Christopher Bush, Nicholas Blake, R.C. Woodthorpe, F.J. Whaley and Gladys Mitchell all exploited their experience as teachers in giving their school-based mysteries a touch of authenticity. Francis John Whaley was the most obscure member of this quintet, but his debut novel, Reduction of Staff (1936) continues to be admired by connoisseurs. Mitchell spent a lifetime working in traditional schools, but was fascinated by the controversial educational views of A.S. Neill, founder of the progressive school Summerhill, and these influenced her presentation of the Hillmaston co-educational school in Death at the Opera (1934), also known as Death in the Wet.
Woodthorpe’s debut, The Public School Murder (1932) was acclaimed by Dorothy L. Sayers: ‘The gorgeous picture of life in the masters’ common room made it the most brilliant and humorous detective story of its season.’ Soon the novel gained startling notoriety. In September 1934, the Rev. Dr Elliott Speer, headmaster of Mount Hermon Preparatory School for Boys in Northfield, Massachusetts, was found murdered in circumstances uncannily similar to those in the book. He was shot one evening through the open window of his study. Curiously, Speer owned a copy of The Public School Murder, and it was said that he had recently lent it to Thomas E. Elder, the school’s dean. Elder was a traditionalist hostile towards Speer, who had been liberalising the school’s strict Presbyterian regime, but although circumstantial evidence hinted at his guilt, there was not enough to justify his arrest. Elder left the school, and six years later was tried for threatening a former colleague from Mount Hermon with a shotgun, but was acquitted. Speer’s murder was never solved, and it remains a matter for a conjecture whether the killer borrowed his modus operandi from the novel.
Which Way Came Death? (1936) by Faith Wolseley, was a well-written novel in which the splendidly three-dimensional central character is the wife of the head of a public school. The author was married to the headmaster of Hurstpierpoint College, which may account for her decision to opt for a pseudonym: she had previously written under her own name, Stella Tower.
The Oxford Murders (1929) by Adam Broome was the first of many detective novels to take full advantage of the old university city as a setting, and in 1936, Broome—a pen-name of Godfrey Warden James—produced The Cambridge Murders. In 1945, Welsh-born archaeologist and Cambridge don Glyn Daniel also published a book called The Cambridge Murders, under the name Dilwyn Rees. The Boat Race Murder (1933) by R.E. Swartwout (who, three years before publishing the book, had been the first American to cox Cambridge to victory over Oxford in the Boat Race) and The Punt Murder (1934) by Aceituna Griffin, are Cambridge mysteries with a boating background.
Oxford was, however, a more frequent setting for classic crime fiction than its ancient rival, in part thanks to the influence of J.C. Masterman’s An Oxford Tragedy (1933). Masterman was an Oxford insider who eventually became Vice-Chancellor of the University, and his account of life in a senior common room carried a ring of truth. The academic bickering is briefly disrupted by the murder of an unpopular don in the rooms of the Dean, who has been foolish enough not only to leave a loaded gun there, but also to mention this fact at High Table.
Dermot Morrah’s sole detective novel. The Mummy Case (1933), also known as The Mummy Case Mystery offers an appealing mix of Egyptology and detection, like R. Austin Freeman’s The Eye of Osiris more than two decades earlier. Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, authors of A Catalogue of Crime and highly knowledgeable but habitually severe judges, ranked Masterman’s book as a masterpiece, and Morrah’s as a triumph.
Michael Innes was inspired by Masterman’s success to turn to crime, and Innes in turn exerted an influence upon Edmund Crispin, creator of Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature at St Christopher’s College, and a vigorous amateur sleuth in nine novels and two collections of short stories. By definition, undergraduates were never destined to become series characters, but a quartet of female students take centre stage in Mavis Doriel Hay’s sole Oxford novel, Death on the Cherwell (1935), in which they investigate the killing of the much-disliked bursar of Persephone College.
