The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books
Page 10
The Secret of High Eldersham
by Miles Burton (1930)
The sinister side of life in remote East Anglia is evoked in the second novel to appear under the name of Miles Burton. High Eldersham is a creepy place, ‘saturated with local legend’. Late one night, the village constable drops in at the Rose and Crown, only to discover that the landlord, Samuel Whitehead, formerly a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, has been stabbed to death.
The Chief Constable promptly calls in Scotland Yard, but Detective Inspector Young finds himself ‘surrounded by impalpable forces beyond his power to combat’. After a promising early lead peters out, Young struggles to make headway with his investigation, and consults his friend, the wealthy and affable Desmond Merrion. Badly wounded during the war, Merrion had transferred to Naval Intelligence, becoming ‘a living encyclopaedia upon all manner of obscure subjects which the ordinary person knew nothing about’.
On arriving in the village, Merrion encounters a war-time acquaintance, who hopes to marry the daughter of the local squire, Sir William Owerton. Merrion’s eye is also caught by Mavis Owerton, who is as attractive as she is adventure-loving. But as he digs deeper into the mystery, he cannot help wondering if Mavis and her father are implicated in the strange and secretive goings-on in High Eldersham.
The story, also known as The Mystery of High Eldersham, combines a relatively straightforward detective plot with thriller-ish ingredients, but represents a considerable advance on the first Miles Burton book, The Hardway Diamonds Mystery, published earlier in the same year. Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, authors of A Catalogue of Crime (1971, rev. ed. 1989), and for many years the most high-profile enthusiasts of traditional detective fiction, extolled Merrion’s debut as ‘a model in its class’. Today, the antics of the villagers seem tame, but Barzun and Taylor argued that Miles Burton was working in the Gothic tradition of Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and was the first of ‘the moderns’ to do so in the detective genre.
Merrion made such a favourable impression that, having married and settled down, in High Eldersham of all places, he became a long-running series character, although Young was soon replaced by Inspector Arnold as his main collaborator. Exceptionally, Arnold solves a complex puzzle—a locked-bathroom mystery—without Merrion’s assistance in Death Leaves No Card (1939), one of the most ingenious Burton novels. Merrion’s last appearances came as late as 1960, a year which saw the publication of both Legacy of Death and Death Paints a Picture. Even then, the real identity of Miles Burton remained a more closely guarded secret than that of High Eldersham. Only after the author’s death did it emerge that the name was a pseudonym for Cecil John Street, better known as John Rhode, dozens of whose novels were set in the rural England that he loved.
Street had managed to put everyone off the scent for more than three decades; Burton’s year of birth had been stated in reference works as much later than Rhode’s, while different novels bearing an identical title—Up the Garden Path—appeared under both pseudonyms at different times. Street’s flair for remaining a man of mystery was underlined when it was revealed by the Golden Age expert and researcher Tony Medawar, as late as 2003, that in the early Thirties he had also written four obscure mysteries under the name Cecil Waye, and featuring ‘London’s most famous private detective’, Christopher Perrin.
Death Under Sail
by C.P. Snow (1932)
A cancer specialist, Roger Mills, takes a group of friends for a boating holiday on the Norfolk Broads, but is soon found dead at the tiller, having been shot in the heart. Ian Capel, the narrator, calls on his friend Finbow to help solve the crime, and acts as his Watson. Finbow, a wealthy Cambridge graduate and bon viveur who plays cricket and enjoys Chinese poetry, belongs to the Wimsey school of gentlemanly amateur sleuths. If anything, he makes a rather more plausible detective than the local sergeant, who is a comic figure.
Finbow’s first name is never revealed: it is a curious feature of the genre that mystery surrounds the full names of so many of its detectives. In keeping with the Golden Age vogue for intertextual allusion, Snow makes passing mention of Dorothy L. Sayers and S.S. Van Dine’s detective Philo Vance; in Gaudy Night (1935), Sayers returned the compliment by name-checking Snow’s The Search (1934). Finbow also anticipates the plot of one of the most famous detective stories when he says: ‘That’s a splendid idea. Five people are suspected of murder. Who did it? Answer: everyone.’
