by Freeman Wills Crofts (1920)
Set in 1912, The Cask opens with a minor accident at St Katherine Docks. Dock workers unloading casks that have arrived in London from continental Europe drop one, causing it to split slightly. They discover that it contains gold sovereigns, but more than that, a woman’s hand is visible inside. The police are called, but by the time they arrive, the cask has vanished. A mysterious Frenchman has claimed the cask as his own.
Aided by good work from a police constable who ‘had read Conan Doyle, Austin Freeman and other masters of detective fiction’, Inspector Burnley of Scotland Yard traces the Frenchman, Felix Leon, together with the cask. Inside the cask is the body of a beautiful woman, who has been strangled. This remains a vivid and memorable image, even when described in Crofts’ sober, functional prose.
Who is the woman, and how did she meet her fate? To find the answers, Burnley and his colleagues embark on a lengthy investigation. One suspect possesses an apparently impregnable alibi, and the action switches back and forth between England and France as the police struggle to break it. They call on Georges La Touche, ‘the smartest private detective in London’, for help; La Touche is half-English, half-French, and he plays a crucial part in unravelling a mystery with a cosmopolitan flavour.
The meticulous account of detective work, coupled with the ingenuity of the construction (and deconstruction) of the alibi were to become Freeman Wills Crofts’ hallmarks, and they set his debut novel apart from the competition. Over the next twenty years, the book sold more than 100,000 copies.
Dublin-born Crofts became a crime novelist by accident. A railway engineer, he started writing the book ‘as an escape from boredom during recovery from a long illness’. After much revision, it was accepted for publication, and its immediate success prompted him to keep writing. He continued to make use of interesting foreign locations; Inspector Tanner journeys to Portugal in The Ponson Case (1921), a disappointingly anti-climactic follow-up to The Cask, while the first part of The Groote Park Murder (1923) is set in South Africa. Travel, whether by road, train, boat, or plane, plays an important part in many of his books, and trickery with journey times is often crucial to his culprits’ cleverly constructed alibis.
In his fifth book, he introduced the good-natured but relentless Inspector Joseph French, who became his most famous detective. By the end of the decade, Crofts had earned the admiration of no less an authority than T.S. Eliot, retired from the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway, and settled in England to write full-time. Even Raymond Chandler, no fan of this type of story, acknowledged him as the ‘best plodding detail man’. Introducing a reprint of The Cask, Crofts modestly admitted the book’s shortcomings—thin characterisation and an excess of padding—but it represents a milestone in the evolution of the detective story.
The Red House Mystery
by A.A. Milne (1922)
A.A. Milne is now so closely associated with Winnie-the-Pooh and children’s fiction that it comes as a surprise to many readers to learn that, prior to creating Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet and their friends, he wrote an immensely popular detective novel. The Red House Mystery is a country-house mystery, so deftly written that it achieved widespread acclaim.
Mark Ablett, wealthy owner of the eponymous Red House, has been hosting a party of guests when Antony Gillingham, an affable and well-travelled young man, calls, hoping to catch up with his old friend Bill Beverley. He stumbles upon a locked-room mystery: Mark’s ‘black sheep’ brother Robert has apparently been shot between the eyes, and Mark, a selfish drunkard, is nowhere to be found. Antony takes it upon himself to investigate, with Bill acting as his Watson.
Milne was well known for his humorous writing in Punch at the time the book was published, and despite the change of direction, his tone is characteristically light-hearted. In the aftermath of a bloody war, whodunit puzzles offered an ideal form of escapism, and Bill finds it hard to think of Mark Ablett ‘as an escaped murderer, a fugitive from justice, when everything was going on just as it did yesterday, and the sun was shining…How could you help feeling that this was not a real tragedy, but merely a jolly kind of detective game that he and Antony were playing?’
Despite moving on to books for children, Milne retained his ‘passion for detective stories’ and wrote a witty and incisive introduction to a new edition of this novel, four years after its first publication. He insisted that detective fiction should be written in ‘good English’ and abhorred the complications that ensue from ‘love interest’. He favoured amateur detectives and fair play, arguing that ‘the detective must have no more special knowledge than the reader’. Readers should know what was in the detective’s mind, and for that reason a ‘Watson’ figure was invaluable: the sleuth must ‘watsonise or soliloquise; the one is merely a dialogue form of the other, and for that, more readable’.