Persephone, based on St Hilda’s, where Hay had been a student, is a women-only college, and in the year that Hay’s book appeared, Dorothy L. Sayers published Gaudy Night, set in a fictionalised version of her old college, Somerville, and regarded by many of her admirers as her finest achievement. Harriet Vane returns to Shrewsbury College after a gap of some years, rather as Sayers had gone back to Somerville as guest of honour at a reunion after a long absence. The Dean seeks Harriet’s help in unmasking the person responsible for a series of poison-pen letters and for defacing a manuscript, but the element of mystery in the story is subordinate to Sayers’ attempt to produce ‘a detective novel of manners’ and to integrate her plot with her chosen theme of intellectual integrity. As the book’s subtitle, ‘a love story with detective interruptions’, implies, the primary focus is not on the crime or its solution. Sayers is preoccupied by the relationship between men and women in general, and between Harriet and Lord Peter Wimsey in particular. The novel continues to divide opinion, but as a love letter to Oxford in the guise of a detective story, it remains unsurpassed, despite the seemingly never-ending fictional crime wave among the dreaming spires.
Murder at School
by Glen Trevor (1931)
Colin Revell, still in his twenties, has had ‘one of those “brilliant” careers at Oxford that are the despair alike of parents and prospective employers’, enjoys a private income of four pounds a week, and has acquired a reputation as ‘a neat solver of mysteries’. He has also found time to publish a novel: ‘of course he had done that’. His expert assistance is sought by the headmaster of his old school, Oakington, after a pupil dies, apparently by accident, in the dormitory.
It seems clear that, despite the existence of a mysterious ‘will’ left by the dead boy, his death was an accident. A few months later, however, Revell learns that another pupil has died at Oakington, apparently having drowned by accident while foolishly swimming in the dark. An even more troubling coincidence is that the two dead boys were brothers. Their cousin, a housemaster, is now in line to inherit one hundred thousand pounds. Is it possible that he has contrived two ingenious murders? The account of Revell’s hapless investigation into the deaths is flavoured with an irony reflecting the influence of Francis Iles, although the plot is scarcely in the same league as that of Iles’ Malice Aforethought.
The novel was published by Ernest Benn in a yellow dust-jacket whose style bore a distinct similarity to that pioneered by Victor Gollancz, formerly managing director of Benn, who had set up his own publishing house with immediate success, poaching authors such as Sayers and J.J. Connington from his old firm. Gollancz, whose marketing flair was legendary, had made a mystery out of the identity of Francis Iles, prompting a great deal of wildly erroneous speculation, much to the amusement of the author himself.
Benn followed this lead. The jacket claimed ‘special attention’ for ‘a thriller of exceptional ingenuity’, while a competition on the rear flap offered a prize of ten pounds for the first correct solution to the mystery of Glen Trevor’s identity, to be opened on New Year’s Day 1932. The clue given was that his real name was ‘known to the discerning as the Author of a number of novels distinguished for their penetrating observation in the drawing of character’. His most recent book had also been published by Benn.
The correct answer was James Hilton, whose earlier books included Dawn of Reckoning (1925), a mainstream novel which includes a trial for murder, and was later transformed into a crime film, Rage in Heaven, Hilton’s father was headmaster of a school in Walthamstow, and Hilton put his understanding of school life to use again in Goodbye, Mr Chips (1934) a short and sentimental book that became a bestseller and a memorable film. In 1933, he published two novels that were filmed, Knight without Armour and the much better known Lost Horizon, set in idyllic Shangri-La. His gifts for visual writing and telling a good st
ory took him to Hollywood, where he won an Academy Award for his contribution to the screenplay for Mrs Miniver. Murder at School enjoyed a new incarnation in the US as Was it Murder?, with Hilton credited as the author, but Colin Revell’s first case, unlike Philip Trent’s, was his last.
Murder at Cambridge
by Q. Patrick (1933)
Hilary Fenton, an undergraduate at All Saints College, Cambridge, is a native of Philadelphia who has come to England ‘to polish off any odd corners that may have survived four years at Harvard.’ A clever but sullen fellow student from the Orange Free State in South Africa, Julius Baumann, swears Hilary to secrecy before asking him to witness a document and giving him an envelope, to be posted in the event of Baumann suddenly leaving college. Shortly afterwards, during a thunderstorm, Baumann is found dead in his room. He has been shot, and lying on the floor close to his hand is a revolver.
