The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Crime novels in which the humour stems from the characters or the situation are usually more successful than those where the sole purpose of the book is to be funny. Part of the problem is that murder in real life is an appalling crime which causes untold distress. Making fun of it without tastelessness requires more care and skill than merely making a game out of it. Sustaining a career as an author of funny detective novels is especially challenging. Alan Melville, for instance, built a considerable reputation as a wit, but despite producing a handful of amusing detective novels, he soon abandoned the genre in favour of a career as a broadcaster and playwright. Another journalist and broadcaster who wrote plays was Denzil Batchelor, who published The Test Match Murder (1936) early in his career. England’s star batsman is poisoned by curare, administered via his batting glove, while walking out to the crease at Sydney. This light-hearted thriller, which features a pleasing caricature of the Great Detective, falters when Batchelor resorts to introducing a dope gang and even a mysterious Chinaman. A former secretary to the legendary cricketer C.B. Fry, Batchelor became better known as a sports writer than as a novelist.

  After writing captions for newspaper cartoons together, Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon experimented with a humorous mystery novel. The tone of A Bullet in the Ballet (1937) is set in the opening sentence: ‘Since it is probable that any book flying a bullet in its title is going to produce a corpse sooner or later—here it is.’ It was followed by two more books featuring the impresario Vladimir Stroganoff and Inspector Adam Quill. Casino for Sale (1938) includes a locked-room mystery, but the authors’ speciality lay in amusing rather than baffling their readers. Caryl Brahms’ real name was Doris Caroline Abrahams, while ‘Skid’ Simon, born Seca Jascha Skidelsky in Manchuria, was a champion bridge player whose early death ended a highly successful comic writing partnership.

  Of the ironic writers inspired by Berkeley’s work under the name Francis Iles, the most consistently amusing was Richard Hull. Hull’s The Murderers of Monty (1937), for instance, begins enjoyably, with four professional men setting up a company which has the object of killing their eponymous friend, who is rather a bore. Why is the company called The Murderers of Monty Limited? Because it is limited to Monty, of course. The joke backfires when Monty Archer is found dead, and the novel suffers because the entertaining idea at its heart does not sustain a full-length book.

  John Dickson Carr’s books featuring Sir Henry Merrivale, and published as by Carter Dickson, utilise slapstick humour as a means of misdirecting the reader’s attention from vital plot information. Carr’s most high-spirited disciple was Edmund Crispin, who wrote detective novels with lashings of comedy as well as ingenuity. Rather like Alan Melville, however, Crispin ran out of steam all too soon.

  In contrast, two long-serving employees of major banks sought escape from the sinister world of finance by leavening many of their detective stories with a touch of humour. Clifford Witting was a former clerk with Lloyds Bank; the first half of Measure for Murder (1941), set against the background of an amateur dramatic society’s staging of Measure for Measure, is narrated by a former bank clerk. The book presents an interesting picture of English small-town life during the early stages of the Second World War. Also in 1941, George Bellairs made his debut with Littlejohn on Leave. In real life, Bellairs was Mancunian bank manager Harold Blundell, who published detective stories for almost forty years; the longevity of his career was probably due to the care he took to ensure that the crimes investigated by Inspector Littlejohn did not become submerged by comedy.

  Writing a funny crime story that will stand the test of time is difficult. Julian Symons, as fiercely critical of his own books as he was of sub-standard work by others, concluded that his light-hearted debut The Immaterial Murder Case (1945) was so bad that it should never be republished. Symons’ books became increasingly serious as he sought to reflect what he saw as an evolution in the genre from the detective story to the crime novel.

  After the Second World War, Pamela Branch published The Wooden Overcoat (1951), an engaging story about a club for wrongly acquitted murderers, but she was another witty writer who lacked staying power, the last of her four books appearing in 1958. Joyce Porter was more prolific, but her early work featuring the lazy and repellent Chief Inspector Dover was by far her best.

