The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  The landmarks of London dominate countless mystery stories. The simple device of placing a grey-bearded man’s body on Horse Guards Parade enabled Milward Kennedy to indulge in a dreadfully punning title: Corpse Guards Parade (1929); a year later, his friend and erstwhile collaborator A.G. Macdonell, writing as Neil Gordon, published The Big Ben Alibi (1930), a characteristically amusing mystery featuring the misadventures of a detective novelist. John Rowland’s Murder in the Museum (1938) sees mild-mannered Henry Fairhurst’s research in the domed reading room of the British Museum interrupted by his discovery that a red-haired man who appears to be asleep is dead, the victim of poisoning by cyanide. In Murder Underground (1934), Mavis Doriel Hay deposited a body at Belsize Park underground station, a few hundred yards away from Belsize Lane, where she and her husband lived. Of the many books written by Leonard Gribble, none made a greater impact than his football whodunit, The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1939), which was filmed by Thorold Dickinson.

  Val Gielgud and Holt Marvell amused themselves by devising a murder at their place of work, Broadcasting House, while Dorothy L. Sayers fictionalised Benson’s, the advertising agency in Kingsway where she had been employed, in Murder Must Advertise (1933). After being bullied by a fellow shop worker during the early stages of the Second World War, Christianna Brand found catharsis in murdering her adversary in Death in High Heels (1941), although she took the precaution of transforming the shop into a dressmaker’s in Regent Street. Christopher St John Sprigg and R.C. Woodthorpe, both of whom spent time working as journalists, made fun of the Street of Shame in two books published in quick succession, Fatality in Fleet Street (1933) and A Dagger in Fleet Street (1934).

  London was home to many ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ which often provide a setting for scenes in detective stories, most notably in Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Richard Hull was a bachelor who gave his address as a club—the United Universities—and he set his second novel in a fictitious equivalent. Keep it Quiet (1935) concerns the death of a club member, apparently poisoned by the club cook, and the frantic efforts of the hapless secretary, assisted by a member who is a doctor, to cover up the calamity. The focus is not so much on whodunit as on whether the culprit will get away with it, and how many other members may be eliminated before the end of the story. Hull’s neat variation on a familiar resolution improbably involves the laws of Latvia.

  The heart of the city was a popular background for crime. Anthony Berkeley’s ingenious The Piccadilly Murder (1929) opens with Ambrose Chitterwick taking tea with his formidable aunt at the opulent Piccadilly Palace Hotel, a venue which also features in the Detection Club’s round-robin story The Scoop (1931) and Agatha Christie’s Lord Edgware Dies (1933). Murder is committed at the Piccadilly Underground station in Murder in Piccadilly (1936) by Charles Kingston; this was a pen-name of Charles Kingston O’Mahony, an Irishman who wrote about true crime before turning to fiction. Kingston’s book is a thriller, lively if stylistically a touch old-fashioned even by Golden Age standards; the same is true of A Scream in Soho (1940) by John G. Brandon, an exceptionally prolific writer whose mysteries included contributions to the long-running series featuring Baker Street’s other Great Detective, Sexton Blake.

  The eerie atmosphere of the black-out in London during the early stages of the ‘phoney war’ is caught in Brandon’s book, and also in A Deed Without a Name (1940) by Dorothy Bowers, in which Archy Mitford is found hanged in a darkened room, with black-out curtains drawn. Although his death appears to be a case of suicide, three recent—and inexplicable—attempts on his life have been made. Dan Pardoe, the youngest Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard, suspects murder from the outset—‘Men choose to die in the light’—and finds that Archy has left a cryptic ‘dying message clue’. The author’s commitment to fair play is emphasised by the proud boast emblazoned on the dust-jacket of the first edition: Brilliant Detection—Absolutely No Cheating. Bowers was a writer of distinction whose career of high promise ended prematurely as a result of the tuberculosis which plagued the later years of her life.

  War-time London was also well evoked by Gladys Mitchell in Sunset Over Soho (1943) and in another book where the black-out is central to the plot, E.C.R. Lorac’s Murder by Matchlight (1945), but perhaps no detective novelist of the Golden Age captured London’s character in a more compelling manner than Margery Allingham. The endpapers of the first edition of Death of a Ghost (1934) boast a map of ‘the Lafcadio House and Studios of Little Venice, Bayswater in London’. In the course of Albert Campion’s investigation, he is tempted, in typical fashion, tempted to wonder ‘why, with a murderer at large in Little Venice, Donna Beatrice should have escaped killing’. The plot is original, and the book among her best.