On the dust-jacket copy of the first edition, an excited blurb writer claimed that: ‘Few detective stories have ever been written under more extraordinary conditions than Death Under Sail. Dr C.P. Snow, a 26-year-old Cambridge “don”, has been busily engaged in experiments which may well be of vital importance to the human race. He has already succeeded…in making and destroying vitamins by physical methods…Naturally work such as this has been a great strain to Dr Snow, and at one point during the proceedings he went for a short holiday on a friend’s yacht on the Norfolk Broads. Here it was that he evolved an extraordinary form of mental recreation for a man engaged in work that may result in banishing famine from the world and bringing good health within the reach of all. He planned and began to write a “thriller”…he developed a plot as watertight as the yacht he sailed, and eventually created the cleverest possible solution to the murder of the Harley Street specialist who met his death with a smile upon his lips. And they say scientists have no imagination!’
Famine remains to be conquered, but despite the hyperbole, the young academic was destined to achieve distinction in multiple fields. Detective fiction, unfortunately, was not among them. Charles Percy Snow was an expert in chemistry and physics who became a senior civil servant, and was also active in politics, ultimately becoming a life peer. He became a popular mainstream author, renowned for the sequence of novels known as Strangers and Brothers. For the title of one of the books, he coined the term ‘the corridors of power’, while ‘The Two Cultures’, his Reith Lectures of 1959, provoked widespread debate about the divergent interests of scientists and those interested in the arts. His wife Pamela Hansford Johnson was also an author; together with her first husband, a journalist called Neil Stewart, she wrote two light-hearted detective novels under the pen-name Nap Lombard.
Although Snow never had any intention of specialising in detective stories, his literary life came full circle with his last novel. A Coat of Varnish (1979) is a sombre crime novel rather than a whodunit. The subject is murder in Belgravia, but although the book is more ambitious than his debut, the result is less satisfying.
The Sussex Downs Murder
by John Bude (1936)
John Bude’s third detective novel was set against a background of special significance to lovers of the genre. When his days as a consulting detective at 221b Baker Street were over, the great Sherlock Holmes had retired to the South Downs to take up bee-keeping. But given that Bude’s first two mysteries, both published in 1935, were The Cornish Coast Murder and The Lake District Murder, it does not take a Sherlock to guess that Bude set his early mysteries in a variety of popular rural locations as a marketing ploy, at a time when authors commonly set rural mysteries in vaguely fictionalised counties called Downshire or Middleshire. Bude could scarcely have anticipated that his method would yield a dividend more than half a century after his death, when the British Library reprinted his countryside novels in paperbacks with attractive period cover artwork that far outsold the original editions.
The Sussex Downs Murder shows Bude’s talent for depicting place, and offers a storyline more elaborate and compelling than in his apprentice works. The Rother family farmhouse, Chalklands, and the surrounding area are convincingly realised, and in keeping with Golden Age tradition, a map is supplied to help readers to follow the events of the story after John Rother goes missing, in circumstances which at first (but deceptively) seem reminiscent of the disappearance of Agatha Christie.
The message which lures William Rother to Littlehampton General Hospital recalls the hoax at the heart of the legendary Wallace case, five years before the book was published. The mysterious message forms only one of a host of complications facing Inspector Meredith, introduced in The Lake District Murder, and relocated from Cumberland for the purposes of this story. Meredith is modelled on Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector French, in his diligence, his contented home life, and his love of a good meal, but he possesses a sharper sense of humour. His son’s amateur detective work makes a pleasing contribution to the storyline, while his innate humanity comes to the fore in the novel’s closing stages.
