The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Wade’s deeply rooted pessimism about the future of the country estate was borne out after the Second World War, and reflected in Christie’s Dead Man’s Folly (1956). A ‘murder hunt’ at a summer fete held in the grounds of a country house with a nouveau riche owner results, inevitably, in an actual murder; luckily Hercule Poirot is on hand to see justice done.

  Financial pressures and social change threatened a whole way of life, and the country-house mystery came to seem increasingly dated and irrelevant in the austere post-war era. Wade’s continuing disdain for severe tax regimes is central to the plot of Too Soon to Die (1953), a notable ‘inverted’ mystery about the newly impoverished gentry. In the second chapter—grimly headed ‘Estate Duties’—he recounts the misfortunes of the Jerrods of Brackton Manor, ‘one of the oldest families in the county…Nobility in the form of title had never come their way, and distinction had stopped short at honourable and useful mediocrity…but they were Jerrods, and whatever extortions might be devised by successive Chancellors of the Exchequer, they would hold on to Brackton while life remained in their bodies.’ When the family faces the prospect of financial catastrophe, the solution seems to lie in a cunningly devised fraud. But the Revenue’s suspicious are aroused, and the family’s hold on Brackton Manor is jeopardised once John Poole—now elevated to the rank of Chief Inspector—comes on to the scene.

  The Crime at Diana’s Pool

  by Victor L. Whitechurch (1927)

  Felix Nayland, a mysterious former diplomat, has returned to England after years abroad, and acquired a residence for himself and his unmarried sister in the heart of the countryside. The Pleasaunce nestles below the hills which flank one side of the village of Coppleswick, and stands in good-sized grounds with thick woods and a stream that has been dammed so that two natural hollows have become deep pools of water. Nayland decides to introduce himself to the local community by hosting a summer garden party, and the guests include Major Challow, the Chief Constable of the county, and Harry Westerham, a young clergyman.

  Entertainment is supplied by The Green Albanian Band and Western Glee Singers, but, typical of an English summer, the fun is interrupted by a downpour. A member of the band is reported missing, and as Challow and Westerham stroll away from the gathering, they spot a man’s body lying in a pool. The corpse belongs not to the bandsman, but to Nayland, who has been stabbed to death. The Pleasaunce soon becomes the setting not for a garden party, but a coroner’s inquest.

  Westerham’s keen habit of observation makes him a useful ally to the police, whose first suspect, inevitably, is the missing foreigner. The plot involves the dead man’s past in South America, and reflects Whitechurch’s taste for blending a quintessentially English country-house mystery with a touch of the exotic. The author, also a clergyman, surely speaks for himself as well as for Westerham when observing: ‘Most people have the extraordinary notion that a parson is something different from an ordinary man, that he lives entirely apart from others in a theological atmosphere.’ For good measure, he adds: ‘the parson is rarely given credit for the many hours he spends in his study over a variety of matters which would puzzle many a business man’. Westerham is intelligent as well as amiable, and since he has ‘some idea of writing’, he may represent a portrayal of the author as a younger man.

  In a preface, Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch explained that he adopted an approach that was at the time unorthodox: ‘… in reality, the solver of a problem in criminology has to begin at the beginning, without knowing the end, working it out from clues concerning which he does not recognise the full bearing at first…To begin with, I had no plot. When I had written the first chapter I did not know why the crime had been committed, who had done it or how it was done.’ This was a daring method for an author seeking to set a puzzle, rather than to focus on evocation of character and setting, although it was not conducive to ‘fair-play detection’. As Dorothy L. Sayers complained, he did not put the reader ‘on an equal footing with the detective himself, as regards all clues and discoveries’. For her, this was a throwback to ‘the naughty tradition’, but she acknowledged that the novel was otherwise excellent.

  Whitechurch earned election to the Detection Club, and contributed to The Floating Admiral. A former Chaplain to the Bishop of Oxford, he became honorary canon at Christ Church Cathedral, and rural dean of Aylesbury. He created two ‘railway detectives’, and his most highly regarded work in the crime genre was the collection Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912). His final detective novel, Murder at the College (1932) was an early example of the Oxford crime story, although he calls his setting ‘Exbridge’.