  J.K. Rowling, an admirer of Sayers and Wimsey, has also heaped praise on Allingham, describing another of her London novels, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), as ‘phenomenal’. In creating the private investigator Cormoran Strike, whose office is in Denmark Street, Rowling has (writng under the name Robert Galbraith) ensured that, although Holmes, Wimsey, Poirot and Campion are long gone, the traditions of the London-based detective and the well-made detective novel live on.

  Death at Broadcasting House

  by Val Gielgud and Holt Marvell (1934)

  In 1932, the young British Broadcasting Corporation, having outgrown its premises at Savoy Hill in London, relocated to the purpose-built Broadcasting House in Portland Place. Val Gielgud, who was working for the BBC at the time as a producer, said in a memoir that, although some derided the new headquarters (critics mocked it as ‘pretentious’ and for having ‘a queer shape’), it typified ‘in steel and concrete…a new professionalism’ about the Corporation’s activities.

  Gielgud and his colleague Eric Maschwitz realised that Broadcasting House would provide a perfect backdrop for a highly topical ‘workplace mystery’. Both men were experienced actors and writers and had already collaborated on a detective novel, Under London (1933), with Maschwitz using the pseudonym Holt Marvell. Their BBC mystery is centred on the live broadcast of The Scarlet Highwayman, a radio play written by Rodney Fleming, and recorded in several studios, as was common at the time. After the broadcast, a member of the cast called Sidney Parsons is found strangled in studio 7C, and Julian Caird, the Dramatic Director, tells the Controller of the BBC, ‘Do you realise that everyone who heard that play must have heard him die? That makes it pretty unique in the annals of crime.’

  The police investigation is led by Inspector Spears, and the authors capture the tension that existed at the time between professional detectives and their superiors (such as the assistant commissioner, Major Cavendish), former soldiers who ‘seemed to put discipline first and results, in comparison, nowhere’.

  Three pages are devoted to floor plans of Broadcasting House, as a complicated plot unfolds. Dorothy L. Sayers admired the authors’ writing, their commitment to fair play and the ingenuity of the plot, although with characteristic attention to detail, she quibbled that: ‘it could hardly have taken a person 45 seconds to cross a passage and enter a room (a second is a much longer interval than one thinks, and in 45 seconds I can walk down 20 stairs, out through the back door, shutting it after me, and half-way down the garden)’.

  Sayers was far from alone in enjoying the novel—known in the US as London Calling!—and Gielgud and Marvell felt that a film version of the story would be ‘sure-fire’, given that Broadcasting House was not only a modern building that was still newsworthy but ‘rather a box of tricks’. After an initial struggle to find backers, Death at Broadcasting House was shot in twenty-nine days, not at Portland Place, but at a modestly sized studio in Wembley, with Gielgud playing the part of Caird.

  The novel benefited from its highly topical setting—as many Golden Age mysteries did—yet it was not the first broadcasting mystery. A forerunner of the BBC had already supplied the title and background for 2LO (1928) by Walter S. Masterman, an author o
f breezy thrillers who had gained first-hand insight into the criminal life as a result of serving a prison sentence for embezzling funds from the Board of Fisheries. ‘The Broadcast Murder’, by Grenville Robbins, was an enjoyable short story about a seemingly impossible crime—a murder during a live wireless broadcast, where the victim vanishes without trace.

  Gielgud and Maschwitz each enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the media. Both men were of Polish descent, and colleagues in the BBC called them ‘the Polish Corridor’. They wrote five novels together, and although Maschwitz is better remembered as lyricist for ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ and ‘These Foolish Things’, Gielgud continued to write detective fiction, his final novel appearing as late as 1975. He collaborated successfully on radio plays with John Dickson Carr, collected more than sixty years after their first broadcast as 13 to the Gallows (ed. Tony Medawar, 2008). He also formed a fruitful relationship with Sayers, producing radio adaptations of her novels as well as her highly successful cycle of radio plays The Man Born to Be King in 1941–2.

