The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  The story unfolds slowly, reflecting the unhurried nature of life among the well-to-do in Edwardian Britain. Eventually, murder occurs, and the final scenes are devoted to courtroom drama. The solution, in a book with a small cast list, is far from surprising, but the quality of the writing keeps the reader wanting to turn the pages.

  Edward Frederic Benson, no relation to the author of Tracks in the Snow, belonged to a brilliant if eccentric family. His father was Archbishop of Canterbury, his mother was described by Gladstone as ‘the cleverest woman in England’, and ‘Fred’ and three siblings who survived infancy all achieved distinction in their chosen fields. Fred published his first book while still a student at Cambridge, and his debut novel appeared in 1893 while he was working as an archaeologist in Athens. Later in life, he became Mayor of Rye in Sussex, and by the time of his death he had produced almost one hundred books, one of them devoted to figure skating, in which he was a skilled exponent who represented England. His most popular fiction was the Mapp and Lucia stories, which present an entertaining view of English social life and have twice been successfully televised.

  Even Benson’s lighter work occasionally displays his keen interest in the macabre. He wrote highly regarded ghost stories, sometimes humorous in tone, including ‘The Bus-Conductor’, which in 1945 supplied one element of the classic horror portmanteau film Dead of Night. In 1901, he tried his hand at crime fiction with The Luck of the Vails, his only other full-length work in the genre.

  Introducing a reprint of The Blotting Book in 1987, Stephen Knight argued that the book may have influenced Agatha Christie, and that it amounts to ‘a psychodrama among well-known people, looking forward to the methods of A.B. Cox, especially when he wrote as Francis Iles. Here there is no real detective; Superintendent Figgis thinks with his mouth open most of the time…the elements of a classic clue-puzzle are also present, time and place are as important as they would be to the Detection Club.’ The plot is much less elaborate than those of the Golden Age of murder between the world wars, but the agreeable writing and delineation of character supply ample compensation.

  The Innocence of Father Brown

  by G.K. Chesterton (1911)

  The Innocence of Father Brown was the first and best collection of stories about the little priest whose insight into human nature makes him a formidable amateur detective. Chesterton took a real-life friend, a Bradford priest, as his model, ‘knocking him about; beating his hat and umbrella shapeless, untidying his clothes, punching his intelligent countenance into a condition of pudding-faced fatuity, and generally disguising Father O’Connor as Father Brown’. Father Brown became a convenient mouthpiece for Chesterton’s opinions, and shared his creator’s humanity and fascination with paradox.

  The first Father Brown story, ‘The Blue Cross’, introduces the arch-criminal Flambeau and the policeman who pursues him, Valentin. Father Brown outwits Flambeau ‘by being a celibate simpleton, I suppose…Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?’ He sees through Flambeau’s attempt to disguise himself as a priest, because the villain attacks reason, which amounts to ‘bad theology’.

  Other stories make equally telling points. In ‘The Invisible Man’, Father Brown solves a perplexing case of murder by pointing out that an ordinary working person can seem ‘mentally invisible’ to others. Consequently, his presence at the scene of a crime may not be remembered by a witness. As he says, ‘Nobody ever notices postmen somehow, yet they have passions like other men.’

  Father Brown was suited to the short story form, and Chesterton wisely avoided attempting to include him in a novel. One unusual experiment, a forerunner of the game-playing that became common during the Golden Age of detective fiction, came in 1914 with ‘The Donnington Affair’. Sir Max Pemberton, a journalist, dandy and author of crime and mystery fiction, wrote the first part of the story for a magazine, and invited Chesterton to try his hand at unravelling the mystery. Chesterton rose to the challenge, and Father Brown solved the case.

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton loved detective stories, although one biographer, Michael Ffinch, has said: ‘It is ironic that Chesterton is best known today for what he himself considered his least important work.’ In later years, Chesterton wrote the Father Brown stories primarily to fund other activities. Like Arthur Conan Doyle before him, and novelists such as G.D.H. Cole in the Golden Age, he never expected his mysteries to survive long after his other writing faded from the public memory. At the time of writing, a daytime television series which shifts Father Brown to the Fifties, and offers storylines with scant resemblance to the originals, was enjoying perhaps unexpected popularity.

