The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Crime writers often play variations on this theme. In Murder in the Moor (1929), a detective called Peregrine Clement Smith stumbles on a mystery during a walking tour on a thinly disguised version of Dartmoor. The wit and ingenuity of this novel have been praised by connoisseurs, yet little is known about the author, Thomas Kindon, except that he appears to have been, like Freeman Wills Crofts, John Rhode and Francis Everton, highly knowledgeable about engineering.

  Agatha Christie was a skilful exponent of the holiday mystery. In Peril at End House (1932), Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings arrive in St Loo, which Hastings says is ‘well named the Queen of Watering Places…If only these weather conditions continued we should indeed have a perfect holiday.’ Poirot turns down a commission from the Home Secretary, only to meet Nick Buckley, a young woman whose life appears to be in danger. Despite claiming to have solved his last case, he soon finds himself drawn into an elaborately plotted murder.

  Poirot’s attempt to relax on the beach at Smugglers’ Island (a location modelled on Devon’s Burgh Island) meets a similar fate in Evil Under the Sun (1941). In conversation with fellow residents of the Jolly Roger Hotel who are contentedly watching the sunbathers, Poirot argues that ‘there is evil everywhere under the sun…Let us say you have an enemy. If you seek him out in his flat, in his office, in the street…you must account for yourself. But here at the seaside it is necessary for no one to account for himself.’ Sure enough, glamorous, sun-loving Arlena Stuart is duly found stretched out on the beach; someone has strangled her.

  Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Five Red Herrings (1931) saw Lord Peter Wimsey taking a fishing holiday in Galloway, where the author and her husband had enjoyed several holidays. The area’s landscapes have attracted a colony of artists, one of whom is found dead with a fractured skull, his painting half-finished. The story is Sayers’ attempt to write a puzzle mystery with a closed circle of suspects, and the story turns on an alibi trick which elaborates on a plot device in J.J. Connington’s The Two Tickets Puzzle, published the previous year.

  In 1932, Sayers published a more compelling holiday mystery, Have His Carcase, in which Harriet Vane’s coastal walking holiday is rudely interrupted by her discovery of a corpse with his throat cut. The question of ‘howdunit’, as often with Sayers, sparked her imagination, and the trimmings include an elaborate cipher which Lord Peter Wimsey manages to solve. The dead man was a foreigner who had been working at a nearby hotel, the Resplendent: ‘one of those monster seaside palaces which look as though they had been designed by a German manufacturer of children’s cardboard toys. Its glass porch was crowded with hothouse plants, and the lofty dome of its reception-hall was supported on gilt pilasters rising out of an ocean of blue plush.’ And it proves to have been events in the Resplendent that sowed the seeds for the crime.

  The calamitous impact of serial murders on a holiday resort dependent on tourism is evident when ‘the Eastrepps Evil’ strikes in Francis Beeding’s Death Walks in Eastrepps . The murder of a philandering artist is the first of a sequence of deaths to plague the coastal town of Coldhithe in And Being Dead (1938), the first novel by Margaret Erskine, the pen-name of Margaret Wetherby Williams. Inspector Septimus Finch is told that the resort is ‘the latest playground of Mayfair’, but on arriving there concludes that it looks ‘just the place for a murder’.

  The dead man was involved in an unpopular scheme to develop Coldhithe, and a similar plan plays a part in E.R. Punshon’s Crossword Mystery (1934): ‘The idea was to build a big seaside golfing hotel…Suffby Cove itself would make a splendid swimming pool. Shooting rights were to be bought over land near, and there would be lots of fishing and boating, and, of course, a first-class jazz band…even an ice rink was thought of…it would be a gold mine.’ Archibald Winterton opposes the development—but is found drowned in the Cove.

  As flying, cruising and travelling long distances by rail became more commonplace, overseas holiday destinations saw an upsurge in fictional crime. Once again, Christie led the way. Foreign trips by train, plane and ship respectively formed the background for three of Hercule Poirot’s principal cases, recorded in Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death in the Clouds (1935) and Death on the Nile (1937).

