by A. N. Wilson
This was the month in which General Von Hindenburg died and Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. He did not need to take Hindenburg’s place as Reichspräsident. Having been leader of his party, he was now leader of his nation. Simply, der Führer. The Times reported that Herr Hitler had flown in a monoplane to Hamburg. Thirty-eight thousand uniformed Nazis had saluted him on his way into town from Fuhlsbüttel aerodrome.
Sir Austen Chamberlain, now retired as cabinet minister, though still in the Commons, and not destined to have as much to do with Herr Hitler as his half-brother Neville,* wrote to tell Sir Josiah that he could beat his record. He himself had completed a puzzle in 41 minutes. But, ‘Ask the Provost of Eton’, i.e. M. R. James the ghost-story writer – who ‘measures the time required for boiling his breakfast egg by that needed for the solution of your daily crossword – and he hates a hard-boiled egg’.11
Opposite Chamberlain’s letter, Times readers could see that the Krupp factory on the Ruhr had started a youth training scheme and taken on 800 boys for skilled labour. After frequent visits to America, the German steel bosses had revolutionized means of production.
It was left to P. G. Wodehouse three days later to admit, along with the great majority, that he found crosswords – well, a puzzle. While the editorial piously intoned, ‘every friend of Germany will hope that she will quickly recover from her present troubles and that as a strong, free and united nation, she may become a powerful factor in the maintenance of European peace’. R. Ruggles Gates – Marie Stopes’s ‘ex’ – sent in to the letters page on the same day a contribution about the ethnicity of Jews. (‘As regards the Jewish people through the world they are probably no more homogeneous than the Nordic, Alpine or Mediterranean races, but they have retained a racial consciousness which has long since been replaced in other peoples by the spirit of nationalism.’) Wodehouse, however, was still on the crossword:
Sir, on behalf of the great race of rabbits, those humble strivers who like myself have never yet succeeded in solving an entire Times crossword puzzle, I strongly resent these Austen Chamberlains and what not flaunting their skill in your columns. Rubbing salt in the wounds is what I call it. To a man who has been beating his head against the wall for twenty minutes over a single anagram it is g. and wormwood to read a statement like that one about the Provost of Eton and the eggs. In conclusion may I commend your public spirit in putting the good old emu back into circulation again as you did a few days ago? We of the canaille know that the Sun-God Ra has apparently retired from active work – are intensely grateful for the occasional emu.12
The cryptic crossword and the whodunnit mystery story were two distinctive products of their time, expressions no doubt of the belief that if one could only worry at a problem for long enough it would have a single simple solution: Keynesian or Marxist economic theory, Roman Catholic, communist or fascist doctrine. Many of the brightest minds of the age, if not necessarily the most analytic, while enjoying the mystery stories of Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie, and priding themselves on the speed with which they solved the crossword puzzle, were drawn fatefully towards ideologies, systems. Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was an addict of puzzles of all kinds, and the author of A Book of Acrostics, The book reeks almost heart-rendingly of late Victorian innocence, of parlour games in a large, intelligent, well-meaning upper-middle-class family. (Knox’s father was a bishop.) ‘To break off her engagement if she’d the intention/What place on the Thames would the young lady mention?’ – answer Goring. ‘If the Zoo were for a joy-ride through the streets of London hauled,/After what old-fashioned weapon might the vehicle be called?’ Arquebus. You can almost hear the groans from the assembled company at the atrocious pun. He also wrote humorous articles for Punch, a magazine of which his brother E. V (know variously as Eddie and Evoe) became the editor. Another brother, Wilfrid, was a distinguished New Testament scholar and Anglican holy man. Another brother, Dilly, a religious non-believer, was librarian of King’s College, Cambridge. ‘During the Thirties,’ wrote his niece Penelope Fitzgerald, ‘finding that smoking and patience [i.e. the card game] were not sufficient as alternative tranquilliser and counter-irritant to the active mind, Dilly suddenly produced a new way of writing poetry.’13 Each line had to end with a word of the same form, but with a different vowel, the vowels ‘of course’ coming in their proper order, a, e, i, o, u or the equivalent sounds in English. On the death of A. E. Housman, Dilly wrote:
Sad though the news, how sad
Of thee the poet dead!
