The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Christie herself acknowledged that Jane Marple resembled the sister of the doctor who narrates the classic Poirot novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), a gossip-loving spinster who is one of her most rounded and pleasing characters. Caroline Sheppard is not, however, a detective, and fails to deduce who did kill Roger Ackroyd. When Miss Marple first appeared, few imagined that a crime-solving spinster in a small village would become one of fiction’s most iconic sleuths. Her career as an amateur detective was late-flowering, but long-lasting, and the stories about her have been successfully adapted for radio, television and film. As time passed, Christie’s portrayal softened, and the old lady became unexpectedly adventurous; in her post-war incarnation, she unravelled mysteries in a London hotel, while travelling on a coach tour, and even during a Caribbean holiday. She remained, in true Christie fashion, the last person one would suspect of being a Great Detective.

  The Case of the Late Pig

  by Margery Allingham (1937)

  Great Detectives rarely tell their own stories. Sherlock Holmes’ two accounts of his own investigations, for instance, rank among the less notable entries in his casebook, and serve as reminders of the benefits of having a ‘Watson’ as admiring narrator of the exploits of a much more gifted friend. But The Case of the Late Pig is a successful exception to the general rule, in part because Albert Campion’s distinctive voice is captured from the outset:

  ‘The main thing in autobiography, I have always thought, is not to let any damned modesty creep in to spoil the story. This adventure is mine…and I am fairly certain that I was pretty nearly brilliant in it in spite of the fact that I so nearly got myself and old Lugg killed that I hear a harp quintet whenever I consider it.’

  Significantly, the book—the only one narrated by Campion—is short. Just as Great Detectives do not take their colleagues into their confidence, they like to keep their readers at arm’s length; their conjuring tricks work best when watched from a distance. If events are seen from the sleuth’s viewpoint, how can the element of surprise be maintained, and how can the author justify keeping us in the dark? The brevity and pace of the story help Allingham’s narrative experiment to succeed, although Campion teases an amiable but naive chief constable when declining to explain what is in his mind:

  ‘“Look here, Leo,” I said. “I know how the first murder was done, and I think I know who did it, but at this stage proof is absolutely impossible…Give me a day or two longer.”’

  A perplexing puzzle is the story’s starting point. An intriguing but unsigned letter persuades Campion to attend the funeral of ‘Pig’ Peters, whom he remembers without affection from his school days at Botolph’s Abbey. Five months later, he is summoned to the parish of Kepesake—only to be confronted by the corpse of ‘Pig’ Peters. The mystery of the man who died twice is enhanced by Allingham’s evocation of rural England: ‘Kepesake, which is a frankly picturesque village by day, was mysterious in the false light. The high trees were deep and shadowy…while the square tower of the church looked squat and menacing against the transparent sky. It was a secret village through which we sped on…our rather ghastly errand.’

  As the plot thickens, a familiar rural scene takes on a macabre character: ‘About half a mile away, in the middle of a field waist high in green corn, there was a dilapidated scarecrow, a grotesque, unnatural creature…But about this particular effigy there was a difference. Far from being frightened, the rooks were swarming upon it.’ On looking through a telescope, Campion feels sick and giddy: a missing man has been found.

  The Case of the Late Pig began life as a paperback original, and the first British hardback edition did not appear for more than half a century, but the story is an example of Margery Allingham at her best. Its high spirits are not a means of disguising a thin plot, but complementary to an intriguing mystery. She was an unorthodox novelist, whose work was correspondingly uneven, but her admirers remain legion, and to this day the Margery Allingham Society flourishes. A.S. Byatt described Traitor’s Purse (1941), in which Campion loses his memory, as ‘startlingly good’, and added that it boasted ‘the most amazing plot of any thriller I know’. Allingham’s gift for evoking atmosphere won praise from Christie in an essay written for Russian mystery fans: ‘You can feel the sinister influences behind the scenes; and her characters live on in your memory long after you have put the book away.’

