The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  The popular success of these ventures encouraged Club members to become even more ambitious, and they decided to co-author a full-length novel. Sayers began work on an expanded version of The Scoop, but soon it was decided to come up with a brand new storyline. The result was The Floating Admiral. In her introduction, Sayers explained the authors’ approach:

  ‘Here, the problem was made to approach as closely as possible to a problem of real detection. Except in the case of Mr Chesterton’s picturesque Prologue, which was written last, each contributor tackled the mystery presented to him in the preceding chapters without having slightest idea what solution or solutions the previous authors had in mind. Two rules only were imposed. Each writer must construct his instalment with a definite solution in view: that is, he must not introduce new complications merely ‘to make it more difficult’…Secondly, each writer was bound to deal faithfully with all the difficulties left for his consideration by his predecessors.

  ‘Where one writer may have laid down a clue, thinking that it could point only in one obvious direction, succeeding writers have managed to make it point in a direction exactly opposite. And it is here, perhaps, that the game approximates most closely to real life. We judge one another by our outward actions, but in the motive underlying those actions our judgment may be widely at fault. Preoccupied by our own private interpretations of the matter, we can see only the one possible motive behind the action, so that our solution may be quite coherent, quite plausible and quite wrong.’

  Chesterton’s prologue is set in Hong Kong, before in the first chapter (‘Corpse Ahoy!’, written by Canon Victor L. Whitechurch) the action switches to a country river, and the discovery in a small boat of the corpse of Admiral Penistone. The story is progressed in lively fashion by a formidable team of literary conspirators: G.D.H. and M. Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley. Berkeley’s lengthy concluding chapter was called, with evident feeling, ‘Clearing Up The Mess’.

  An appendix contained the solutions put forward by the earlier contributors (apart from the authors of the first two chapters). Christie’s idea involves transvestism, while Knox, famous for insisting that there should be ‘no Chinamen’ in a detective story, complains that having five characters associated with China is overdoing it. Another appendix presents notes on the mooring of the boat by John Rhode. ‘Counsel’s Opinion on Fitzgerald’s Will’ was included. There is also a map of Whynmouth and its environs. Any book written in such a fashion is bound to be idiosyncratic, but The Floating Admiral remains an exuberant and enjoyable example of a round-robin detective novel; eighty-five years later, the current generation of Detection Club members paid tribute to it with a new collaborative mystery, The Sinking Admiral (2016).

  The Body in the Silo

  by Ronald Knox (1933)

  No detective novelist was better equipped for game-playing than Ronald Knox. Brother of a famous cryptographer, author of a book of acrostics and Sherlockian scholar, he also devised the genre’s ten commandments, a ‘Decalogue’ for detective writers. Of his six crime novels, The Body in the Silo is a country-house mystery, complete with a map showing the grounds of Astbury Hall, a timeline of key events, a cipher based on an early form of shorthand, cluefinder footnotes—and even a chapter entitled ‘The Rules of the Game’.

  Knox’s regular sleuth was Miles Bredon, an astute, crossword-loving investigator with the Indescribable Insurance Company. Most Golden Age detectives, other than stolid policemen like Crofts’ Inspector French, seemed to find family ties an encumbrance. Miles’ wife Angela, however, frequently played an active part in his cases. The Bredons—happily married in a way that would become deeply unfashionable for fictional detectives of later generations—are invited by their acquaintances the Hallifords to join a house party in Herefordshire.

  They become involved in an ‘elopement hunt’, a variation on the idea of a scavenger hunt or treasure hunt, but the following morning one of their fellow guests is found dead in the hosts’ grain silo. The hunt provides the perfect cover for a killer; as Bredon says, ‘When everybody is plotting in fun, you get a good opportunity of plotting in earnest.’ But even Knox factors into his highly elaborate story the psychological make-up of the culprit, who is fundamentally cruel yet at the same time squeamish, someone who ‘recoils from the circumstances of violent death, the messiness, the twitching of the corpse.’