But still thy poems abide –
There Death, the unsparing god
Himself dare not intrude.14
Dilly would put his crossword mind to brilliant and patriotic use deciphering Enigma (the German electro-mechanical enciphering system) in the 1940s. In the Thirties he contented himself with doodles, and with an all but impenetrable translation of Herodas’s all but impenetrable Mimiambi for the Loeb Classics. Ronald, known as Ronnie, was perhaps the most celebrated of the brothers in his lifetime, partly because he wrote detective stories. Of these, his niece wrote:
Between 1926 (The Viaduct Murder) and 1937 (Double Cross Purposes) he wrote six detective stories. All of them, even the earliest, were backward looking. To feel at home in them, you need to be familiar with Bradshaw’s Railway Timetables, canoeing on the upper reaches of the Thames, vicarages, gas taps, and country house-parties in which the first duty is consideration for one’s hostess … The solutions to the mysteries are most scrupulously set out, and page references are given, in case the reader has missed the clues. As a novelist, Ronnie was not strong on characterisation.15
His biographer and friend Evelyn Waugh tells us that ‘at the time there was a limited but eager public for these puzzles … None was more ingenious than he, more scrupulous in the provision of clues, more logically complete in his solutions.’16
Ronald Knox belonged to that Etonian generation which had seen a whole generation blighted and in many cases destroyed by the First World War. Before the war, he was a wit, a president of the Oxford Union in the days when that institution was still a nursery of statesmen, and a scholar. His life was an elegy for the never-forgotten dead. In 1917 he became a Roman Catholic, and was ordained two years later, eventually becoming the Roman Catholic chaplain to his old university, Oxford. He always refused to have a telephone installed in his chaplaincy. (‘I hate using the instrument; I hate being interrupted by bells; I hate enquiries from the editors of Sunday newspapers about the existence of a future life.’)17 The chaplaincy was only available for males, and what is more, males of a limited educational background – Eton and the larger Benedictine or Jesuit boarding schools. Roman Catholic women were directed to a convent in Cherwell Edge and grammar-school-educated Roman Catholic men were advised to worship at one of the churches in the town.18
In Ronald Knox’s own case, Roman Catholicism, like crossword puzzles and acrostics and detective stories, seems to have worked for him like a systematic exclusion of experience as much as one which sought to explore its complexities. To read his works of apologetics, such as a correspondence with the then agnostic, eventually Catholic, Arnold Lunn, Difficulties, is to be amazed by the breezy way in which Knox sees Roman Catholicism as a perfect solution. Subjects which must by definition be insoluble mysteries, such as a reason for supposing the Almighty to be omniscient, are rapped out on the typewriter, no doubt with pipe in mouth, in about as much time as it took to compose an acrostic. He is prepared to defend anything, even his Church’s condemnation of Galileo – ‘the congregations condemned his teaching while it was, in their view, still unproved’. Burning witches was not so much cruel as ‘in accordance with the notions of the time’.19 These strange letters were exchanged in 1932. In the Soviet Union, the five-year plan was resulting in widespread starvation and ‘purges’ of tens of thousands of people from the party. Japan had invaded Manchuria. In Germany, the Weimar Republic was teetering to its collapse, and in Britain, with no sign of the government know
ing how to cope with the unemployment crisis, debts to the United States grew and grew. Every Western power lived with the perpetual fear that its currency would cease to have any value. As Roman Catholic chaplain at Oxford during the 1930s Ronald Knox not unnaturally found the conversations of the undergraduates about the European situation dismaying. ‘Let me see: what country are you boring about now?’20 Evoe, in the editorial chair at Punch in 1933, ran a drawing by Bernard Partridge of Hitler treading Jews underfoot. Punch in those days carried serious drawings each week illustrative of what was happening in the world, but even so, the proprietors thought the message of the drawing needed reinforcement with the words ANTI-JEWISH CAMPAIGN written across the sky. Sitting with his friend Beachcomber, J. B. Morton, in the Fleet Street Bar, El Vino, Evoe wondered whether humour had had its day, and the two men would agree that the state of the world had become such that nothing was too absurd or unpleasant to come true.21
No wonder the murder mystery was the most popular literary form of its age. Inevitably, when made, or more accurately remade, into successful films or TV serials in our times, the classics from the Golden Age of mystery-writing are made to seem like period pieces, and the directors and designers take pride in the whole visual background to their stories, in the authentic Art Deco furniture, wide-lapelled suits, trilby hats and fedoras, low-backed limousines, in the cloche hats of the ladies and the black dresses with white aprons of the housemaids, as actual or pastiche jazz or big band music plays in the credits. The popularity of such series on TV demonstrates that the 1930s have a glamorous appeal in themselves, but nearly always what gets lost in the adaptation is the actual nature of the stories.