  Send for Paul Temple

  by Francis Durbridge and John Thewes (1938)

  Paul Temple is unique among Great Detectives of the Golden Age in that he made his first appearance in a radio serial rather than in print. The storyline was turned into a novel shortly after the serial was first broadcast by the BBC (in the Midlands only). Its radio origins are betrayed in the cliff-hanger chapter endings, the heavy reliance on dialogue, and the absence of superfluous characterisation or other matters of detail.

  Sir Graham Forbes, the monocled former military man who is Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, confers with Superintendent Harvey and Chief Inspector Dale about a wave of diamond robberies. During the latest raid, a night watchman has died from chloroform poisoning. The man had been working under a false name, and it looks like an inside job. His dying exclamation was ‘The Green Finger!’, and in an earlier robbery, another man apparently hand in glove with the criminals had with his last breath uttered the same mysterious words. The police conclude that they are up against ‘one of the greatest criminal organisations in Europe.’ But, despite having the benefit of an enigmatic ‘dying message’ clue, they have not the faintest idea how to smash the gang.

  Their helplessness has provoked the press into demanding that they ‘Send for Paul Temple!’ Suave and handsome, Temple is a former journalist who turned to writing thrillers for the stage with such phenomenal success that he has become a household name, and rich enough to own a country house near Evesham in addition to his London flat. He has also developed a sideline in criminology, investigating sensational crimes for the newspapers, and being responsible for the arrest of a string of notorious criminals.

  Temple is duly consulted by Superintendent Harvey, who books a room at the Little General, an inn close to Temple’s rural retreat. Shortly afterwards, Harvey is found there, shot dead in an apparent suicide. Temple is wisely dissatisfied with the easy explanation, and he is aided and abetted in his efforts to solve the mystery by an intrepid young newspaper reporter, Louise Harvey, who is the dead policeman’s sister, and uses the name Steve Trent.

  Once the master-criminal is unmasked, Temple marries Steve. Their creation may have been influenced by the popularity of Nick and Nora Charles, who do the detecting in Dashiell Hammett’s final novel, The Thin Man (1934), and its film spin-offs. Temple, whose favourite catchphrase is ‘By Timothy!’, and Steve remain an idealised version of a quintessentially British couple. They are as brave and adventurous as Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence Beresford.

  Francis Henry Durbridge wrote diverse plays and sketches for the BBC before creating Paul Temple at the age of twenty-five. Durbridge shared the writing of Send for Paul Temple with John Thewes, which may have been an alias for Charles Hatton, who co-wrote the next four Temple books. Durbridge often reused material, and after adapting it for stage and film, he rewrote the first Temple novel in 1951 as Beware of Johnny Washington. He became a prolific writer for radio, and later television, finally concentrating on the stage. As a writer of breathless mysteries with multiple twists he had few peers.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Play Up! Play Up! and Play the Game!’

  Arthur Conan Doyle, a sturdy patriot, surely endorsed the sentiments of Sir Henry Newbolt’s once-famous poem ‘Vitai Lampada’. Despite this, and his love of cricket and other sports, he did not really play the game with the Sherlock Holmes stories, in terms of presenting them as a contest between author and reader. In making his deductions, the great consulting detective usually benefited from information withhe
ld from the reader. The game-playing aspects of detective fiction came into prominence only after the First World War, as a symptom of people’s reaction to carnage and bereavement; there was a hunger for escapism, and readers relished having the chance to solve a puzzle set in a detective story.