  The mystery is so convoluted that Bredon’s explanation of what actually happened takes up many pages; it is typical of Knox that the two deaths in the story occur as a result of a dark comedy of errors. In the end, a likeable character unintentionally acts as executioner, but Bredon reassures him: ‘Nothing could possibly be more just than what has happened this time; the miscarriage of the plan brings death, not to a harmless stranger, but to the criminal.’ This is a story brimming with Chestertonian paradoxes, written by a friend and admirer of Chesterton, who gave the address at the great man’s funeral.

  Ronald Arbuthnot Knox, a member of an intellectually gifted family, was educated at Eton and Balliol, where he excelled as a classicist. He became an Anglican priest before converting to Catholicism in 1918. He translated the Latin Vulgate Bible into English, and wrote on a wide range of subjects. His tongue-in-cheek paper ‘Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes’, presented in 1911, earned the admiration of Arthur Conan Doyle, who said: ‘You know a great deal more about it than I.’ He was a founder member of the Detection Club, but eventually tired of writing detective stories. Knox was also a popular broadcaster, and his hoax ‘Broadcasting from the Barricades’, a radio programme about a revolution supposedly taking place in Britain, caused a sensation in the early days of the BBC. The trouble arose because so many listeners took his joke seriously.

  She Had to Have Gas

  by Rupert Penny (1939)

  Agatha Topley, a widow who owns a modest boarding-house at Craybourne, a watering-place in East Anglia, worries about her sole lodger’s creditworthiness. Alice Carter, a young woman whom Mrs Topley instinctively distrusts, is behind with her rent. Not long after Alice received a mysterious male visitor called Ellis, Mrs Topley discovers that Alice has gassed herself. But then the body of the apparent victim disappears—what can possibly be going on? Meanwhile, the spoiled niece of a famous crime writer has vanished, and the reader is tempted to believe that she was living a double life in the guest-house. With Rupert Penny, however, nothing is ever straightforward.

  Penny’s regular sleuth, the affable Inspector Beale, leads the investigation, and as usual his friend, stockbroker and journalist Tony Purdon is on hand to act as a rather superfluous version of Dr Watson. Penny was dedicated to playing fair with his reader, and the novel includes both a challenge to the reader and a scattering of cluefinder footnotes as the truth is revealed in the closing pages.

  Rupert Penny was a pen-name of Ernest Basil Charles Thornett, who also wrote one thriller as Martin Tanner. Thornett was a crossword-puzzle fan who during the Second World War worked at Bletchley Park as a cryptographer. After the war, he continued to work for GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), and for some years his superior was C.H.O’D. Alexander, head of cryptanalysis and a well-known chess champion.

  Unsurprisingly, he found it easy to come up with clever puzzles for Chief Inspector Beale to solve. His novels are plotted with an elaboration that is extraordinary even by Golden Age standards, and feature a plethora of tropes of the genre such as maps, charts and timetables. He relished teasing his readers, and a typical example is the challenge laid down in an ‘Interlude’ in Policeman in Armour (1937): ‘Who stabbed Sir Raymond Everett? How was the murder carried out? These are not unfair questions, the answers being discoverable from the foregoing evidence. It is hoped that at least one reader in ten will give five minutes’ attention to the matter, and more than one in a hundred
do so with satisfactory results. There is not much point in setting a problem that nobody can solve except the setter and his puppets.’ Sealed Room Murder (1941) offers an impossible crime for solution, as does Policeman’s Evidence (1938), which includes a cipher so fiendishly convoluted that it is hard to imagine anyone solving it.

  Penny sometimes allowed himself to become carried away with complicated plotting, but his stories are sprinkled with welcome touches of humour. Had he begun to publish a decade earlier, he might have built a considerable reputation. By the time of the appearance of his first mystery, The Talkative Policeman (1936), however, Sayers, Berkeley and their followers had begun to shift the focus of the genre away from intellectual game-playing.