  Some Must Watch

  by Ethel Lina White (1933)

  Helen, aged nineteen, takes a position quaintly described as a ‘lady-help’ with the Warren family at their lonely country house. The Summit is ‘tucked away in a corner, on the border line between England and Wales’ and ‘looked strangely out of keeping with the savage landscape’. Its remoteness makes working there an unattractive proposition for anyone who is not desperate—but Helen is desperate.

  She is a young woman of her time, a victim of the economic slump: ‘Her one dread was being out of work…ladies were a drug in the market.’ Her first job, at the age of fourteen, had been as a walker of the dogs of the rich; the dogs were better fed than she was. Fresh from the misery of unemployment, Helen is only too grateful to have board and lodging, and a worthwhile job, ‘after weeks of stringent economy—since “starvation” is a word not found in a lady’s vocabulary’. Far from ducking the realities of social conditions in the Thirties, Ethel Lina White makes them integral to the plot.

  The new job seems almost too good to be true, and so it proves. At first, Helen finds the spookiness of the Summit enticing: ‘danger…seemed to be everywhere—floating in the air—inside the house, as well as outside, in the dark tree-dripping valley’. But this is not a conventional country-house whodunit—a serial killer is at work in the vicinity. He has already killed four young women, and a fifth killing takes place uncomfortably close to the Summit. The unpleasant nurse to the invalid Lady Warren warns Helen about the murderer: ‘Haven’t you noticed that the murderer always chooses girls who earn their own living?…The country is crawling with women, like maggots, eating up all the jobs. And the men are starved out.’ Ethel Lina White builds the tension with unobtrusive skill as a ruthless murderer closes in on Helen, before an ending which amounts to a form of poetic justice.

  Some Must Watch was filmed in 1946 by Robert Siodmak, and Mel Dinelli’s screenplay was adapted for the stage in 1962. The movie was remade in 1975 with Jacqueline Bissett as Helen, and again in 2000. Such longevity attests to White’s flair for devising memorable ‘woman in jeopardy’ storylines, her speciality as a novelist and writer of short stories. The most famous film made from her work was The Lady Vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic version of her 1936 novel The Wheel Spins, but the less-renowned Midnight House, aka Her Heart in Her Throat (1942), filmed as The Unseen, boasted a screenplay by Raymond Chandler.

  Ethel Lina White came from Abergavenny, not far from the borderland setting of Some Must Watch. The daughter of a successful builder, she was one of a family of twelve raised by Welsh nursemaids. She worked in London for the Ministry of Pensions, but left the job ‘on the strength of a ten-pound offer for a short story’, and ‘scratched a living on short stuff for quite a time before my first novel was published’. Her favourite form of relaxation was watching films, which perhaps accounts for her knack of writing vivid and suspenseful scenes.

  Death by Request

  by Romilly and Katherine John (1935)

  This country-house whodunit is, like The Murder at the Vicarage, narrated by a member of the clergy. The Reverend Joseph Colchester has been vicar of Wampish for twenty-six years, and his distinctive, prissy voice supplies one of the book’s incidental pleasures. The book opens with Colchester in reflective mood: ‘It is not
without a feeling of horror and reluctance that I take up my pen…Is it really serviceable to perpetuate the memory of so much guilt and wretchedness? I am shocked by the thought that my tale may be read by some as a diversion.’ He proceeds to describe events that took place three years earlier at Friars Cross, the home of Matthew Barry, a friend of Colchester since they were at Oxford together.

  The guests at Friars Cross include a girl called Phyllis Winter, the glamorous but enigmatic Mrs Anne Fairfax, Matthew’s school friend Colonel Lawrence, and the libidinous young Lord Malvern. Over dinner, they discuss murder and the ethics of capital punishment; next morning, Malvern’s body is found in his bedroom. He has been gassed, and it soon becomes clear that his death was the result of murder, rather than accident or suicide.