  Where there is a game, there must be rules, and such luminaries as the American aesthete Willard Huntington Wright (author of elaborate and wildly popular detective novels under the name S.S. Van Dine), A.A. Milne and T.S. Eliot published their opinions about the requirements of fair play in detective fiction. Towards the end of the Twenties, Monsignor Ronald Knox came up with ‘the Detective Decalogue’, a list of rules which commentators have sometimes taken much more seriously than he did. ‘The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow’ was an example of a rule that did make artistic sense, while ‘No Chinaman must figure in the story’ was merely a light-hearted rebuke to thriller writers whose yarns made fanciful and sometimes xenophobic use of sinister Oriental bogeymen. Highly questionable principles included Knox’s insistence that ‘The detective must not himself commit the crime’, a commandment flouted to brilliant effect before, during and after the Golden Age. The importance of playing fair was echoed in the rules and constitution of the Detection Club, of which Knox was a founder member, and in the Club’s jokey initiation ritual for new members.

  Philip MacDonald emphasised his commitment to fair play in a preface to one of the best Gethryn novels, Persons Unknown (1931, revised as The Maze a year later): ‘In this book I have striven to be absolutely fair to the reader. There is nothing –nothing at all—for the detective that the reader has not had. More, the reader has had his information in exactly the same form as the detective—that is, the verbatim report of evidence.’ Occasionally, writers such as J.J. Connington would be so lavish with the clues that the person guilty of an ingenious crime became evident a little too soon, but that was a better fault than the tendency of some writers to conceal vital information from the reader. Vernon Loder, at his best an entertaining puzzle-maker, sometimes sinned in this way. This may explain why John George Hazlette Vahey, who wrote as Loder, Henrietta Clandon and under other pseudonyms, was never elected to the Detection Club.

  In its simplest form, the detective puzzle was a parlour game which had little or nothing to do with literature. F. Tennyson Jesse, a criminologist, novelist of distinction and author of interesting detective stories in the traditional mould, also edited the British edition of The Baffle Book (1930), the first of three collections of mystery puzzles put together by the Americans Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay. Diagrams, maps, plans of scenes of crime, and tantalising fragments of torn letters garnished dozens of detective stories; more unusual gimmicks included photographs and artists’ sketches. Codes and ciphers were popular, although sometimes the explanation about how to interpret them proved lengthy and tedious.

  The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace experimented with narrative structure, and so did the much more obscure Documentary Evidence (1936), a thriller by Robertson Halket (a pseudonym for E.R. Punshon). In both books, the story is told through letters, newspaper clippings and other documentation. Murder off Miami (1936), compiled by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links, took the concept to extremes. This was the first of four ‘murder dossiers’ containing physical evidence—clues in the form of hair samples, matches and illustrations—as well as telegrams, facsimile police reports and so on. The dossiers were gimmicky and expensive to produce, but at first they sold well, and inspired imitations in the United States; two of the American ‘Crimefiles’ were the work of Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Wheeler, writing as Q. Patrick. The dossiers’ popularity proved short-lived, however, and failed to survive the outbreak of war.

  Equally artificial was Cain’s Jawbone, a novella included in The Torquemada Puzzle Book (1934) compiled by the detective fiction critic of the Observer. In real life ‘Torquemada’ was Edward Powys Mathers, an expert compiler of cryptic crossword puzzles. The unique feature of Cain’s Jawbone was that the pages were printed in the wrong order. Even when one knew the correct order (and very few people have ever risen to the challenge unaided), the story was not especially readable.

  Ingredients of classic crime fiction such as impossible crimes and enigmatic dying message clues undeniably called for readers to make a herculean effort to suspend disbelief; whether they were willing to do so depended on the skill of the author, and Christie, Berkeley and John Dickson Carr often skated on thin ice. They took fair play seriously, and although Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), a masterly example of the ‘least likely person’ solution to a murder puzzle, provoked controversy, the consensus was that she had not betrayed her readers. Their task, as Dorothy L. Sayers pointed out, was to suspect everyone. Berkeley, Milward Kennedy and Rupert Penny were among those who adopted a favourite device of the American author Ellery Queen, the ‘challenge to the reader’ to solve the mystery, laid down at a point in the story when all the clues had been supplied.