Such was the popularity of Winnie-the-Pooh that it is often forgotten that, apart from this novel, Alan Alexander Milne also enjoyed success as a screenwriter and a playwright. His play The Fourth Wall (1929) is on the fringe of the crime genre, and he also wrote crime short stories, but although the closing lines of The Red House Mystery suggest that Antony will tackle further cases, Milne never wrote a second detective novel. The chances are that, like E.C. Bentley, he would have struggled to improve upon his enjoyable debut.
Chapter Three
The Great Detectives
The decade following the end of the First World War saw the emergence of a new generation of detective novelists. Many were young—sometimes very young; Margery Allingham’s first novel appeared when she was only nineteen—but also ambitious and dynamic. They had survived the carnage, but none of them had been left unscathed. Many had lost friends and family members; some had themselves been wounded. With the coming of peace, they were, like the public at large, in the mood for fun and games.
Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Philip MacDonald and their colleagues wanted to write lively mysteries that tested readers’ wits. Their task was to create a post-war incarnation of the ‘Great Detective’, someone who could solve a fiendishly complex puzzle before anyone else. But these detectives, and their creators, had to jump a hurdle that Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle never faced. Fair play demanded that all the clues should be laid out in the story, so that readers had an opportunity to test their own skills in deductive reasoning before the truth was finally revealed.
The broader canvas afforded by a novel made this possible. Red herrings abounded, as well as clues. The pool of suspects—typically in a ‘closed community’, such as the guests at a traditional country-house party—became larger, presenting more options for mystification. Authors developed increasingly sophisticated techniques of misdirection, none more so than Agatha Christie. Her special gift was the ability to deceive readers time and again without having her detectives rely upon sophisticated scientific or technical expertise or other esoteric knowledge. This set her apart from writers such as R. Austin Freeman, of whom Sayers said: ‘Thorndyke can cheerfully show you all his finds. You will be none the wiser, unless you happen to have an intimate acquaintance with the fauna of local ponds; the effect of belladonna on rabbits; the physical and chemical properties of blood; optics; tropical diseases; metallurgy; hieroglyphics, and a few other trifles.’
Sayers thought that ‘the modern revolution’ in the direction of playing fair was ‘a recoil from the Holmes influence and a turning back to The Moonstone (1868) and its contemporaries’, but Sergeant Cuff, although a memorable and significant character, did not dominate The Moonstone in the way that Great Detectives towered over the mysteries in which they appeared. Cuff was much more fallible than the relentlessly brilliant Hercule Poirot. Even Philip Trent, whose flawed deductions lay at the heart of the narrative in Trent’s Last Case, soon returned to prove his worth as a sleuth. The question for readers of Golden Age detective stories was whether, if they too were presented with all t
he clues to a baffling puzzle or whodunit or howdunit, they might be sharp-witted enough to work out the solution before the Great Detective revealed all in the closing pages.
Sergeant Cuff was, above all, a professional police officer, with a real-life model in Inspector Whicher. The Great Detectives of the Golden Age were almost invariably amateurs who were fascinated by criminology, such as Lord Peter Wimsey, or professionals who worked alongside the police but were not part of the force. A diverse bunch, they included H.C. Bailey’s Reggie Fortune, Christopher Bush’s Ludovic Travers, and Maud Silver, created by Patricia Wentworth, a pen-name for Dora Amy Elles. Miss Silver was a former governess who became a private detective in order to supplement her retirement income, and flourished in her unlikely second career, solving mysteries flavoured with romance.
J.J. Connington’s Sir Clinton Driffield was exceptional, a unique example of a Great Detective who is also a Chief Constable, his flair underlined by his elevation to that high office at the tender age of thirty-five. Even he retired to enjoy an interlude as an amateur sleuth, as Connington experimented with a new police detective, Superintendent Ross, before changing his mind, and restoring Sir Clinton to his original post in charge of the county force. Writing about professional police officers, as Freeman Wills Crofts demonstrated, required paying at least some attention to procedure and plausibility, even if authors such as Ngaio Marsh allowed their policemen the luxury of an occasional flash of deductive brilliance.