  Chesterton’s other detectives included Horne Fisher, who appeared in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922; the title was later given by Alfred Hitchcock to two films unconnected with Chesterton), and Gabriel Gale, who features in The Poet and the Lunatics (1929). The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), which is prefaced by a poem addressed to his lifelong friend E.C. Bentley, is a metaphysical thriller reflecting his enthusiasm for the fantastic. Chesterton believed that: ‘The whole point of a sensational story is that the secret should be simple. The whole story exists for the moment of surprise…It should not be something that it takes twenty minutes to explain.’ The convoluted plotting of the full-length Golden Age whodunits was not for him, but in 1930 he accepted Anthony Berkeley’s invitation to become first President of the Detection Club, and participated in the Club’s activities with characteristic gusto.

  At the Villa Rose

  by A.E.W. Mason (1910)

  Crime writers have always drawn on real-life cases when seeking inspiration for their fiction. Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle all wrote detective stories based on ‘true crimes’ that caught their interest, and so do many authors of today. In the hands of a talented novelist, the facts of a seemingly mundane or commonplace crime may be fashioned into an intriguing mystery, focusing on plot, character, setting or all three.

  On a visit to the then-renowned Star and Garter hotel at Richmond, A.E.W. Mason saw two names scratched on a window-pane by a diamond ring: ‘One was of Madame Fougere, a wealthy elderly woman who a year before had been murdered in her villa at Aix-les-Bains, the second was that of her maid and companion, who had been discovered…bound and chloroformed in her bed.’ The incident stuck in his mind, and visits to a provincial conjuring show, a murder trial at the Old Bailey, and a restaurant in Geneva supplied him with further material for the plot of a detective novel. He conceived a French police professional, Inspector Hanaud, who was ‘as physically unlike Mr Sherlock Holmes as he could possibly be’. Mason gave Hanaud a ‘Dr Watson’ in Mr Julius Ricardo, a fastidious dilettante who had made a fortune in the City of London.

  At the Villa Rose opens with Ricardo spending the summer in Aix-les-Bains. On a visit to the baccarat table, he encounters a young Englishman, Harry Wethermill, together with Celia Harland, the pretty but impecunious girl to whom Harry has become attached. Less than forty-eight hours later, Harry calls on Ricardo for help. Celia’s employer, Madame Dauvray, has been strangled, and her maid bound and chloroformed. Celia is missing, and is the obvious suspect. Presuming on a slight acquaintance, Ricardo persuades Hanaud to become involved in the case, and the legendary detective proceeds to unmask an unexpected culprit.

  Already a well-regarded novelist and playwright, Mason wanted ‘to make the story of what actually happened more intriguing and dramatic than the unravelling of the mystery and the detection of the criminal…to combine the crime story which produces a shiver with the detective story which aims at a surprise’. This worthy aim caused him to reveal whodunit long before the end of the book, with later chapters amounting to an extended explanatory flashback.

  Albert Edward Woodley Mason was an accomplished all-rounder: an actor, politician, writer and spy. His novel of courage and adventure,
The Four Feathers (1902), has been filmed no fewer than seven times. Hanaud is a memorable creation, and his friendship with Ricardo one of the most attractive early variations on the theme of detective and admiring stooge. The cosmopolitan backdrop of the story adds further appeal, while the plot blends the real-life source material with phoney spiritualism, baffling but logical detective work, and a ‘least likely suspect’ as villain. Its main flaw is the lop-sided story structure.

  Mason waited for more than a decade before bringing Hanaud back in The House of the Arrow (1924). This time, he resolved ‘to leave as little as possible, once the mystery was solved, to be cleared up and explained’. The result was an even better book, but At the Villa Rose remains a landmark in the genre. Three more Hanaud novels appeared at intervals; he made his final appearance as late as 1946 in The House in Lordship Lane, his only recorded case to take place in England.

  The Eye of Osiris

  by R. Austin Freeman (1911)

  The Eye of Osiris blends elements of an actual murder in Boston, Massachusetts with forensic science, Egyptology and romance. The result is a memorable challenge for Dr John Thorndyke, an expert in medical jurisprudence, and the first major scientific detective to appear in twentieth-century crime fiction.

