, also shows the harsh side of crime and its effect upon family life.
All these stories, and many more that I did not have space to include, show that the transitional period from the Victorian era to the 1920s was rich in crime and detective fiction that helped pave the way toward the Golden Age. I have arranged the contents in a certain sequence so that I can comment upon each story and author in my individual introductions and show their relevance to the emergence of the Golden Age.
MIKE ASHLEY
NOTE: An unfortunate aspect of much of the fiction from this period is that it contains rampant racist and sexist references. I have made every endeavour to choose only those stories where such references were minimized, but it was difficult to avoid the casual references because they were part of the period, and therefore representative of the time.
Christabel’s Crystal
Carolyn Wells
We start with what is really a parody of detective fiction at the time this story was published in 1905. Carolyn Wells (1862–1942) was then well known for her parodies and humorous verse, which appeared in many newspapers and magazines. She had contracted scarlet fever as a child, which left her almost totally deaf and led to her lifelong delight for books. She became a librarian but soon turned to writing, and developed a passion for the mystery story, particularly as a puzzle. After compiling many books of verse and humour, including children’s books, she turned to mystery fiction, which accounts for over 80 of her 170 books. She became best known for her series featuring book-loving detective Fleming Stone, which began with The Clue in 1909, though there had been an earlier novella, “The Maxwell Mystery,” in 1906. The series ran for sixty-one books, the last, Who Killed Caldwell?, appearing just a few weeks before her death in March 1942. Although highly popular in their day and still enjoyable for their often “impossible” puzzles and solutions, most of Wells’s mysteries read like parodies of the field. This is because Wells herself saw the mystery novel as a form of fantasy, with her detectives as almost superhuman in their powers of intellect and deduction. She wrote in her book, The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913)—which was the first “how to” book in the genre—that “the sooner the writer of detective fiction realizes that the detective of fiction has little in common with the detective in real life, the better is that author equipped for his work.” Wells was clearly a writer of the old school, yet the following story, in lampooning the genre, shows how much the detective story had already grown by 1905 and that the time had come to stop looking back and start looking forward.
OF all the unexpected pleasures that have come into my life, I think perhaps the greatest was when Christabel Farland asked me to be bridesmaid at her wedding.
I always had liked Christabel at college, and though we hadn’t seen much of each other since we were graduated, I still had a strong feeling of friendship for her, and besides that I was glad to be one of the merry house party gathered at Farland Hall for the wedding festivities.
I arrived the afternoon before the wedding-day, and found the family and guests drinking tea in the library. Two other bridesmaids were there, Alice Fordham and Janet White, with both of whom I was slightly acquainted. The men, however, except Christabel’s brother Fred, were strangers to me, and were introduced as Mr. Richmond, who was to be an usher; Herbert Gay, a neighbor, who chanced to be calling; and Mr. Wayne, the tutor of Christabel’s younger brother Harold. Mrs. Farland was there too, and her welcoming words to me were as sweet and cordial as Christabel’s.
The party was in a frivolous mood, and as the jests and laughter grew more hilarious, Mrs. Farland declared that she would take the bride-elect away to her room for a quiet rest, lest she should not appear at her best the next day.
“Come with me, Elinor,” said Christabel to me, “and I will show you my wedding-gifts.”
Together we went to the room set apart for the purpose, and on many white-draped tables I saw displayed the gorgeous profusion of silver, glass and bric-a-brac that are one of the chief component parts of a wedding of to-day.
I had gone entirely through my vocabulary of ecstatic adjectives and was beginning over again, when we came to a small table which held only one wedding-gift.
“That is the gem of the whole collection,” said Christabel, with a happy smile, “not only because Laurence gave it to me, but because of its intrinsic perfection and rarity.”
I looked at the bridegroom’s gift in some surprise. Instead of the conventional diamond sunburst or heart-shaped brooch, I saw a crystal ball as large as a fair-sized orange.
I knew of Christabel’s fondness for Japanese crystals and that she had a number of small ones of varying qualities; but this magnificent specimen fairly took my breath away. It was poised on the top of one of those wavecrests, which the artisans seem to think appropriately interpreted in wrought-iron. Now, I haven’t the same subtle sympathy with crystals that Christabel always has had; but still this great, perfect, limpid sphere affected me strangely. I glanced at
it at first with a calm interest; but as I continued to look I became fascinated, and soon found myself obliged (if I may use the expression) to tear my eyes away.
Christabel watched me curiously. “Do you love it too?” she said, and then she turned her eyes to the crystal with a rapt and rapturous gaze that made her appear lovelier than ever. “Wasn’t it dear of Laurence?” she said. “He wanted to give me jewels of course; but I told him I would rather have this big crystal than the Koh-i-nur. I have six others, you know; but the largest of them isn’t one-third the diameter of this.”
“It is wonderful,” I said, “and I am glad you have it. I must own it frightens me a little.”
“That is because of its perfection,” said Christabel simply. “Absolute flawless perfection always is awesome. And when it is combined with perfect, faultless beauty, it is the ultimate perfection of a material thing.”
“But I thought you liked crystals because of their weird supernatural influence over you,” I said.
“That is an effect, not a cause,” Christabel replied. “Ultimate perfection is so rare in our experiences that its existence perforce produces consequences so rare as to be dubbed weird and supernatural. But I must not gaze at my crystal longer now, or I shall forget that it is my wedding-day. I’m not going to look at it again until after I return from my wedding-trip; and then, as I tell Laurence, he will have to share my affection with his wedding-gift to me.”
Christabel gave the crystal a long parting look, and then ran away to don her wedding-gown. “Elinor,” she called over her shoulder, as she neared her own door, “I’ll leave my crystal in your special care. See that nothing happens to it while I’m away.”
“Trust me!” I called back gaily, and then went in search of my sister bridesmaids.
* * *
The morning after the wedding began rather later than most mornings. But at last we all were seated at the breakfast-table and enthusiastically discussing the events of the night before. It seemed strange to be there without Christabel, and Mrs. Farland said that I must stay until the bridal pair returned, for she couldn’t get along without a daughter of some sort.
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