The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Clouds of Witness is the work of a novelist learning her craft, but manifests the story-telling qualities that soon earned fame for Dorothy Leigh Sayers. An Oxford-educated intellectual, she was also a notable historian and critic of the genre whose reviews for the Sunday Times display erudition, energy and enthusiasm in equal measure. Together with Anthony Berkeley, she became a driving force in the Detection Club, using experience gained in the advertising world to help build its reputation; she succeeded E.C. Bentley as President in 1949. Her detective fiction became increasingly ambitious, and although opinion remains divided as to the extent of its success, her contribution to the development of the genre was highly significant before she abandoned crime writing at the end of the Thirties to concentrate on religious writing and translating Dante.

  The Rasp

  by Philip MacDonald (1924)

  Among the Great Detectives suited to crime-solving in the Twenties were several men who had experienced ‘a good war’. Colonel Anthony Ruthven Gethryn, who first appeared in The Rasp, was a prime example. He is introduced as ‘something of an oddity. A man of action who dreamed while he acted; a dreamer who acted while he dreamed.’ His parents were ‘a hunting country gentleman’ who was also a brilliant mathematician, and a Spanish woman who had been a dancer, mannequin, actress and portrait painter. The vivid if exaggerated characterisation is symptomatic of a young, energetic author serving his literary apprenticeship; MacDonald was still in his early twenties.

  As if being courageous, handsome, modest and likeable were not enough, Gethryn was in addition an excellent sportsman, and an Oxford graduate skilled in mathematics; he ‘also became known as a historian and man of classics’. He was called to the Bar, wrote novels and poetry, worked in politics, and then served with distinction in the infantry before being wounded in action. Recruited by the Secret Service, he went undercover in Germany: ‘It was queer work, funny work, work in the dark, work in strange places.’ Showered with decorations by ‘a grateful Government’ and ‘a baker’s dozen of other orders (foreign)’, he inherited a fortune, and invested in a periodical called The Owl.

  When the editor of The Owl urges him to look into the sensational murder of John Hoode, Gethryn leaps at the chance. Hoode is Minister of Imperial Finance, and one of many politicians who are murder victims in Golden Age mysteries, perhaps because countless people had motives to kill them. He has been bludgeoned to death, with a wood-rasp, in the study of his country house, Abbotshall. Gethryn falls in love with a young widow, Lucia Lemesurier, who lives across the river from the scene of the crime, but his pursuit of her is complicated by the fact that the man her sister loves is a prime suspect.

  Gethryn often mentions detective stories, and intertextuality of this kind became commonplace in Golden Age fiction. Scientific know-how culled from Dr Thorndyke’s debut, The Red Thumb-Mark (1907) helps him to solve a puzzle about fingerprints. He makes use of his acting ability in unmasking the culprit, and wins over Lucia. The zest of MacDonald’s prose contributed to the book’s success, and compensated for flaws such as Gethryn’s very lengthy explanation of the mystery at the end. During the Twenties, ‘love interest’ in detective stories was frowned on by purists such as A.A. Milne and Dorothy L. Sayers, but MacDonald’s romantic sub-plot proved to be ahead of its time. Gethryn’s lead was followed by several Golden Age detectives—even Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey—who married a woman they met through solving a murder.

  Gethryn returned in books which demonstrate MacDonald’s gift for building suspense, such as The Noose (1930), where he races against time to save an innocent man from the gallows; the surprise solution is a variant of that in The Skeleton Key. Gethryn’s appearances became infrequent after the mid-Thirties, but he did not take his final bow until 1959, in The List of Adrian Messenger, an extraordinary story of multiple murder that was later filmed by John Huston.

  Philip MacDonald came from a distinguished literary family; his grandfather, George Fraser MacDonald, was an inspiration to Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, and he co-wrote his first two novels with his father Ronald MacDonald. MacDonald and J. Jefferson Farjeon co-wrote a screenplay based on The Rasp which was filmed by the legendary Michael Powell in 1932. MacDonald became a versatile scriptwriter, working on projects as varied as Raise the Roof, said to be the first British film musical, and—after relocating to the United States—the classic movies Rebecca and Forbidden Planet. Hollywood’s gain was crime fiction’s loss.