  Penny recognised that the puzzle-based type of fiction at which he excelled was falling out of fashion. Even his first novel included a prefatory note discussing the likely fate of the detective story: ‘By its nature it is for today and possibly for tomorrow and perhaps its highest hope is to pass from dustbin to dustman, and back again to bin, until…[it] is allowed to go the inevitable way of all rubbish. The detective shall find his grave at last as surely as the lifeless flesh he theorised upon.’

  Penny felt that Holmes was the sole exception, although Wimsey (whose last case had actually been written by then) might become another, but his crystal ball failed him as regards Poirot and Miss Marple, and as to the future popularity of classic detective stories. He would be amazed, and perhaps appalled, to find that, eighty years after they were published, jacketed first edition copies of his novels can change hands for thousands of pounds. After a burst of activity yielding nine books in six years, he stopped writing fiction in the early Forties; in later life, his principal literary activity involved editing the annual journal of the British Iris Society, of which he was a doyen.

  Chapter Five

  Miraculous Murders

  A dead body is found in a locked room. Murder has been done—and yet there is no sign of the murderer, perhaps not even of a weapon. It is an impossible crime—for how can it have been committed? The appeal of this puzzling paradox is intense and enduring. Locked-room mysteries have fascinated and entertained readers for as long as detective fiction has been written, while apparently impossible crimes have in recent years featured in popular television series as well as in novels written not only by English-speaking writers, but also by French and Japanese authors such as Paul Halter and Soji Shimada.

  Locked-room and impossible crime stories flourished during the Golden Age, when ingenuity of plotting was so highly prized. John Dickson Carr, the anglophile American who is universally acknowledged as the supreme master of the locked-room mystery, summed up the appeal of these stories with typical gusto: ‘When…we find ourselves flumdiddled by some master stroke of ingenuity which has turned our suspicion legitimately in the wrong direction, we can only salute the author and close the book with a kind of admiring curse.’

  Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, published in 1841 and generally regarded as the first detective story, posed a fascinating problem for Poe’s great detective, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, to solve. A woman was found dead in Paris, her body locked inside a room from which there appeared to be no means of escape for her killer. Yet this was not the first locked-room story. Two years earlier, Sheridan Le Fanu had published ‘A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’ anonymously, although this spooky story can scarcely be described as detective fiction. Antecedents of the locked-room mystery may also be discerned in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and E.T.A. Hoffman’s novella Mademoiselle de Scuderi (1819).

  Wilkie Collins’ short story ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’ poses a situation faintly reminiscent of that in an episode in Chretien de Troyes’ Lancelot of the Knight of the Cart, written in the twelfth century. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery (1892) earned widespread acclaim, while Arthur Conan Doyle’s superb Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Speckled Band’ also exploited the potential of the locked-room mystery to excellent effect. Even Joseph Conrad dabbled with an impossible crime scenario similar to Collins’, in his story ‘The Inn of the Two Witches’.

  The twentieth century saw a host of writers conjuring up ingenious variations of the impossible crime. Among the more talented were the American Jacques Futrelle, creator of Professor S.F.X. Van Dusen, alias ‘the Thinking Machine’, who was the epitome of a cerebral Great Detective, and France’s Gaston Leroux, author of The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907), whose detective was a journalist called Joseph Rouletabille. In Britain, G.K. Chesterton regularly confronted Father Brown with seemingly impossible crimes, a device which enabled him to indulge in his love of paradox.

  Many Golden Age novelists—including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh—found themselves unable to resist the challenge of concocting stories about apparently impossible crimes, while Anthony Wynne made a speciality of them. The prolific Frank King—the pseudonym of Clive Conrad—published four locked-room mysteries, notably Terror at Staups House (1927), in which the loathsome and miserly old Amos Brankard, a receiver of stolen property, gets his come-uppance in a sealed room one stormy winter’s night.