Bude’s real name was Ernest Carpenter Elmore. After publishing two weird and fantastic novels, he turned to fictional crime with enough success to become a full-time writer. On Guy Fawkes Night in 1953, he was among the handful of writers who joined with John Creasey to found the Crime Writers’ Association at a meeting held in the National Liberal Club. Prior to his premature death, he adapted his technique of setting mysteries in attractive locales to the changing tastes of readers in post-war Britain, and allowed Meredith to venture across the English Channel in books such as Death on the Riviera (1952) and A Telegram from Le Touquet (1956).
Sinister Crag
by Newton Gayle (1938)
Rock-climbing offers ample scope for homicide, a possibility exploited by several authors, notably the mountaineer Frank Showell Styles, who used the pen-name Glyn Carr for a series of mysteries from the Fifties onwards. One of the most interesting cases of murder on the mountains, pre-dating Carr’s work, was the last of five books to appear under the name Newton Gayle. Most of the action in Sinister Crag takes place in the fictional Lake District valley of Wannerdale. Three men have died while climbing the eponymous fell; did their deaths result from accident or murder?
Jim Greer, Gayle’s series detective, suspects foul play, and spends much of the book climbing the fells along with his friend Robin Upwood, who narrates the story, and plays Watson to Greer’s Holmes. They stay at the Herdwick Hotel, as do a number of potential suspects. Greer states the problem confronting him: ‘Three men have been killed; but we don’t know which of them was the intended victim…Except for their interest in mountaineering I doubt if there was a single common factor in their lives…This means that, in tackling the problem from the angle of motive, our difficulties are trebled.’ Although thinly characterised, he is an efficient detective who at one point compiles an ‘alibi chart’.
The Lake District, splendidly evoked, makes an ideal setting for crimes and misdemeanours. As Greer says: ‘The whole place is a wilderness of gullies and cliffs. Even in clear weather you’d never find anybody who wanted to elude you.’ There may be too much information about climbing to suit non-enthusiasts, but the world beyond the rural idyll is not forgotten: ‘More wars and rumours of wars?’ Upwood asks someone who has abandoned her newspaper in dismay. Mussolini is mentioned as an example of someone who suffered claustrophobia after spending time in prison.
The name of Newton Gayle concealed an unusual writing partnership, between Muna Lee and Maurice Guinness. Lee was an American poet and activist, and Guinness a British oil executive. Although they made an odd literary couple, their co-authored mysteries are distinctive. Sinister Crag is unique among Greer’s recorded cases in taking place in Britain. The quality of writing was no doubt due to Lee, while Guinness was primarily responsible for supplying plot material—particularly in this book, where he made good use of his own enthusiasm for mountaineering. Lee spent many years living in Puerto Rico, which supplied the background for an unorthodox Newton Gayle novel, Murder at 28:10 (1936), set at the time of a devastating hurricane. Lee later joined the US State Department as a cultural affairs specialist, while in the Sixties, Guinness wrote three thrillers under the name Mike Brewer.
Chapter Seven
Murder at the Manor
The success of Trent’s Last Case, in which Sigsbee Manderson is murdered in the grounds of his country house, set a pattern for Golden Age detective novels. A tale about ‘murder at the manor’ offered authors the chance to create a closed circle of suspects, principally comprising house guests. The American detective novelist S.S. Van Dine went so far as to advance the snobbish argument that: ‘Servants—such as butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like—must not be chosen by the author as the culprit…It is a too easy solution…The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person.’ Detective stories in which ‘the butler did it’ were, contrary to popular belief, few and far between.
A country house invariably boasted a library, which sometimes became a crime scene, but more often, at the end of the book, a suitably august backdrop for the Great Detective’s explanation of whodunit and why to those who had survived to the final chapter. It is no coincidence that the first recorded cases of Hercule Poirot, Albert Campion, Sir Clinton Driffield and Roderick Alleyn, among countless others, concerned murder in a manor. And when Anthony Berkeley bought a country estate, Linton Hills in Devon, he promptly made use of it as the setting for The Second Shot (1930).