  Coffin, Scarcely Used (1958) by Colin Watson launched the Flaxborough Chronicles, a dozen novels set in and around a market town with an unexpectedly high level of homicide. The series was adapted for television in 1977 as Murder Most English; five years earlier, Lonelyheart 4122 (1967) had become a TV movie, The Crooked Hearts. Watson was arguably the most successful British writer of comic crime to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. A journalist by profession, he is also said to be the first person to have obtained libel compensation from the satirical magazine Private Eye after it described his writing as like Wodehouse, ‘but without the jokes’; an unkind review can dull even the sharpest sense of humour.

  Quick Curtain

  by Alan Melville (1934)

  Quick Curtain opens with a first-night performance in front of a full house at the Grosvenor Theatre. The great and the good have come to see Blue Music, and so have Inspector Wilson of Scotland Yard and his journalist son. The show is a ‘musical comedy operetta’ produced by the legendary Douglas B. Douglas. Words and music come courtesy of Ivor Watcyns, who wrote the book ‘between the grapefruit of one breakfast and the tomato juice of the lunch immediately following that breakfast’.

  Douglas has ‘a flair for picking legs, spotting personality, and persuading the public that something merely mediocre was something simply sensational’. The stars of his show are Brandon Baker, who has kept himself in trim as a ‘juvenile lead’ for nearly thirty years, and Gwen Astle, who has married six times, twice into the peerage, and has recently become engaged to the son of an American multi-millionaire. The thin storyline of Blue Music involves the shooting of the leading man, but Brandon Baker is killed by a real bullet. Within minutes, the presumed culprit is found dead in his dressing room, having apparently hanged himself, but the two Wilsons who form a comic equivalent of Holmes and Watson, discover that there is more to the case than meets the eye.

  In a review for The Sunday Times, Dorothy L. Sayers said that Melville ‘gets great enjoyment out of scarifying all the leading lights of the profession, from producer to dramatic critic’, although she fretted that he ‘blows the solemn structure of the detective novel sky-high’. He makes amusing use of his inside knowledge of backstage life, and Sayers said that his satire included ‘several thinly veiled personal attacks’. In the twenty-first century, the pleasure of the story lies not in reading between the lines to detect the identity of Melville’s targets, but in his witty portrayal of characteristic types. These include not only the producer and performers, but also James Amethyst, weary drama critic of the Morning Herald, who finds the musical comedies that he reviews so formulaic that he scarcely troubles to pay attention.

  As Sayers said, Melville looks on ‘all this detective business as a huge joke’, but not only does he sustain the joke to the end of the book, his humour has also survived the passage of time. Melville, whose real name was William Melville Caverhill, was a versatile writer who worked as a scriptwriter and radio producer for the BBC, and dabbled in detection, as well as working as a lyricist and writing for the theatre.

  He adapted his first mystery, Week-end at Thrackley (1934) into a play, which became Hot Ice, a film screened in 1952. In all, he produced six mysteries during the mid-Thirties before turning his attention elsewhere. During the television era, he became chairman of the Brains Trust, hosted a satiric revue series called A–Z, and was a panellist on What’s My Line?. As an actor, his credits included parts in a Noel Coward’s The Vortex, and in a costume drama, By the Sword Divided, which earned high audience ratings in the Eighties. By that point, his work as a detective novelist was long forgotten.
r />   Case for Three Detectives

  by Leo Bruce (1936)

  It is no mean feat to combine an intricate locked room mystery with a successful parody of three Great Detectives, but Leo Bruce rose to the challenge in his first detective novel. The book introduces Sergeant Beef, an apparently uncouth, beer-drinking, darts-playing policeman whose skills as a detective are routinely underestimated, not least by Lionel Townsend, who narrates the story.

  Townsend is among the guests at the country home of the amiable and seemingly inoffensive Dr and Mrs Thurston, when the conversation turns to the difference between murder in fact and fiction. Shortly afterwards, a woman’s screams are heard, and Mrs Thurston is found dead in her locked bedroom with her throat cut. It cannot be suicide—but how, and by whom, has she been killed? The village bobby, Sergeant Beef, is summoned, but he is quickly usurped by three of ‘those indefatigably brilliant private investigators who seem to be always handy when murder has been committed’.