  The Thorndyke stories occasionally drew on real-life mysteries, and in this novel the detective talks about how the murder in 1849 of a Boston businessman, George Parkman, by an impecunious lecturer, John Webster, resulted in an early triumph for forensic detection, and Webster’s conviction and public hanging. The dead man’s remains had been partially cremated, and as Thorndyke explains to his friend, Christopher Jervis, ‘identification was actually effected by means of remains collected from the ashes of a furnace’. The human body is, Thorndyke says, ‘a very remarkable object…it is extremely difficult to preserve unchanged, and it is still more difficult completely to destroy.’

  Jervis narrates many of Thorndyke’s cases, but here the story is told by a young physician called Paul Berkeley. A wealthy Egyptologist called John Bellingham has been missing for two years, leaving behind a strange and convoluted will. Berkeley becomes personally involved when he falls in love with the missing man’s niece Ruth, who is living in poverty with her father Godfrey. When human remains come to light, it falls to Thorndyke to identify them, and discover what happened to John Bellingham, and why.

  The puzzle is cleverly constructed, and Freeman’s meticulous handling of technical detail makes Thorndyke’s investigation highly credible, even though the prose lacks sparkle, and the story proceeds at a stately pace. The ‘love interest’ did not appeal to every reader; even Dorothy L. Sayers—a fervent admirer of Freeman—deplored it. Thorndyke is, however, bluntly unapologetic. Perhaps speaking for Freeman, he insists: ‘We should be bad biologists and worse physicians if we should underestimate the…paramount importance of sex; and we are deaf and blind if we do not hear and see it in everything that lives when we look around the world.’

  Richard Austin Freeman qualified as a doctor before joining the Colonial Service and serving in Africa. Ill-health disrupted his medical career, and he turned to writing to supplement his income. He co-wrote two collections of short detective stories under a pseudonym prior to creating Thorndyke. The Singing Bone (1912) was an innovative collection of ‘inverted’ detective stories, in which the culprit is seen carrying out his criminal scheme before Thorndyke sets about unravelling it, although the book’s originality and significance was not appreciated for many years.

  Forensic detective work had already featured in Sherlock Holmes’ cases (written by a doctor) and also in the stories co-authored by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace. Freeman’s discussions of science carried even greater authority, and Raymond Chandler, author of detective novels of a very different type, described him in a letter as ‘a wonderful performer…he is also a much better writer than you might think, if you were superficially inclined, because in spite of the immense leisure of his writing, he accomplishes an even suspense which is quite unexpected.’

  The Lodger

  by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1913)

  The Lodger began life as a short story inspired by a conversation which its author had overheard at a dinner party. A fellow guest’s mother employed a butler and cook who married, and took in lodgers. The couple were convinced that Jack the Ripper had spent one night in their house, and Marie Belloc Lowndes became intrigued by the idea of living under the same roof as someone who proves to be a multiple murderer. After the story ‘The Lodger’ was published in the final issue of the American magazine McClure’s in 1911, she was commissioned by the Daily Telegraph to write a novel for serialisation in the newspaper. The editor agreed to her proposed expansion of the short story, and the result was a notable early example of the novel of psychological suspense.

  The strength of The Lodger derives from its focus on the tensions of domestic life rather than lurid melodrama. Robert and Ellen Bunting, who live in a ‘grimy if not exactly sordid’ street in west London (rather than Whitechapel, the actual scene of the Ripper’s crimes), appear to present a cosy picture of comfortable married life. But appearances are deceptive; the couple are desperately short of money: ‘Already they had learnt to go hungry and now they were beginning to learn to go cold.’

  Financial salvation arrives in the form of a long, lanky man ‘clad in an Inverness cape and an old-fashioned top hat’, who knocks on the Buntings’ door. He is looking for quiet rooms, and is willing to pay a good price. He says his name is Mr Sleuth, and his habit of quoting the Bible seems to Mrs Bunting to set the seal on his respectability. But four brutal murders have been committed in London over the past fortnight by someone calling himself ‘the Avenger’. Before long, it begins to dawn on Mrs Bunting that her lodger may be nursing a very dark secret. But she is reluctant to betray him.