  Long after the era of classic crime, a stay in the luxurious Burgh Island Hotel remains on the wish-list of thousands of Christie fans, while tourist authorities everywhere recognise that successful crime stories set in an attractive location bring a welcome boost to the local economy. Ann Cleeves’ recent novels about Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, televised as Shetland, provide a striking example. The series’ success has even led to the appearance of a profusely illustrated coffee-table book written by Cleeves and celebrating the bleak beauty of an archipelago where crime is rare—except in fiction.

  The Red Redmaynes

  by Eden Phillpotts (1922)

  Mark Brendon, a highly regarded young Detective Inspector from Scotland Yard, deserts London for a trout-fishing holiday on Dartmoor. A workaholic, he has reached a point in his life where his thoughts are turning to the future, and the possibility of marrying and raising a family. Heading from Princetown towards the deep pools of Foggintor Quarry, he has a brief encounter with a beautiful young woman; later, while fishing, he passes the time of day with a red-haired man. When murder interrupts Mark’s holiday, both strangers play a central part in the investigation.

  The young woman is Jenny Pendean, and it seems that her husband has been killed by her uncle—who proves to be the red-haired man, Captain Robert Redmayne. Jenny tells Brendon the story of the troubled Redmayne family, the ‘peculiar will’ left by her wealthy grandfather, and the tensions caused by her marriage to Michael Pendean, who had avoided fighting during the war. Robert Redmayne has gone missing, and Pendean’s body cannot be found.

  Brendon becomes increasingly obsessed with Jenny, but his pursuit of her is no more successful than the police’s efforts to track down Robert Redmayne. He encounters a rival for Jenny’s affections in the shape of Giuseppe Doria, a flamboyant Italian boatman who works for Robert’s brother, Bendigo, and before long murder again strikes the Redmayne family. The story is told in leisurely fashion, but benefits from Phillpotts’ lyrical descriptive writing, and a pleasing plot twist. Brendon makes a likeable protagonist, although in the later part of the book, he plays second fiddle to a snuff-taking Great Detective, a retired American policeman called Peter Ganns, who had a long friendship with another of Jenny’s uncles, Albert Redmayne.

  Eden Phillpotts worked as an insurance clerk before becoming a writer; early success enabled him to settle in his beloved Devon, which he seldom left thereafter; Phillpotts was shy and reticent, shunning interviews and only ever making one public appearance, at Exeter Cathedral, to unveil a memorial window to Lorna Doone’s author, R.D. Blackmore, who had encouraged him early in his career. Despite his reluctance to socialise, he became friendly with Agatha Christie’s parents, who were neighbours, and he advised Christie on her first, unpublished, novel, introducing her to his literary agent. She said in her autobiography: ‘I can hardly express the gratitude I feel to him.’

  A renowned regional novelist, Phillpotts also wrote poetry and plays, two of them in collaboration with his daughter Adelaide. His detective fiction, written under his own name and as Harrington Hext, once much admired, was lauded in an essay by John Rowland, a crime writer who shared Phillpotts’ enthusiasm for contriving impossible-crime scenarios. Rowland compared The Red Redmaynes to the work of Wilkie Collins, while Jorge Luis Borges ranked Phillpotts with Poe, Chesterton and Collins, and included The Red Redmaynes in his never-completed list of one hundred great works of literature. Barzun and Taylor ranked the novel ‘only one cut below Trent’s Last Case’. In the half-century after Phillpotts’ long life came to an end, his reputation has faded, but his crime fiction is ripe for re-evaluation.

  Mystery at Lynden Sands

  by J.J. Connington (1928)


  All Great Detectives were unrelenting in their quest for the truth about mysterious crimes, but the English legal system did not always satisfy their thirst for justice. Sometimes, they set themselves above the law. They might show compassion to those who were technically guilty, or impose their own punishment when the law proved impotent. It was not even unknown for them to commit murder themselves, while somehow managing to remain on the moral high ground. Sir Clinton Driffield, created by J.J. Connington, is a prime example of a sleuth with a cold-blooded streak; not for nothing was one of his recorded cases given the title in the US of Grim Vengeance.