Writing about the genre in 1928, Sayers argued that ‘love interest’ was a potential impediment to the success of a detective novel, but she recognised that times were changing: ‘As the detective ceases to be impenetrable and infallible and becomes a man touched with the feelings of our infirmities, so the rigid technique of the art necessarily expands a little.’ Her own development as a crime writer reflected this, and she transformed Lord Peter Wimsey from a sleuthing equivalent of Bertie Wooster into a mature and rounded character. She even gave him a ‘love interest’, in the form of an extensive courtship of Harriet Vane, which reached a successful conclusion in Gaudy Night (1935). Two years later, Sayers denied that marriage would be the end of him as a detective: ‘I can see no end to Peter this side of the grave…. His affairs are more real to me than my own.’ But her crystal ball proved cloudy. Although she kept writing until her death in 1957, to all intents and purposes, Wimsey’s career was already over.
Lesser writers struggled to create memorable Great Detectives. Brian Flynn’s long-forgotten Anthony Bathurst made his debut in The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927), set in a country house during Cricket Week, in which he was critical of some fictional sleuths. This was rather rash – especially given that the American critics Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor dismissed one of his own later cases, Conspiracy at Angel (1947) as “straight tripe” – but Bathurst enjoyed a long career as a private investigator, and some of the mysteries he solved were ingeniously contrived. The concept of the Great Detective was, however, starting to seem shop-worn even during the Golden Age.
Just as E.C. Bentley had meant to do with Trent’s Last Case, and as Anthony Berkeley did in creating the error-prone Roger Sheringham, novelists with a more original turn of mind began to enjoy subverting the notion of the Great Detective. Their chosen method was often parody, but the most original novel of this kind appeared as late as 1945. This was The Ingenious Mr Stone by Robert Player.
Player gave a neat twist to Golden Age conventions. A pleasingly differentiated trio of narrators tell, in leisurely fashion, a story set in part at a girls’ school in Torquay whose head teacher is murdered. The eponymous Lysander Stone, an idiosyncratic private investigator said to be the most suitable man in Europe to investigate the case, does not even make a formal appearance until the second half of the story. A bewildering sequence of strange and suggestive incidents make it impossible for the reader to be quite sure what is going on until the final narrator, the elderly Mrs Bradford, ‘describes the methods used by Lysander Stone in solving the Langdon-Miles problem’. The diversity of voices adds to the delights of a story packed with plot twists and wit. But despite the fact that Poirot and some of his peers continued to ply their trade long after the Second World War, their greatest days belonged to the past. The Ingenious Mr Stone signalled the end of the era.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
by Agatha Christie (1920)
The First World War cast a long shadow over the Twenties. Its impact on people’s lives is evident from the outset of Agatha Christie’s first novel, which she began writing in 1916. Captain Arthur Hastings, recently invalided home from the Western Front, is invited to spend his sick leave with friends at Styles Court. In the green and peaceful Essex countryside, Hastings finds it almost impossible to believe that war is raging not so very far away: ‘I felt I had suddenly strayed into another world.’ He confesses to his hosts that, when the war is over, he has ‘a secret hankering to be a detective’; before long, he bumps into the little man who had fired his imagination years earlier in Belgium, and whose name is Hercule Poirot.
Poirot, once a famous detective but now a refugee from the conflict, is living nearby. He and some fellow countrymen have benefited from the charitable work of Mrs Emily Inglethorp, wealthy chatelaine of Styles, whose recent marriage to a much younger man has proved unpopular with other members of her family. When Mrs Inglethorp dies of strychnine poisoning, Hastings seeks Poirot’s aid, and they form an updated version of the Holmes–Watson partnership.
Hastings describes Poirot as an ‘extraordinary-looking man’; he is short, with an egg-shaped head and stiff moustache. ‘The neatness of his attire was almost incredible’, Hastings says, choosing a topical comparison to emphasise his point: ‘I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.’ Poirot is vain, obsessed with order and method, and a master of the enigmatic remark that misleads Hastings, as well as the reader, as to where his suspicions really lie.