Hilary, a likeable and enthusiastic narrator, decides that Baumann has been murdered, and leaps to the conclusion that the killer is a young woman with whom he is besotted. Believing he has spotted her lovely profile on a staircase in the vicinity of the crime scene, and that traces of her distinctive perfume have lingered in Baumann’s study, he determines to protect her. A second murder occurs, and the puzzle of the two deaths is investigated by Hilary in tandem with Inspector Horrocks, who proves remarkably tolerant of the student’s attempts to obstruct the course of justice.
This high-spirited mystery benefits from the energy and inside knowledge of an author not many years older than Hilary, who sprinkles his narratives with jokes about the Cambridge way of life. A light-hearted glossary provided for readers ‘who have not sojourned long at Cambridge’ describes a combination room as ‘a mysterious chamber in which the fellows of the college assemble to drink port after Hall. No one has ever yet discovered what they talk about there, but the conversation is reputed to be very brilliant’. A proctor is defined as ‘a don dressed up as a policeman’.
Somerset-born Richard Wilson Webb was well qualified to write this novel—also known as Murder at the ’Varsity—having studied at Clare College, Cambridge, and lived in France and South Africa prior to emigrating to the United States. He worked for a pharmaceutical business in Philadelphia, and his creative mind found an outlet through the invention of a pocket inhaler as well as by writing detective fiction. After producing two crime novels under the Q. Patrick pseudonym with Martha Mott Kelley, he retained the writing name when she left their literary partnership, and made use of his inside knowledge of Cambridge college life for this solo novel.
Following Murder at Cambridge, Webb wrote two more Q. Patrick books in collaboration with Mary Louise Aswell, including the excellent but very dark rural mystery, The Grindle Nightmare (1935). His publisher made a mystery of his identity without hinting at his collaborators’ existence: ‘Q. Patrick is not his name, America not his birthplace, writing is not his vocation…A Jekyll and Hyde is Q. Patrick—by day an important Eastern executive, by night a recorder of macabre crime!…Q. Patrick the author is an enigma! Q. Patrick is a riddle! Q. Patrick is a mystery!’
Under the same pseudonym, Webb proceeded to join forces with another Englishman, Hugh Wheeler. Wheeler and Webb also wrote under the name Jonathan Stagge and Patrick Quentin, and Wheeler continued to produce Quentin novels after Webb’s retirement from writing in the Fifties, although he later became better known as the author of books to musicals such as A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd.
Death at the President’s Lodging
by Michael Innes (1936)
‘An academic life, Dr Johnson observed, puts one little in the way of extraordinary casualties. This was not the experience of the Fellows and scholars of St Anthony’s College when they awoke one raw November morning to find their President, Josiah Umpleby, murdered in the night. The crime was at once intriguing and bizarre, efficient and theatrical. It was efficient, because nobody knew who had committed it. And it was theatrical because of a macabre and unnecessary act of fantasy with which the criminal, it was quickly rumoured, had accompanied his deed.’
Michael Innes announced his arrival as a detective novelist characteristically, with a quotation, a paradox, a baroque scenario and a touch of humour. Umpleby has been shot, little piles of human bones have been scattered around his corpse, and on the oak panels of his study, someone has chalked a couple of grinning death’s heads.
The puzzle is too much for the capable but unimaginative local policeman, and Inspector John Appleby of New Scotland Yard is summoned. There is ‘something more in Appleby than the intensely taught product of a modern police college. A contemplative habit and a tentative mind, poise as well as force, reserve rather than wariness—these were the tokens perhaps of some underlying more liberal education.’ He prefers to solve problems ‘on a human or psychological plane’ rather than by focusing on the practicalities of ‘doors and windows and purloined keys.’