If the revenge tragedy and the simplistic history play were the staple of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre audiences it was surely because they and their parents had just lived through a period of bloody civil war, and were holding at bay the thought that England might once again resemble the battlefield of Bosworth or the last scene of Hamlet with King, Queen, Prince and friends all corpses. The corpses in the Golden Age mystery stories play a similarly powerful but different role.
Murder on the Orient Express is one of the most perfect of Agatha Christie’s stories. It is a very simple revenge story. The train leaves Stamboul for Europe. One of the passengers is murdered during the night, and the train is stuck in a snowdrift in the Balkans. Poirot, the Belgian detective, is conveniently on hand to solve the mystery. An American passenger is the victim, repeatedly stabbed during the night the train is unable to move. Known as Mr Ratchett, it turns out that he was really a gangster named Cassetti, who had kidnapped a baby, little Daisy Armstrong, the child of an English war hero and a famous American tragic actress. When the kidnapped child was delivered back to its parents dead, the mother had given birth to a stillborn child and her worthy husband had shot himself. Cassetti had escaped justice on some legal technicality. Now, twelve suspects are assembled on the train. Could it be, as Poirot eventually realizes, that this villainous figure has been dispatched by a self-appointed ‘jury’ of odd-balls – the nanny, the valet, the ex-actress, the soldier, the Russian princess, and so forth? Or could it be simply that he was killed by a stranger who has mysteriously escaped into the snows? Poirot, having established the truth of the story, which is indeed that they have all stabbed the villain, allows the second explanation to be offered to the Yugoslavian police when, eventually, the snow clears and the luxury train glides smoothly on its way towards Paris.
Simple as it is, and indeed transparently devoid of any symbolic intention on the author’s part, the tale nevertheless shimmers with import. When Poirot meets the villainous Ratchett/Cassetti, ‘I had a curious impression. It was as though a wild animal – an animal savage, but savage, you understand – had passed me by.’ ‘And yet he looked altogether of the most respectable.’ ‘Précisément! The body – the cage – is everything of the most respectable – but through the bars, the wild animal looks out …’22
Christie wrote stories which are a little like unpretentious versions of Greek tragedy. Their elemental simplicities explain why they have survived when so much contemporary literature, more obviously ambitious and ‘literary’, has failed the test of time. A great wrong was done, and twelve people have conspired to avenge it. There will always be something satisfying at a profound level about that story. Yet it appeals to more than an archetypical moral response. We do not need to posit intention on the author’s part when with the eyes of hindsight in the twenty-first century we find political echoes and meanings in this story, first published in 1934. The wrong which has been accomplished by the American, and which has to be avenged as they all pass through the Balkans by a multicultural and multinational group of individuals – what does it suggest? Not an allegory, of course, but can we quite dismiss the thought that this league of nationalities wishes to put its multifarious stab-wounds into the heart of the man who has brought disaster on them all? Are they the League of Nations taking revenge, in the very area of the world where their troubles began – the Balkans – upon the old gentleman, President Wilson, who … No, that is too neat an ‘explanation’. But these stories, which have such a totally compulsive appeal, must be appealing to more than the human desire to solve a puzzle; or, to put it another way, the need to solve a puzzle, by the very fact of its being so obsessively important to so many crossword and mystery addicts, would appear to be something which goes deeper than its surface attractions.