  Mr Fortune, Please

  by H.C. Bailey (1927)

  In ‘The Missing Husband’, first of the half-dozen stories in this volume, Reggie Fortune is encountered lazing in a hammock in ‘an orchard where the apple-blossom rose out of a flood of bluebells’, but H.C. Bailey soon reminds his reader of the darker side of life. Reggie is recovering from ‘the blood-poisoning which he acquired in his work as medical expert for the Crown upon the historic crime of the abominable Armenian, Commensus’. He is consulted by his friend the Hon. Sidney Lomas, Chief of the CID, and a missing person inquiry develops into a murder investigation. When Lomas says that the culprit would have escaped justice if the local police had handled the case, Reggie muses, in his customary languid way, ‘I wonder how many clever fellows do get away with it?’

  Reggie Fortune was unique among Great Detectives to emerge after the First World War in that he was seen to best advantage in short stories rather than in novels. The stories were longer than the typical detective short story, and often explore intense human passions which seldom darken detective stories of the Twenties written by Bailey’s peers.

  In ‘The Quiet Lady’, Reggie discusses criminal motivation with an elderly doctor: ‘Fellow thinks he’s a very important fellow. Ought to have more than he’s got. Ought to have his own way. So he takes it…Conceit…Desire to show what a wonderful fellow he is. To prove his power over people’s lives. Some fellows will do anything for that.’ The telegraphic style of dialogue is characteristic, and so is the horrific behaviour of the culprit; Reggie summarises the case as: ‘Not a nice business.’ When the old doctor accuses him of being ‘rather terrible…if you’re not sure, let’s have mercy’, Reggie’s bleak response is: ‘Mercy—that’s not my department. I work for justice.’

  ‘The Little House’ sees Reggie dealing with ‘one of the few cases that have frightened him’. A seemingly innocuous, if puzzling, incident concerning a lost kitten introduces a grim tale about cruelty. The mistreatment of children is a subject that recurs in Bailey’s work, as does the stinging cynicism in Reggie’s remark: ‘I use only evidence. That’s why I don’t get on with lawyers and policemen.’

  Henry Christopher Bailey began his literary career as an author of historical and romantic fiction, publishing his first novel shortly after leaving Oxford. He became a journalist, spending many years with the Daily Telegraph, where he was a colleague of E.C. Bentley. He turned to detective fiction after the First World War, perhaps partly influenced by Bentley’s success, at much the same time as younger writers such as Christie and Sayers, but he lacked their interest in playing elaborate games with readers.

  Reggie Fortune, adviser to the Home Office, appeared in no fewer than eight collections of stories before his first appearance in a novel, Shadow on the Wall (1934). Agatha Christie was among his admirers: ‘The stories stand or fall by Mr Fortune. It is not the cases themselves but Mr Fortune’s handling of them wherein lies the fascination. For Mr Fortune is, undeniably, a great man…His method is the method of the knife, ruthless and incisive…Some of the best Fortune stories show the deduction of a whole malignant growth from one small isolated incident.’ Bailey also created another long-running series character in the solicitor Joshua Clunk, whose path occasionally crosses that of Reggie Fortune. During the Golden Age itself, Bailey was one of the most highly regarded detective writers, but his reputation went into sharp decline after the Second World War. His mannered style of writing became deeply unfashionable, and
is likely to remain so, but today his concerns as a crime writer seem rather more modern than those of many of his contemporaries.

  The Poisoned Chocolates Case

  by Anthony Berkeley (1929)

  Roger Sheringham was the most fallible of Great Detectives. Anthony Berkeley’s desire to debunk the notion of the omniscient crime-solver is made plain by the number of occasions when Roger—like Philip Trent in Trent’s Last Case—came up with an ingenious solution to a baffling mystery, only to discover that his theory was hopelessly mistaken. As Roger reflects in Jumping Jenny (1933), also known as Dead Mrs Stratton: ‘That was the trouble with the old-fashioned detective-story. One deduction only was drawn from each fact, and it was invariably the right deduction. The Great Detectives of the past certainly had luck. In real life one can draw a hundred plausible deductions from one fact, and they’re all equally wrong.’