We are left in no doubt that Appleby is a ‘gentleman’, and suspicion shifts around a closed circle of college men (no woman plays a significant part in the story); in the US, to avoid any hint of infamy at the White House, the book was re-titled Seven Suspects. Although part of a fictitious university located at Bletchley, St Anthony’s, the erudition, playfulness and petty jealousies of college life are evoked so well because the author was a consummate Oxford insider. Appleby finally reveals all in the suitable setting of the college common room, although naturally he waits until after port and sherry have circulated around the assembled Fellows.
Michael Innes was a pen-name taken by John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who studied at Oriel College and later returned to Oxford to become a student (i.e. Fellow) at Christ Church. In the mid-Thirties, as he said in his memoir Myself and Michael Innes (1987), ‘in one class of polite society, writing detective stories had superseded writing ghost stories as an acceptable relaxation’, and he began the novel ‘with the notion of its bringing in a little pocket-money’. In much the same spirit Cecil Day-Lewis, another Oxford man, had written his first detective story under the name Nicholas Blake to fund the repair of a leaky roof.
Appleby and his creator enjoyed long careers. Innes’ work included several thrillers, and sometimes verged on the fantastic, as with The Daffodil Affair (1942), while he became equally prolific as a writer of ‘straight’ novels and non-fiction under his own name. Sounding a little defensive, he wrote that ‘detective stories are purely recreational reading, after all, and needn’t scorn the ambition to amuse as well as puzzle’. Appleby ultimately became Metropolitan Police Commissioner and earned a knighthood; his son Bobby also became a detective and featured in later books.
Chapter Twelve
Playing Politics
In traditional detective whodunits, politicians and financiers became murder victims almost as regularly as elderly relatives of impoverished people desperate for an inheritance. Members of all three groups supplied plenty of suspects with reasons to kill them. Bankers and members of political elites were no more popular in the first half of the last century than they are today.
Readers of detective stories in the aftermath of the First World War, through the misery of the economic slump, and in the run-up to the Second World War, were looking for escapism, and writers were ready, willing and able to supply it. Nevertheless, both before and during the Golden Age, writers touched on political and economic concerns of the time more often than post-war critics have acknowledged.
Financial shenanigans keep cropping up in Freeman Wills Crofts’ novels of the Thirties, as in The End of Andrew Harrison (1938), a locked-room mystery involving the apparent suicide of a rascally businessman. The Times’ review of Crofts’ book said that ‘the barons of commerce are as much the stock in trade of many of the writers of thrillers as were the bold, bad baronets of our grandfathers’ time’, and the same column featured two further examples. In F.J. Whaley’s Southern Electric Murder, ‘motor car manufa
cturing firms are found using bribery and espionage in order to secure the market for themselves’, while trade rivalry between competing owners of multiple stores lie at the heart of Basil Francis’ Slender Margin.
Politicians fared even worse in detective stories than those barons of commerce, yet Stanley Baldwin and President Woodrow Wilson professed their enthusiasm for the genre, and the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz masterminded an imprint known as ‘The Prime Minister’s Detective Library’, one of his less-successful marketing ploys. During the Golden Age, several men and women prominent in political life tried their hand at detective fiction. Julian Symons claimed in Bloody Murder that ‘It is safe to say that almost all the British writers of the twenties and thirties…were unquestionably right wing’, but this confident assertion was quite wrong.
The long list of exceptions included the husband-and-wife team of G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, the former air minister Lord Gorell (who defected from the Liberals, only to be drummed out of the Labour Party because of his association with Ramsay MacDonald) and Ellen Wilkinson, who became a post-war Labour minister. Nicholas Blake (Cecil Day-Lewis) was a Marxist when he began his crime writing career, as was Cameron McCabe (Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann), while Raymond Postgate was a founder member of the British Communist Party, and Christopher St John Sprigg met his death while fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Bruce Hamilton and his brother Patrick flirted with communism, R.C. Woodthorpe was a left-wing journalist working for the Daily Herald, while Anthony Wynne and E.R. Punshon both took pot-shots at capitalism in their novels, occasionally to the detriment of narrative pace.
The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books Page 15