  Occasionally, ingenious authors liked to rub salt in the wounds of their hapless readers by making their obtuseness crystal clear. This was achieved by including at the end of the novel a ‘cluefinder’ providing, via footnotes or a table, a guide to those earlier pages where vital pieces of information were mentioned. The cluefinder, apparently invented by J.J. Connington in The Eye in the Museum (1929), was soon borrowed by others. They included Freeman Wills Crofts, who used a cluefinder in one of his most satisfying novels, The Hog’s Back Mystery (1933), John Dickson Carr, Rupert Penny and Elspeth Huxley. Huxley was a cousin of Aldous, and an expert on colonial Kenya, whose occasional mysteries included Murder on Safari (1938) and Death of an Aryan (1939), also known as The African Poison Murders.

  The most elaborate of all cluefinders appeared in C. Daly King’s Obelists Fly High (1935), a labyrinthine mystery about a shooting on board an aeroplane, which begins with an epilogue and ends with a prologue. Even Julian Symons, a stern critic of the more artificial products of the Golden Age, could not help but admire the outrageous originality of King’s novel, which he ranked alongside ‘the detective story to end detective stories’, Cameron McCabe’s The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor (1937). McCabe’s protagonist Muller says, in the course of a lengthy epilogue debating the nature of detective fiction, ‘the possibilities for alternative endings to any detective story are infinite’. This echoing of Berkeley, one of several novelists and critics whose views are discussed, was entirely deliberate.

  A very different kind of gimmick made Stella Tower’s Dumb Vengeance (1933) memorable. The country-house setting is conventional enough, but the narrator, Miss Jenkins, is soon revealed to be a dog. The concept would have been better suited to a short story than a novel, but the quality of the writing compensates for the slenderness of the plot, and the book is the literary ancestor of those perhaps surprisingly popular crime novels featuring sleuthing animals, and in particular cats.

  The best writers, having mastered the rules, became adept at breaking them, and Agatha Christie and Anthony Berkeley led the way in doing just that. As the Thirties drew to an end, it seemed that the detective novel in the form of a game was becoming played out. The Second World War and its aftermath wrought lasting changes to the genre, as had the previous global conflict. Detective novels continued to be written and enjoyed, however, and new exponents of the puzzle mystery kept coming on to the scene.

  Crime writing evolves over time, but game-playing remains a feature of the genre. This is so, despite the fact that the era of challenges to the reader and cluefinders is long gone. It is worth noting the words of two major crime writers who emerged shortly after the Second World War, and whose work is widely regarded, quite reasonably, as having made a break with the past. Patricia Highsmith, a distinguished novelist with little interest in, or aptitude for, writing whodunits, decla
red in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966): ‘Writing fiction is a game, and one must be amused all the time to do it.’

  As for Julian Symons, sometimes seen as a scourge of Golden Age detection, he acknowledged in The Modern Crime Story (1980) that he had come ‘to realise how completely my stories were based on the conception that we are all playing games in our lives’. It is no coincidence that one of his finest novels resembles the best Golden Age fiction in various respects. The events in the story are influenced by a notorious real-life murder case—the Moors Murders—the reader is supplied with the private journal of an unnamed culprit, and there is a clever ‘least likely person’ solution. The book’s title is The Players and the Game (1972).

  The Floating Admiral

  by certain members of the Detection Club (1931)

  Founded in 1930, the Detection Club attracted the great and the good of British detective writers. Chesterton was the Club’s first President, and E.C. Bentley, A.A. Milne, A.E.W. Mason and Baroness Orczy were among the founder members. But the Club’s driving force was a core of younger and highly energetic and enthusiastic writers with strong commercial instincts, and a fondness for game-playing. In the vanguard were Anthony Berkeley, the Club’s founder, and Dorothy L. Sayers. From the start, they immersed themselves in collaborative projects, writing two ‘round-robin’ mysteries together. Behind the Screen (1930) and The Scoop (1931) were each the length of a novella, produced by half a dozen writers, broadcast by the BBC and serialised in The Listener; they were published together in book form in 1983.