  The best work of Virgil Markham, son of the poet Edwin Markham, brims with youthful daring. Death in the Dusk (1928), set in Radnorshire on the border between England and Wales, combines an extraordinary plot with lashings of Gothic atmosphere. In the prefatory notes, one character whets the reader’s appetite for the puzzle by describing it as ‘a compendium of the bedevilment of Parson Lolly, the mad behaviour of the milkman, the invisible omnipresence of Sir Brooke Mortimer, the enigma of the mystic bone, the legend of Sir Pharamond’s imperishable arm, and the machinations of the ultimate contriver’. Even this list omits ‘the fiendish cat of the Sisters Delambre’. The key twist, although not wholly original, is cleverly disguised. Shock! (1930), known as The Black Door in the US, was subtitled The Mystery of the Fate of Sir Anthony Veryan’s Heirs in Kestrel’s Eyrie Castle near the Coast of Wales, and features a seemingly impossible disappearance. The Collins Crime Club first edition described the book as “a super-thriller” and included not only a map of St David’s and Ramsey Island, but also a highly elaborate pull-out family tree detailing the ‘descendants of Horace Veryan, of Coniston Park, Westmorland’. The Devil Drives (1932), concerning death by drowning in a locked cabin, is highly regarded, but Markham’s output as a detective novelist extended to a mere eight books, the last appearing in 1936.

  ***

  John Dickson Carr enjoyed a much longer career. In three successful series, he rang variation upon variation upon his favourite theme. Dickson Carr was an anglophile who set most of his mysteries in Britain, although like Markham, and many other leading exponents of the impossible crime story, he was American. Carr’s closest rival as a specialist in miracle problems was a professional magician called Clayton Rawson. Rawson’s Great Detective was also a magician, the Great Merlini; writing as Stuart Towne, Rawson created another sleuthing conjurer, Don Diavolo. Henning Nelms, also American, wrote one of the finest impossible crime stories, Rim of the Pit (1944) under the name Hake Talbot. The rapid decline in popularity of this type of story after the Second World War is illustrated by the fact that the next Hake Talbot novel never found a publisher.

  The inherent artificiality of the ‘impossible crime’ device might be thought to make it ill-suited to any fiction with pretensions to a degree of realism, but as ever with detective fiction, all is not as it seems. Impossible crimes feature in books focusing on psychological suspense, such as Helen McCloy’s Mr Splitfoot (1968) and police procedurals, including Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novel Killer’s Wedge (1959). Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall produced a series of ten police novels that amounted to a Marxist critique of Swedish society which proved hugely influential, and Sjowall, sometimes described as ‘the godmother of Nordic N
oir’, has picked as her favourite the ninth of the books, The Locked Room (1973), in which an investigation of a robbery is combined with Inspector Martin Beck’s attempt to discover the truth about the death of a man found in a locked room.

  Any idea that locked-room mysteries ended with the demise of the Golden Age of detective fiction was put to rest in the latter part of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, by successful television series on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Banacek, Monk, Jonathan Creek and Death in Paradise. And the international appeal of an apparently impossible crime has been confirmed by the popularity of Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, published in Japan in 1981, but not translated into English until more than twenty years later. It is a striking example of a story that combines Golden Age trappings such as a locked-room mystery and a ‘challenge to the reader’ with startling descriptions of violence that to Anthony Wynne or John Dickson Carr would have been unthinkable.

  The Medbury Fort Murder

  by George Limnelius (1929)

  A memorable setting, strong characterisation and sound plotting distinguish George Limnelius’ crime-writing debut. This locked-room mystery begins quietly, with background and character sketched at some length. When Major Hugh Preece of the Royal Army Medical Corps is consulted by a subaltern called Lepean, his realisation that he has encountered the man before triggers memories of past indiscretions.

  As a young man, Preece had become infatuated with a ruthlessly ambitious showgirl called Prunella Lake. The outbreak of war brought their relationship to an end, and they both married other people, although a subsequent reunion had far-reaching consequences. In the meantime, while serving in West Africa, Preece had seen his friend and colleague Victor Wape kill a man, but escape punishment.