  Bats in the Belfry

  by E.C.R. Lorac (1937)

  Anthony Fell, an Australian cousin of Bruce Attleton, has been killed in a motoring accident while visiting Britain. At the funeral gathering, Bruce’s attractive young ward Elizabeth strives to lighten the mood by telling her fellow mourners about a form of ‘murder game’ she has been playing at her club. The challenge is: how best to dispose of a corpse? Bruce’s wife Sybilla, a lovely but cold-hearted actress, suggests setting the body into the permanent fabric of the building.

  Bruce is shaken by the death of his cousin, and the attentions paid to Sybilla by Thomas Burroughs, a wealthy stockbroker, are another cause for concern. In addition, his friend, the dramatist Neil Rockingham, tells young Robert Grenville that Bruce is being pestered—and perhaps blackmailed—by a mysterious individual called Debrette. Rockingham persuades Grenville to help him find out more about Debrette, who is based in Notting Hill. Grenville soon learns that Debrette claims to be a sculptor, and lives in a strange place known locally as ‘the Morgue’.

  The Morgue, once home to a religious sect, is properly known as the Belfry Studio, and proves to be ‘a gaunt tower…lit by the reflections of neon lights in the West End’. Grenville describes it as ‘the most lunatic jumble of Victorian Gothic mixed with Oriental detail and debased Byzantine embellishment’. He is driven away by Debrette, but returns to find Bruce Attleton’s suitcase in the coal cellar of the building. When Debrette vanishes, and Attleton also goes missing, Rockingham raises the alarm with Scotland Yard.

  Inspector Macdonald leads the hunt for the missing men, and eventually a body is discovered—but to whom does it belong? Good-humoured but tough and determined, Macdonald is a methodical policeman in the tradition of Inspector French, although unlike Freeman Wills Crofts’ detective he is a bachelor. The plot is elaborate, the characterisation crisp and the atmosphere of the dark London streets well evoked.

  E.C.R. Lorac was the principal pen-name of Edith Caroline Rive, who was known to friends and family as Carol Rivett; her pseudonymous surname is Carol spelt backwards. She introduced Inspector Macdonald in The Murder on the Burrows (1931), and he proceeded to investigate in no fewer than four dozen novels, the last published posthumously. She also wrote a long series featuring Chief Inspector Julian Rivers, under the name of Carol Carnac.

  A native Londoner, she was an accomplished author whose work deserves to be better known. Early Lorac titles include Murder in St John’s Wood and Murder in Chelsea, both published in 1934. The former novel, praised by the often severe American critics Barzun and Taylor, presents yet another example of that staple Golden Age situation, the murder of a financier. Dorothy L. Sayers lauded The Organ Speaks (1935), set in a music pavilion in Regent’s Park, as ‘entirely original, highly ingenious, and remarkable for atmospheric writing and convincing development of character’; the first edition boasted a ‘diagram of the console of the four-manual organ in the Waldstein Hall’.

  Lorac was elected to the Detection Club in the year Bats in the Belfry was published, and served as the Club’s Secretary. A teacher by profession, she developed a passion for the Lune Valley and the surrounding area in the north-west of England, which provides the backdrop to several of her later books. At the time of her death, she was working on a non-series mystery novel, while another late stand-alone novel, Two-Way Murder, has not as yet been published.

  What Beckoning Ghost?

  by Douglas G. Browne (1947)

  The body of a man in his sixties is discovered in the Serpentine at Hyde Park. The deceased is Wally Whichcord, who had achieved notoriety seven years earlier as an independent witness to a sighting of ‘the Hyde Park Ghost’. During an air raid in 1940, a bereaved mother whose son, Hugo Demarest, had died when his submarine was lost with all hands claimed to have encountered his ghost, wearing naval uniform, in Hyde Park. In her grief, Mrs Demarest had turned to spiritualism, and consulted a medium of questionable reputation, but her story was supported by a companion, as well as Whichcord, who was sleeping rough nearby. And shortly before his death, Whichcord claimed to have seen the ghost again.