One reason why it would be a mistake to offer any one simple explanation for the appeal of the mystery genre in the Golden Age is that the stories fall into many different categories. John Dickson Carr (1905–77, sometimes writing as Carter Dickson) and the two cousins Frederic Dannay (1905–82) and Manfred Bennington Lee (1905–71), who wrote as Ellery Queen, were masters of the brilliant puzzle. Julian Symons, in his definitive study of the genre, Bloody Murder, listing Queen’s The French Powder Mystery (1930), The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931), The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932) and The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934), opines that ‘Judged as exercises in rational deduction, these are certainly among the best detective stories ever written.’23 The ingenuity of Dickson Carr is nearly always exercised upon variations of the locked-room mystery, the kind of puzzle which would appeal to Freudians. The Queen books abound in deductive reasoning, which feels reasonable while you are reading it. They are among the best stories which derive from the ratiocinative side of Sherlock Holmes. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories, with the portly Wolfe never leaving the old brownstone house on West Thirty-Fifth Street while Archie Goodwin paces the streets of New York in search of clues, are in their way a child of the Holmes–Watson relationship. There will always be those who cherish mystery stories more for their settings than their plots, and for such readers Wolfe’s house, with his sophisticated tastes (orchids, the Times crossword) and unvarying routines, will be as comforting a place as the English villages and country houses of Dorothy L. Sayers in The Nine Tailors or Agatha Christie’s St Mary Mead in her Miss Marple stories.
For W. H. Auden, whose poetry was first published in 1930, the mystery story was essentially a religious myth. ‘The fantasy which the detective story addict indulges is the fantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law.’24 The enclosed worlds of country-house parties or institutions which his favourite authors depicted were disturbed by the murder, but order and redemption were restored by the detective, who, like God, brought order and justice back into the tarnished garden.
The great critic W. Northrop Frye, another mystery-addict, believed that the amateur detectives – Poirot, Archie Goodwin, Miss Silver, and the rest – were recording angels. It is a striking fact that among the most successful practitioners of the genre, so many should have been Christians. Agatha Christie’s only bedtime reading was Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Dorothy L. Sayers abandoned crime stories altogether to concentrate upon Dante and theology. Ngaio Marsh
from New Zealand, one of the best of the Golden Age writers, was ‘a High Church Anglican … never quite able to recover the faith she had as a child. It was one of her great regrets.’25 Margery Allingham was religious. Much of this is reflected in her work, as it is in Christie’s. Very many classics of detective fiction do actually involve vicarages, or clergy-detectives – from Chesterton’s Father Brown to the parsonage in Sayers’s best novel The Nine Tailors and to Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage. But at a much deeper, more elemental level, these writers appear to be asserting, in the midst of a world which has come morally adrift, that the moral order can still be reclaimed by the angel/detective. Amy Leatheran, the common-sense English nurse who narrates Murder in Mesopotamia, concludes: ‘Sometimes, I declare, I don’t know what’s become of the good strict principles my aunt brought me up with. A very religious woman she was …’ She wonders whether she could end her story with ‘a really good telling phrase. I must ask Dr Reilly for some Arab one. Like the one M. Poirot used. In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate … Something like that.’26
The 1930s turn into a murder story on a grand scale. Old scores will be settled, old injustices avenged, new resentments expressed in murder. Of the dominant figures who cross the pages in the early years – Hitler, Laval, Mussolini, Ribbentrop – very many, like characters in Cluedo, were heading for violent ends.