  No detective novel offers a more entertaining illustration of this principle than The Poisoned Chocolates Case. The genesis of the plot can be found in a clever short story, ‘The Avenging Chance’, in which Roger solves the murder of Joan Beresford. Berkeley expanded the story, making changes in the process, above all by having Roger’s solution shown to be mistaken. In an odd twist somehow typical of Berkeley’s contrariness, the novel appears to have been published before the short story; perhaps he realised that he had come up with a superb concept, and felt it made commercial sense for the novel to appear first.

  Roger has founded the Crimes Circle, a select dining club for people with a passion for criminology. There are just five other members: a famous lawyer, a leading woman dramatist, a prominent detective novelist, and the meek and modest Ambrose Chitterwick. Their guest, Roger’s old sparring partner Chief Inspector Moresby, is prevailed upon to recount the story of an apparently insoluble murder committed by means of poisoned chocolates. Each of the six members in turn comes up with a proposed solution to the mystery, and all of them except Chitterwick cite actual cases in support of their theories—a reminder of Berkeley’s acute interest in real-life crime. One after another, the superficially plausible explanations of the mystery are dismantled.

  To reinforce the point about the almost infinite possible interpretations of evidence, in 1979, Christianna Brand, a member of the Detection Club elected after the Second World War, and a friend of Berkeley’s, came up with a seventh solution to the puzzle of the poisoned chocolates, and in 2016, the present writer published an eighth. The American critic James Sandoe noted that in The Dain Curse, also published in 1929, Dashiell Hammett ‘solved’ that case no fewer than four times. This is almost certainly a coincidence, but Hammett reviewed at least one of Berkeley’s novels, and did find Roger Sheringham amusing.

  Unwise characters in detective novels continued to consume chocolates from questionable sources with predictably calamitous results; the device was used by such diverse and gifted writers as Agatha Christie, in Three-Act Tragedy, (1934), the American Helen McCloy in Who’s Calling? (1942), and by Edmund Crispin in Buried for Pleasure, as late as 1948.

  Sheringham’s life bore a striking resemblance to his creator’s. Sheringham too was an Oxford graduate who fought and was wounded during the war, and then tried his hand at various jobs before making an unexpected success of writing a novel. He also shared Berkeley’s fascination with criminology, ‘which appealed not only to his sense of the dramatic but to his feeling for character’. Berkeley modelled the get-togethers of the Crimes Circle on the dinners he hosted at his home in Watford that led to his founding the Detection Club, a prestigious organisation for detective writers which elected its members by secret ballot, and subjected them to an initiation ritual which entailed swearing an oath on a skull.

  Anthony Berkeley was a pseudonym of Anthony Berkeley Cox. After war service, Cox worked as a freelance journalist; like his fellow Detection Club members A.A. Milne and Ronald Knox, he contributed humorous columns to Punch before turning to detective fiction. His ingenious and innovative plotting won immediate admiration, but he became increasingly interested in criminal psychology, which lay at the heart of the novels he wrote as Francis Iles.

  The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop

  by Gladys Mitchell (1929)

  Great Detectives are distinctive characters, none more so than Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, described in this, her second appearance, as ‘a small, shrivelled, bird-like woman, who might have been thirty-five and who might have been ninety, clad in a blue and sulphur jumper like the plumage of a macaw’. She greets the vicar of Wandles Parva with ‘that air of easy condescension which is usually achieved by royalty only.’

  Mrs Bradley is the author of a Small Handbook of Psycho-Analysis, and has moved to the Stone House in Wandles Parva fresh from her exploits in Speedy Death (1929), in which she not only solved the killing of a transvestite explorer, but took quite extraordinary measures in order to prevent another murder. Wandles Parva boasts a manor house owned by a blackmailer, a wood which is the scene of all manner of nefarious activities, and a pagan stone circle complete with blood-splashed ‘Stone of Sacrifice’. After the blackmailer goes missing, human remains are found in the village butcher’s shop, but neither decapitation nor dismemberment disturb the relentlessly playful tone of the narrative.