  Sir Clinton holds the office of Chief Constable, but the books in which he appears are not conventional police stories, and at one point he resigned in order to conduct unspecified intelligence work, although this proved short-lived. Connington was a professor of chemistry, and an admirer of R. Austin Freeman’s detective fiction. Mystery at Lynden Sands typifies his work in emphasising scientific and technological know-how rather than the minutiae of police procedure.

  Sir Clinton is much younger than the Chief Constables typically found in detective fiction of the inter-war years, most of whom are former military men. Aged about thirty-five, he has returned to England after holding a senior post with the police in South Africa. His friend Wendover, whom he nicknames ‘Squire’, is an affable country gentleman whose intellect is sharper than his hearty appearance might suggest.

  Sir Clinton and Wendover are enjoying a golfing break at the seaside when an elderly man is found dead. Soon they are embroiled in a puzzle involving a missing heir, an unscrupulous trustee, unintentional bigamy, and blackmail. The Victorian case of the Tichborne Claimant supplied real-life inspiration for one strand of the narrative. Connington exploits the geography of Lynden Sands, using the beach, quicksand and unusual rock formations to supply crime scenes, and a dramatic climax. The book’s tone is characteristically sardonic. Like Dupin, Holmes or Poirot teasing their luckless sidekicks, Sir Clinton chides Wendover: ‘Masterly survey, Squire. Except that you’ve left out most of the points of importance.’ And when a vicious criminal faces an agonising death, Sir Clinton is unsympathetic: ‘This isn’t a case where my humanitarian instincts are roused in the slightest.’

  By the time this book appeared, T.S. Eliot, a crime-fiction enthusiast, had already placed its author in the first rank of detective novelists. J.J. Connington was the pen-name of Alfred Walter Stewart, a Glaswegian academic who published a well-received dystopian novel, Nordenholt’s Millions, in 1923, before turning to detective fiction with a strong emphasis on fair-play clueing. Sir Clinton made his debut in Murder in the Maze (1927), a country-house murder mystery which the publishers boldly claimed was comparable with ‘the half dozen great masterpieces of this delightful form of literature’.Once he has identified the culprit, Sir Clinton contrives to make the murderer ‘his own executioner…my method was a stiffer one than mere hanging’. Admitting that his approach is unorthodox, he makes no apology: ‘I can only say that my conscience is quite clear.’ Great Detectives commonly dispensed their own brand of justice to malefactors, but nobody did so quite as ruthlessly as Sir Clinton Driffield.

  Murder in Black and White

  by Evelyn Elder (1931)

  In this holiday mystery set in the south of France, the author—better known as Milward Kennedy—plays a game with his readers; the sporting theme is reinforced by the central role of real tennis in the storyline. The book is divided into four sections, and the author states in a prefatory note that: ‘When the reader reaches the end of Part Three he is in possession of all the facts needed to reach the solution of the problem.’ The first section is set at a cocktail party, attended by a young architect and amateur artist, Sam Horder, on his return from holiday in picturesque St André-sur-Mer at Carnival time. He breaks the news about the French equivalent of a country-house mystery—murder at the Chateau St Andre during a fancy-dress ball. Louis de Vigny, dressed in a black and white costume, has been murdered, shot by a rifle bullet ‘practically under my eyes’. But the crime appears to be an impossibility.

  Part Two reproduces six entries from Sam’s sketchbook: a plan of the chateau where the crime took place; a sketch of a ‘flying bridge’; a picture of the Tour Pantillon; four sketches of scenes in the old town; a view of the crime scene from the sea; and a picture of the chateau from above the seashore. The sketches contain visual clues to the solution of the mystery, a pleasing device adopted and modified by Francis Beeding in The Norwich Victims (1935), a novel prefaced with photographs of the suspects which merit careful study.

  The meat of the novel is contained in Part Three, in which Sam describes the events surrounding the murder. He concludes by summing up the problem if the police’s theory about the crime is rejected: ‘only one of three people could have fired the shot, and none of the three had a rifle, or could have concealed it.’ Henry Evelyn acts as amateur sleuth, deducing what has happened on the basis of what Sam has told him, coupled with the sketches—which prompt him to make his own rough diagrams.