  In the wake of the tragedy, Harvey Tuke, a senior official with the Director of Public Prosecutions, accompanies his wife Yvette to a dinner party. The host and hostess, Clifford and Corinne Reaveley, live in an eccentrically designed home just across the road from the Park. The house once belonged to the late Mrs Demarest, and the only surviving person to have seen the Hyde Park Ghost is among those present. Tempers fray as the drink flows, and the night wears on. Eventually Corinne Reaveley flounces out, abandoning her guests, and leaving Tuke to speculate about the puzzling tensions he has detected during the evening as well as the mystery of Hugo Demarest’s ghost.

  When another body is found in the Serpentine, Tuke takes a personal as well as a professional interest. Formidable in appearance, and sharp in intellect, he forms an entertaining double-act with Sir Bruton Kames, the Director of Public Prosecutions, who is a larger-than-life character in the mould of the more renowned Sir Henry Merrivale, created by Carter Dickson. The duo’s investigation takes them not only to Hyde Park and some of London’s meaner streets, but also to the hidden world beneath the city’s pavements. A series of lengthy set-piece scenes, notably an atmospheric subterranean chase, cunningly distract the reader’s attention from an essentially straightforward plot which draws on Browne’s knowledge of crime in real life.

  Douglas Gordon Browne was the grandson of Hablot K. Browne, who as ‘Phiz’ provided illustrations for the work of Charles Dickens, alias ‘Boz’. After leaving school, Browne studied art, and during the First World War, he was one of the first people to be trained to drive a tank. His interest in criminology led him to write several factual books, including a biography of the pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury, co-written with E.V. Tullett. He also published The Rise of Scotland Yard (1956), a book about fingerprints, and a life of the judge Sir Travers Humphreys. Of his novels, Rustling End (1948) draws on the Moat Farm murder at the start of the twentieth century, while Death in Perpetuity (1950) carries echoes of the Wallace case.

  In 1934, the theologian and writer Charles Williams reviewed Browne’s early thriller Plan XVI alongside Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, and Williams went so far as to bracket the authors together: ‘Both Mr Hammett and Mr Browne, with different capacities, might, if they have the courage of imagination, quicken the forward movement of murder.’ Time has proved kinder to Hammett’s reputation than to Browne’s, although Margery Allingham recorded in her diary that she sat up half the night reading Plan XVI, and at his best, the Englishman was an appealing writer. Major Maurice Hemyock, an archaeologist and amateur sleuth, appeared in books such as The Looking-Glass Murders (1935), which Dorothy L. Sayers praised for achieving ‘an artistic unity of a very satisfactory kind’, and The May-Week Murders (1937), set in Cambridge. Hemyock was later supplant
ed by Harvey Tuke, whose cases included Too Many Cousins (1946), an example of the ‘who will be next?’ murder mystery, in which a keen-eyed obituarist draws Tuke’s attention to the fact that three members of the same family have succumbed to a sequence of fatal accidents in quick succession.

  Chapter Nine

  Resorting to Murder

  Holidays offer an ideal opportunity to get away from it all, but the arrival of a Great Detective in any resort is invariably a harbinger of homicide. Crime writers have long favoured holiday locations as settings for their mysteries, in part thanks to inspiration gained from trips of their own. Holidays also offer endless scope in terms of plotting. Travellers in search of fresh experiences may find they lead to danger.

  An early example of the holiday-based mystery is Sudden Death (1886) by Britiffe Constable Skottowe, in which crucial events occur during an extended visit to Homburg made by the wealthy narrator, Jack Buchanan. The foreign setting adds to the air of mystery that pervades an unorthodox novel boasting an ahead-of-its-time subtext about sexual ambiguity. Skottowe never wrote another crime story, although he was responsible for A Short History of Parliament (1887), as well as a book about Hanoverian kings.

  Sherlock Holmes made his debut in A Study in Scarlet the year after Skottowe’s book appeared. In ‘The Devil’s Foot’, published in 1910 but set in 1897, Holmes is advised by a Harley Street doctor to ‘lay aside all his cases and surrender himself to complete rest if he wished to avoid a complete nervous break-down’. He and Watson take a small cottage at the furthest extremity of the Cornish peninsula, but their holiday is soon interrupted by the local vicar, who brings news of ‘the most extraordinary and tragic affair…We can only regard it as a special Providence that you should chance to be here at the time, for in all England you are the one man we need.’ Naturally, the great consulting detective cannot resist the temptation to investigate the case of ‘the Cornish horror’.