  The dead man’s son becomes a prime suspect, as does the butler Frampton, a socialist with a taste for blackmail. Colchester himself has ‘considerable sympathy with the socialist movement’, and this is not the only respect in which his personality and attitudes differ from the conventional Golden Age cleric. Inspector Lockitt, who leads the police investigation, focuses his attention on Edward, but the most energetic detective work is done by Nicholas Hatton, a young private investigator who collaborates with Mrs Fairfax. However, Mrs Fairfax, like many of those staying at Friars Cross, is nursing a secret of her own. A surprise ‘solution’ to the puzzle is followed by an entertaining, if not wholly original, twist in an epilogue. The Johns write wittily, and the Colonel’s buffoonery is especially well done.

  Romilly John, the seventh son of the celebrated artist Augustus John, described his unconventional upbringing in a memoir, The Seventh Child (1932). Despite his parents’ lack of interest in formal education, Romilly went on to study at Cambridge, where he met his future wife, Katherine Tower; they married before either of them graduated. Katherine became a reviewer for the Illustrated London News, and a translator of Scandinavian books. Romilly served in the RAF during the war, spent a short time in the Civil Service, and wrote poetry as well as dabbling in physics. The couple never wrote another crime story, but Death by Request is written with such youthful exuberance that it is a shame that they failed to continue to play the game.

  Birthday Party

  by C.H.B. Kitchin (1938)

  Astonishingly overlooked by historians of the genre, this is a country-house mystery with a difference. Kitchin’s multiple narrators tell a quiet but compelling story in which clues to the truth are psychological rather than material. Four people connected to Carlice Abbey relate their versions of events; as the viewpoints shift, so does the reader’s understanding of the relationships at the heart of the novel. The result is darkly ironic.

  Isabel Carlice is a sharp-witted single woman devoted to the Abbey’s garden, which she tends with loving care. But a past tragedy haunts the Abbey. Twelve years ago Isabel’s brother, Claude Carlice, died in a mysterious gun-room accident. This was no murder, although it remains unclear whether he died of an accident or suicide. But if he killed himself, what was the reason? Claude’s widow, Dora, continues to live at the Abbey, and her impoverished brother, Stephen, a failed novelist, pays a visit in the hope of saving himself from destitution. The tension mounts as the twenty-first birthday of Ronnie Carlice approaches. Oxford-educated, and an idealistic Communist, young Ronnie has his own ideas about what to do when he comes of age, and inherits Carlice Abbey. At the time the book was written, Ronnie’s political views were fashionable. The detective novelist Margaret Cole was among those who travelled to Russia, as Ronnie does just prior to his birthday, to marvel at the success Stalin was making of his post-revolution society. The shadow of impending war looms over the people in the story, and the many subtle touches creating an atmosphere laden with doom provide a reminder that Kitchin was an accomplished author of literary fiction.

  Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin was, as H.R.F. Keating said, ‘born with a whole handful of silver spoons in his mouth’. After Oxford and training as a barrister, he increased his personal wealth through gambling at the Monte Carlo casino, at race-tracks (he bred greyhounds) and on the London Stock Exchange. A talented classicist, botanist and pianist, he published a book of poems in 1919, and an acclaimed novel, Streamers Waving, six years later, but his covert homosexuality and natural reserve meant that he never became a dominant establishment figure. His early books, including two detective novels, were published by the Hogarth Press, owned by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who were intrigued by his experiments ‘in the art of combining the emotions of every day with violent catastrophe’.

  Death of My Aunt (1929) introduced Malcolm Warren, whose career as an amateur detective spanned twenty years but only four books. Warren is, like his creator, a stockbroker, and share-dealing and business skulduggery play a significant part in his second case, Crime at Christmas (1934). Kitchin made good use of the tropes of detective fiction, but tried to do something fresh with them. In an unusual coda to that novel, Warren muses that ‘the real justification’ of the detective story is that it provides ‘a narrow but intensive view of ordinary life, the steady flow of which is felt more keenly through the very violence of its interruption’.