  The combination of a ‘challenge to the reader’ with artistic clues was a clever innovation from a writer who seemed destined to become one of the major Golden Age novelists. The sketches were actually drawn by his friend Austin Blomfield, an architect and artist who went into practice with his father, a distinguished architect whose work included buildings at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Kennedy swiftly produced a second novel under the Evelyn Elder pseudonym, the disappointing Angel in the Case (1932).

  Milward Rodon Kennedy Burge became director of the London office of the International Labour Office from 1924, and started writing in his spare time. After co-writing with his friend A.G. Macdonell The Bleston Mystery (1928), a thriller published as by Robert Milward Kennedy, he started to write detective novels under his own steam as Milward Kennedy, and became a founder member of the Detection Club. His admiration for the books of Anthony Berkeley caused him to experiment with the genre, sometimes with intriguing results. But his desire to vary the formula with each book meant that he never created a successful series character, although Inspector Cornford appeared in a couple of books, as did the suave confidence tricksters Sir George and Lady Bull.

  Chapter Ten

  Making Fun of Murder

  With Trent’s Last Case, E.C. Bentley meant to satirise the supposed infallibility of great detectives. The book’s most unexpected twist was that it laid down the template for the classic whodunit novel. The game-playing nature of the whodunit after the First World War created opportunities for humourists. It is no coincidence that regular contributors to Punch included several of the leading detective novelists to emerge in the Twenties. E.V. (‘Evoe’) Knox, the brother of Ronald, was editor of Punch for seventeen years, and wrote ‘The Murder at the Towers’, perhaps the wittiest short parody of the traditional whodunit.

  The success of P.G. Wodehouse (a keen fan of detective fiction) influenced writers such as Anthony Berkeley and Agatha Christie. Berkeley’s non-series mystery Mr Priestley’s Problem (1927), in which a group of Bright Young Things play a ‘murder hoax’ on a meek little man similar to Berkeley’s more famous character Ambrose Chitterwick, is a romp in the style of a novel by Wodehouse. Christie’s early thrillers such as The Secret of Chimneys (1925) and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) are equally playful. Humour was a recurrent, and routinely under-rated, feature of her writing, and Partners in Crime (1929), featuring her third-string sleuths Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, parodies the work of then-popular authors of detective fiction. The targets include such prominent figures as G.K. Chesterton, Edgar Wallace and Berkeley, as well as the now seldom-remembered American authors Isabel Ostrander and Clinton H. Stagg.

  Humour, especially facetiousness, tends to date badly in fiction, while satire loses its bite once the satirist’s target has faded from memory. The best Golden Age parodies nevertheless remain readable today. They include ‘Greedy Night’
by E.C. Bentley, a short story which, like Gory Knight (1937) by Margaret Rivers Larminie and Jane Langslow, took its title from Dorothy L. Sayers’ ‘novel of manners’ set in Oxford, Gaudy Night (1935).

  The most innovative and ambitious Golden Age parody was Ask a Policeman (1933). This was written in collaboration by six members of the Detection Club, four of whom exchanged detectives with each other. Their chosen murder victim was a newspaper baron, and among the suspects were an archbishop, a police commissioner and the government Chief Whip. The Home Secretary calls in four leading amateur sleuths, each of whom duly propounds a different solution to the mystery. The story was introduced by an exchange of letters between John Rhode and Milward Kennedy. Rhode wrote the book’s long introductory section, while Kennedy had to fashion a logical outcome to what had gone before, a tricky challenge which he met at the expense of strict fair play.

  Once Rhode had set the scene, Helen Simpson took over, with a chapter introducing Gladys Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley. Mitchell returned the compliment in her contribution, which features Sir John Samaurez, the detective created by Simpson in collaboration with the novelist and playwright Clemence Dane. The highlight of the book is Anthony Berkeley’s chapter featuring Lord Peter Wimsey; in contrast, Sayers’ rendition of Berkeley’s inquisitive amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham is competent but not wholly compelling. The book’s sheer joie de vivre is appealing, but it is most impressive as a demonstration of the craftsmanship of writers at the peak of their powers.