  Lord Simon Plimsoll, Amer Picon and Monsignor Smith are thinly disguised versions of Wimsey, Poirot and Father Brown, and the mannerisms, dialogue and methods of detection familiar from the originals are captured wittily and with considerable skill. Lord Simon’s imperturbable sidekick Butterfield does his legwork, just as Mervyn Bunter does for Lord Peter; Picon talks in broken English; while little Smith makes Delphic utterances, and finds intriguing parallels between murderers and monks.

  The closed circle of suspects includes a puritanical yet prurient vicar, a ne’er-do-well young man, a smug solicitor, a sinister butler, a feisty housemaid and a chauffeur with a criminal record. Is it conceivable that they are all in it together? Townsend acts as a self-appointed Watson to each of the great men, and is rewarded when each of them, in turn, comes up with a breathtakingly ingenious explanation for the crime. But it is Sergeant Beef who has the last laugh.

  Beef and Townsend formed a pleasing double-act in seven further novels and a scattering of short stories. Bruce was as willing to experiment with the form and conventions of the detective story as Anthony Berkeley: Case for Three Detectives is a worthy successor to The Poisoned Chocolates Case as an example of the mystery with multiple solutions. Bruce’s Case with Four Clowns (1939) is, like Berkeley’s Murder in the Basement (1932), an example of the ‘whowasdunin’, a story in which murder is pre-ordained, but the victim’s identity is a mystery to be solved. To Townsend’s astonishment, Beef sets up as a private investigator in Case with No Conclusion (1939), another novel which makes jokey references to the classic detective story, while Case for Sergeant Beef (1947) offers a clever spin on the concept of the inverted mystery.

  Bruce was the pen-name of Rupert Croft-Cooke, a versatile and gifted writer who regarded his detective fiction as rather less important than his other work. This view was common among writers of his vintage, but with the passage of time it has become clear that they erred in underestimating the long-term appeal of the detective story. Croft-Cooke was widely travelled, and spent fifteen years living in Morocco following his release from prison; he had been convicted of homosexual offences in 1953 in a controversial case which helped to create pressure for liberalisation of the law. Following his time in jail, he never wrote another book about Beef, but his creative powers remained undimmed.

  He quickly established a new series detective, the schoolteacher Carolus Deene, and became a member of the select sub-group of crime novelists who wrote fiction with some success after a serving a prison term; Walter S. Masterman was another, while Robert Forsythe apparently started writing the first of his eight detective novels while serving time for his role as ringleader in a conspiracy to defraud Somerset House; the fact that he published under the name Robin Forsythe suggests that he was not adept at covering his tracks. As for Leo Bruce, he wrote no fewer than twenty-three books about Deene. The last of them, the trendily titled Death of a Bovver Boy, was published in 1974. However, although they are adroitly constructed, he never surpassed his delightful debut novel.

  The Moving Toyshop

  by Edmund Crispin (1946)

  Few crime novels can match Edmund Crispin’s most celebrated mystery for sheer exuberance. A teasing, seemingly impossible situation, a wonderfully evoked setting among the dreaming spires of Oxford, and an amateur sleuth in the finest tradition of great detectives, make up the ingredients of a much-loved novel. Published shortly after the Second World War ended, the storyline belongs in spirit to the between-the-wars Golden Age of detective fiction.

  Richard Cadogan, a poet visiting Oxford, chances one night upon a toyshop on Iffley Road. Its awning has been left down and, finding the door open, he ventures inside. There he stumbles upon the dead body of an elderly woman, only to be hit on the head by an unknown assailant. After regaining consciousness, he hurries off to report the crime to the police, and accompanies them to the scene, but they discover that the toyshop has metamorphosed into a grocer’s store. As the police are sceptical about Cadogan’s story, he turns for help to Professor Gervase Fen of St Christopher’s College, and a madcap investigation ensues.