  Julian Symons said in Bloody Murder that ‘Kitchin brought nothing new to the crime story, although he has his place as a minor, amiable Farceur’, which suggests that Symons never came across Birthday Party. This was rather the story of Kitchin’s literary life: even in his heyday, his finest work received less attention than it deserved.

  Chapter Eight

  Capital Crimes

  The immense popularity of Sherlock Holmes, and the atmospheric brilliance of Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing, meant that by the start of the twentieth century, London had become the pre-eminent setting for detective fiction. G.K. Chesterton rhapsodised in ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’ about this phenomenon: ‘No one can have failed to notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland…The lights of the city begin to glow with innumerable goblin eyes, since they are the guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the reader does not…This realisation of the poetry of London is no small thing…The narrowest street possesses in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave.’

  The lyrical tone and underlying theme of this passage are not so dissimilar from the more famous characterisation by Raymond Chandler, in his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1944), of the lonely private eye as a sort of modern knight errant: ‘down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid’. The phrase ‘mean streets’ itself recalls Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets, set in the East End of London and published in 1894, the year that Morrison created of one of Holmes’ fellow Londoners and principal rivals, the private investigator Martin Hewitt.

  Novels as different as The Four Just Men, The Lodger and The Middle Temple Murder made effective use of London as a scene of crime. This was a city where anything might happen, from savage serial killings of prostitutes in Whitechapel to the murder of a wife by her seemingly meek husband, who buried her mutilated remains in the cellar of their comfortable house in Hilldrop Crescent in Holloway. The case of Dr Crippen caused a sensation in 1910, as did the Thompson-Bywaters murder in suburban Ilford in 1922. Both crimes illustrated the passions blazing beneath the surface of supposedly respectable domestic life in London, and sparked the imaginations of authors of classic detective fiction.

  William Plomer, a South African who moved to London, was staying in a boarding house in Bayswater in 1929 when the insanely jealous landlord, James Starr, cut the throat of the woman he was living with. Starr, whose real surname was Achew, was a former cabaret performer of Japanese-American parentage; Sybil da Costa, his victim and twenty-two years his junior, was an attractive singer. Plomer turned his uncomfortably close encounter with
homicide into The Case is Altered (1932), a novel which makes up for a lack of mystery or puzzle with a subtle exploration of same-sex relations and class tension in London during the inter-war years; the book even glances at the issue of racial prejudice. Starr suspected Plomer of having an affair with Sybil; the novel hints that a key reason why Starr was mistaken was that Plomer was gay.

  Two fascinating novels on the outer margins of the crime genre present a compelling picture of London’s darker side. In Claude Houghton’s enigmatic I Am Jonathan Scrivener (1930), the narrator takes a job as personal secretary to the wealthy but mysterious Scrivener, but struggles to solve the riddle of his employer’s true identity. The work of Houghton attracted the admiration of such diverse fellow writers as P.G. Wodehouse, Graham Greene, Henry Miller, Hugh Walpole and Clemence Dane, but he never ‘broke through’ into the literary mainstream. Hangover Square (1941) by Patrick Hamilton, a bleak story encompassing murder and suicide, depicts the seediness of London pub life in the run-up to war. The book is subtitled A Tale of Darkest Earl’s Court, and Earl’s Court happened to be where Hamilton had suffered a serious car accident which left him disfigured, and precipitated a descent into alcoholism. His protagonist, George Harvey Bone, is another heavy drinker.

  Josephine Bell’s The Port of London Murders (1938), although a more conventional detective story, captures the despair of poverty-stricken Londoners. The telling connections made between ill-health and lack of money are far removed from the crude stereotypical perception of Golden Age mysteries as wholly lacking in radical comment or social insight. Bell’s real name was Doris Bell Collier Ball, and her writing was informed by her medical training and knowledge.