  Mrs Bradley’s idiosyncratic worldview is reflected in her comparison of a murderer with a doctor who is responsible for the birth of an illegitimate child: ‘The population of this country is so excessive that, looked at from the purely common-sense point of view, a person who decreases it is considerably more public-spirited than one who adds to it, and he should be dealt with accordingly.’

  Mitchell’s ironic tone and ability to conjure up multiple solutions to a murder mystery are reminiscent of the work of Anthony Berkeley. In a satirical twist, the obvious suspect is neatly transformed into the least likely culprit before the final revelation. The ingenuity is worthy of Agatha Christie, but the flavour of Mitchell’s writing is distinctive. To help draw together the threads of a complicated and coincidence-laden sequence of events, she supplies, in classic Golden Age fashion, not only entries from Mrs Bradley’s notebook but also a timetable and two plans of the rural neighbourhood.

  As in her debut novel, Mitchell was confident enough to confront convention head-on. Through Mrs Bradley, she makes it plain that it is ‘retrogressive’ to teach children that it is proper for factory owners to ‘pay women about half what they would pay men are doing exactly the same work’. For her, ‘it’s a frightfully progressive sign that so few intelligent people go to church’, given that plutocrats invoke ‘the will of Heaven’ to make their workers put up with unacceptable conditions.

  Gladys Mitchell was a schoolteacher whose varied interests, including Freud and witchcraft, often found their way into her fiction. She also wrote mysteries as Malcolm Torrie, and historical novels as Stephen Hockaby. Mrs Bradley eventually appeared in no fewer than sixty-six novels as well as numerous short stories, and although their quality varied wildly, the best of them were amusingly original. Just as improbable as many of the plots was the casting of Diana Rigg as the star of The Mrs Bradley Mysteries, a short-lived BBC TV series first screened in 1998.

  The Murder at the Vicarage

  by Agatha Christie (1930)

  Jane Marple, the second Great Detective created by Agatha Christie, less than a decade after Hercule Poirot’s first appearance, was very different from the little Belgian. Far from having professional experience as a detective, she was an elderly spinster who had spent her life in the tranquil Home Counties village of St Mary Mead. But as she says to her condescending nephew, the avant-garde novelist Raymond West, ‘You don’t know as much of life as I do.’ Her genius lies in her understanding of human nature. Drawing parallels between people and incidents in her own, ostensibly limited, experience, and the circumstances surrounding baffling cases of crime, she solves puzzles that have defeated others who seem, superficially
, to be more worldly wise.

  The Murder at the Vicarage is narrated by Leonard Clement, vicar of St Mary Mead. He appreciates Miss Marple’s sense of humour, and realises that although she is ‘a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner’, she ‘always sees everything. Gardening is as good as a smoke screen, and the habit of observing birds through powerful glasses can always be turned to account.’ She makes no secret of her cynicism, and not long after Colonel Protheroe is found murdered in the vicar’s study, she tells the Chief Constable: ‘I’m afraid there’s a lot of wickedness in the world. A nice upright honourable soldier like you doesn’t know about these things.’

  With quiet humour, Christie skewers the pretensions of Raymond West, and the narrow-mindedness of the zealous Inspector Slack. They and the murderer underestimate her acumen, and she has the last laugh. In due course, she wrongfoots the police by revealing whodunit and suggests, for good measure, setting a trap to supply proof of the culprit’s guilt.

  Christie’s sly wit is also evident in the presentation of village life. When Raymond West compares St Mary Mead to a stagnant pool, Miss Marple reminds him that life teems beneath the surface of stagnant pools. Her almost equally inquisitive elderly neighbours indulge in gossip and petty intrigue, and the neighbourhood is also home to adulterers and a well-known cracksman, who is masquerading as an archaeologist.