Christie blends a rich variety of ingredients, including floor plans, facsimile documents, an inheritance tangle, impersonation, forgery and courtroom drama. The originality of her approach lay in the way she prioritised the springing of a surprise solution ahead of everything else—including characterisation and description of setting.
Her prose is economical, rather than evocative, but The Mysterious Affair at Styles set the pattern for dozens of Christie’s later novels. Poirot made a successful return in The Murder on the Links (1923), much of which is set in France, although the short stories gathered in Poirot Investigates (1924) show that Christie’s method of hiding clues among red herrings was better suited to a longer story. The third Poirot novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), notable for a solution so daring that it briefly created controversy, remains one of the most famous of all detective novels, and secured the reputation of both character and author. The little Belgian ranks second only to Holmes in the pantheon of Great Detectives.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie (née Miller) worked in a pharmacy during the First World War, and put her knowledge of poisons to good use in The Mysterious Affair at Styles and many other stories. Speculation about the reasons for her brief, highly publicised disappearance in 1926, at a time when her marriage was in crisis, continues, but her fame rests on the enduring worldwide popularity of her books. Nobody has ever written ingenious whodunits with such consistency, and nobody has ever matched her worldwide sales. More than half a century after her death, she remains a household name.
Clouds of Witness
by Dorothy L. Sayers (1926)
Lord Peter Wimsey was created as a conscious act of escapism by a young writer who was short of money, and experiencing one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Peter Death Bredon Wimsey, second son of the Duke of Denver, began his fictional life as a fantasy figure. He was rich, handsome, charming and above all, highly intelligent. At Eton, he earned a reputation as an outstanding cricketer, cem
ented during his years at Balliol College, Oxford, where, naturally, he took First Class honours in History. During the Great War, he earned the Distinguished Service Order for ‘recklessly good intelligence work behind the German front’, before being blown up and buried in a shell-hole, and suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (as it would now be called) as a result. His convalescence was aided by a love of music and books shared with his creator, and he set himself up in a flat in Piccadilly with a devoted manservant, Mervyn Bunter, who had served as his sergeant during the war.
Wimsey’s life took a new turn when he indulged in detective work to help solve ‘the business of the Attenbury Emeralds’ (eventually written up as a ‘continuation novel’, The Attenbury Emeralds, by Jill Paton Walsh in 2010). He befriended Charles Parker of Scotland Yard, and as his uncle said: ‘The only trouble about Peter’s new hobby was that it had to be more than a hobby…You cannot get murderers hanged for your own private entertainment. Peter’s intellect pulled him one way, and his nerves another…At the end of every case we had the old nightmares and shell-shock all over again. And then Denver [Peter’s elder brother, Gerald, Duke of Denver]…must needs get himself indicted on a murder charge and stand his trial in the House of Lords.’
Clouds of Witness tells the story of the Denver case, Wimsey’s second recorded investigation. He is enjoying an extended holiday in Corsica when he learns that the man engaged to his sister Mary, Captain Denis Cathcart, has been found shot dead shortly after quarrelling with Denver. At the inquest, a coroner’s jury returned a verdict finding Denver guilty of the murder. Wimsey and Parker investigate, and soon become convinced that both Denver and Mary have something to hide.
While Wimsey makes a transatlantic dash to attend the trial after pursuing his enquiries in the USA, the lawyer Sir Impey Biggs describes him as ‘cleaving the air high above the wide Atlantic. In this wintry weather he is braving a peril which would appal any heart but his own and that of the world-famous aviator whose help he has enlisted so that no moment may be lost in freeing his noble brother from this terrible charge.’ His Lordship is not only a Great Detective but also (unlike Poirot) a dashing man of action. At this stage of his career, Sayers’ portrayal of him verged on caricature, but as her confidence grew, she sought to characterise him in greater depth; the turning point came in Strong Poison (1930), when he fell in love with Harriet Vane, who had been charged with murdering her lover.
The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books Page 5