  Crispin enjoyed writing chase scenes, two of which feature in this novel. At one point, when facing a choice about which direction to take, Cadogan decides to turn left, allowing the author to poke fun at his socialist publisher: ‘After all, Gollancz is publishing this book.’ Like John Dickson Carr, Crispin was quite happy to break the fourth wall, and also to make fun of his publisher’s political sympathies. The second chase culminates at Botley fairground, and an out-of-control roundabout; Alfred Hitchcock bought the right to use the scene for the film version of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. A screenplay of The Moving Toyshop was written, but no film of the book was made, although a version for TV launched the BBC’s much-admired series Detective in 1964 (many episodes of which, sadly, have not been preserved).

  Crispin dedicated the book to his friend and fellow student at St John’s College, the poet and detective-fiction fan Philip Larkin, who had sparked his imagination by telling him about an Oxford shop with a flapping awning. Richard Cadogan shares some attitudes with Larkin, and jokes about poetry abound. Larkin is even name-checked by Fen, and described as ‘the most indefatigable searcher-out of pointless correspondence the world has ever known’.

  Edmund Crispin was the pen-name of Bruce Montgomery, who was equally gifted as a composer and a novelist. His first detective novel, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), was written while he was an undergraduate, in a ten-day burst of activity during the Easter vacation when he should have been revising for Finals. His clever, frivolous mysteries rapidly earned a following. In Buried for Pleasure (1948), a village mystery in which Fen stands for Parliament as an Independent candidate, the sleuth meets a detective novelist who says: ‘Characterisation seems to me a very over-rated element in fiction…It limits the form so.’ No doubt he was speaking for Crispin.

  Crispin became a pillar of the Detection Club, but after publishing eight novels and a collection of short stories within a decade, he ran out of creative juice as a crime writer. He struggled with writer’s block, alcoholism and poor health, and his ninth and final novel about Gervase Fen, the underwhelming The Glimpses of the Moon (1977) did not appear until the year before his death.

  Chapter Eleven

  Education, Education, Education

  In the years after the First World War, authors gradually began to recognise the possibilities of workplaces as settings for detective stories. One country house was much like another, but workplaces might also offer a suitably restricted circle of suspects in the event of murder being done, together with fresh and interesting background colour. But authors were limited to workplace backgrounds that they knew well, either as a result of personal experience or in-depth research. J.S. Fletcher, Dorothy L. Sayers and Freeman Wills Crofts, who had earned a living in journalism, advertising and railways respectively, made excellent use of their insight into those worlds in their f
iction. The majority of crime writers, however, had little or no first-hand knowledge of the business environment. Life in an educational establishment was much more familiar. Many were university graduates, while some taught in schools or colleges.

  This was a time when most crime writers came from London or the Home Counties. In 1939, a list of Detection Club members revealed that not a single one of them lived in the north of England, although Sir Hugh Walpole had a place in the Lake District as well as in Piccadilly. Similarly, their experience of school and university was not representative of the population as a whole. With relatively few exceptions, they came from well-to-do families, and were educated at public school; many went to Oxford or Cambridge. Of the first twenty-eight men and women admitted to Detection Club, no fewer than four—Ronald Knox, Douglas Cole, Lord Gorell and Edgar Jepson—had studied at Balliol. Sayers chose the same college as the alma mater of Lord Peter Wimsey (said to have been based on the college chaplain, although Gorell himself thought he was the original of Wimsey). R.C. Woodthorpe and John Dickson Carr, both elected to membership of the Club during the Thirties, also created detectives who were Balliol alumni: Nicholas Slade and the much more renowned Dr Gideon Fell respectively.

  Theirs was, in many ways, a small and elitist world, and this helps to explain why classic crime novels often include phonetic renditions of the dialogue of working-class people which make modern readers cringe. Some of the attitudes evident and implicit in the books of highly educated authors, for instance as regards Jewish and gay people, would be unacceptable in fiction written in the twenty-first century. It is worth remembering that theirs was not only a tiny world, but also a very different one from ours, and one of the pleasures of reading classic crime fiction is that it affords an insight into the Britain of the past, a country in some respects scarcely recognisable today.