Agatha Christie became familiar with country-house life as a result of staying with her sister and brother-in-law at Abney Hall in Cheshire. Abney may have been the model for Chimneys, the stately home which is the setting for her lively thrillers The Secret of Chimneys (1925) and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), and there is no doubt that she fictionalised the house to supply the backdrop for After the Funeral (1953) and the title story in The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960). Like Berkeley, Christie eventually acquired a country house of her own; Greenway, in Devon, is now in the care of the National Trust. In Curtain (an underestimated tour de force published in 1975, but written during the Second World War), Hercule Poirot ended his career where it had begun, at Styles Court. When a girl’s corpse was discovered at Colonel and Mrs Bantry’s home, Gossington Hall in St Mary Mead, Jane Marple was called in to investigate the mystery of The Body in the Library (1942). By the time murder, and Miss Marple, returned to Gossington Hall in the Sixties, the Bantrys were long gone, and the house had fallen into the ownership of a film star, Marina Gregg: The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side (1962).
A Christmas party supplied a popular backdrop for ‘murder at the manor’ novels, including Mavis Doriel Hay’s The Santa Klaus Murder (1936) and Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938). The Poisoner’s Mistake (1936), an early novel by G. Belton Cobb, offers a slight variation, with a New Year’s Eve party culminating in the death of one of the guests. By the time Francis Duncan’s Murder for Christmas appeared in 1949, the cost of running a country house was proving ruinous. Mordecai Tremaine, a retired tobacconist and amateur sleuth, reflects upon the sadness of ‘a proud family coming slowly to oblivion’. The Duncan pseudonym concealed the identity of William Walter Frank Underhill, a former debt collector who became a lecturer in economics; his other novels included an ‘inverted mystery’, They’ll Never Find Out (1944).
The popularity of country-house mysteries, and the possibility of gaining an inheritance by murder, meant that members of the aristocracy appeared in classic crime novels with disproportionate frequency, often as unmourned victims. Georgette Heyer devotes so many pages in Penhallow (1942) to establishing the odiousness of the eponymous lord of the manor that it is a relief when the inevitable finally happens.
Lady Cambers, the busybody strangled in E.R. Punshon’s Death Comes to Cambers (1935) is another typical Golden Age murderee, who gives a large cast of suspects cause to wish her dead. Punshon’s regular sleuth, Sergeant Bobby Owen, is conveniently on hand to solve the myster
y; a grandson of Lady Hirlpool, he has been staying at Cambers, ‘ostensibly to advise Lady Cambers on precautions to be taken against…burglary’. Punshon regularly included lords and ladies in his cast of characters; like P.G. Wodehouse, he enjoyed poking fun at those who owed their creature comforts to inherited wealth rather than their own efforts.
No detective novelist, not even Lord Gorell, had such first-hand insight into the country-house lifestyle as Henry Wade, the pen-name of Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, sixth baronet, CVO DSO, who served both as High Sheriff and as Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire. Wade, unlike Punshon (and Gorell), was a conservative by both instinct and inclination, and he seized the opportunity to criticise punitive taxation in No Friendly Drop (1931), in which Inspector John Poole of Scotland Yard investigates the death by poisoning of Lord Grayle at the Grayle residence, Tassart Hall. The storyline reflects Wade’s acute awareness that, following the First World War, the landed gentry were living on borrowed time.
The Hanging Captain (1933) supplies a plan of the ground floor of the scene of the crime in conventional fashion. Yet whereas Christie portrays Chimneys as a home full of life, as well as death, Wade makes clear that Ferris Court, like the family that owns it, is in a state of terminal decline: ‘As for Ferris Court, the Tudor home of twelve generations of Sterrons…a glance at the garden was sufficient hint of the shadow which overhung the fine old house. Weed-encumbered beds and paths, untrimmed edges, overgrown shrubberies, told their tale of straitened means—or neglect sprung from a broken spirit.’ Sir Herbert Sterron is a broken man long before he is found hanging by the neck from a curtain cord in his ancestral home.