  ***

  The Lodger became a bestseller, and its popularity endured; later admirers included Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. The story was adapted for the stage, filmed four times (once by Alfred Hitchcock) and even, in 1960, turned into an opera by Phyllis Tate, with a libretto by the broadcaster David Franklin.

  Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes had an English mother and a French father. Her younger brother, the poet and satirist Hilaire Belloc, was a close friend of G.K. Chesterton, and himself dabbled briefly in light-hearted fiction on the fringe of the crime genre. A feminist like her mother, Belloc Lowndes was an early member of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, and in The Lodger she observes: ‘perhaps because she is subject rather than citizen, her duty as a component part of civilised society weighs but lightly on woman’s shoulders’.

  Her fascination with real-life crime led her to attend the trial of the Seddons, a husband and wife accused of poisoning an eccentric spinster. In her diary, she recorded that ‘watching the prisoners was to me intensely interesting. They were the most respectable, commonplace-looking people imaginable.’ The Chink in the Armour (1912) was inspired by the murder of Marie Lavin at Monte Carlo; What Really Happened (1926) drew on the unsolved Victorian murder of Charles Bravo; and Letty Lynton (1931) fictionalised the Madeleine Smith case, and was filmed with Joan Crawford in the lead. Belloc Lowndes also created a series detective, Hercule Popeau, whose name may have been lurking in Agatha Christie’s subconscious when she came to christen the Belgian detective who appeared in her first novel.

  Max Carrados

  by Ernest Bramah (1914)

  ‘The Coin of Dionysios’ opens this first book of short stories about Max Carrados. It begins with a private enquiry agent, Louis Carlyle, visiting the home of an expert on numismatics. Ushered into the library, he is shocked when the expert, Max Carrados, asks if his name is Louis Calling. The men, it emerges, are old friends who have for contrasting reasons changed their names. Carlyle was a solicitor who was struck off after being wrongly accused of falsifying a trust account. He changed his appearance and became a private dete
ctive. Max Wynn inherited a fortune from an American cousin on condition that he changed his surname to Carrados. But he cannot see: as a result of being struck in the eye by a branch while out riding, he suffers from a form of blindness called amaurosis. Carlyle had changed his appearance, yet Carrados still recognised his voice: ‘I had no blundering, self-confident eyes to be hoodwinked.’

  Carrados’ remaining senses are acute, and he admits to a secret hankering to become a detective. Carlyle’s initial scepticism turns to astonishment when, after handing Carrados an ancient Greek coin which is a clue to the fraud he is investigating, the blind man solves the case with a flourish worthy of Sherlock Holmes: ‘I should advise you to arrest [the culprit]…communicate with the police authorities of Padua for particulars of the career of Helene Brunesi, and suggest to Lord Seastoke that he should return to London to see what further depredations have been made in his cabinet.’

  Although Carlyle is the professional, he acts as Carrados’ Watson, while his friend’s valet, Parkinson, usefully possesses a photographic memory. Carrados sees detection as a game comparable to cricket, and in ‘The Game Played in the Dark’, Carrados puts himself on a more than equal footing with the villains by extinguishing the lights. This plot device has been borrowed many times, for instance by Nigel Balchin in his screenplay for 23 Paces to Baker Street, a film based on Philip MacDonald’s The Nursemaid Who Disappeared (1938); Balchin dispensed with MacDonald’s sleuth Anthony Gethryn and substituted a blind protagonist.

  Introducing a subsequent collection of stories, The Eyes of Max Carrados (1923), Ernest Bramah described the extraordinary achievements of blind people over the years, adding that ‘many of the realities of fact have been deemed too improbable to be transferred to fiction’. Carrados was far from being the only blind detective in fiction, and the early stories about him appeared at much the same time that the American Clinton H. Stagg created Thornley Colton, a sightless investigator known as ‘the Problemist’. Colton appeared in eight short stories and a novel before Stagg was killed in a car crash at the age of twenty-six, but Carrados’ career continued until 1934, when he appeared for the one and only time in a novel, The Bravo of London.