The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode regularly put their experience as engineers to effective use in devising ingenious means of murder, although their failure to pay comparable attention to creating in-depth characters was one of the factors which prompted Julian Symons to brand their writing as ‘humdrum’, a term which, like all labels, is helpful only up to a point. Developments in science and technology between the wars were chronicled with enthusiasm by crime writers on the look-out for new ideas, whether for murder motives, such as keeping the secret of a revolutionary invention or for means of committing murder. As the world shrank, Crofts and Rhode devised ingenious means of committing murder on trains and boats and planes in books such as Death in the Tunnel (published in 1936 by Rhode under his alias Miles Burton, and featuring a murder in a railway carriage staged to look like suicide); Mystery in the Channel (1931), an example of Inspector French’s ability to deconstruct cunningly devised alibis; and 12.30 from Croydon (1934), in which the murderer is not even present on the flight taken by his luckless victim.

  Francis Everton was another engineer who became a crime writer. Although, perhaps because of the demands of his family business, he produced only a handful of novels, they display a touch of originality and flair that extends beyond the mechanics of committing murder. The same was true of Christopher St John Sprigg; he possessed a high level of technical know-how in the field of aeronautics, put to splendid use in Death of an Airman.

  Science and technology still play a crucial role in crime fiction in the age of CSI, so much so that some writers have opted to concentrate on producing historical mysteries in which no complications arise as a result of DNA profiling, computer technology and so on. Forensics continue to fascinate writers, even if the reading public no longer thirsts as it once did for weird and wonderful methods of murder devised by imaginative doctors, scientists and engineers.

  The Documents in the Case

  by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace (1930)

  The only Sayers novel not to feature Lord Peter Wimsey was also her sole collaborative mystery. The scientific concept at the heart of the ‘howdunit’ puzzle was contributed by Robert Eustace, whose technical know-how and enthusiasm for the genre led him to enjoy a lengthy career as a co-author of detective stories. But the writing was undertaken by Sayers, and her method of structuring the narrative betrays the influence of The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins, whose biography she was working on at the time, but never completed.

  The story is introduced by a cryptic note from Paul Harrison, who asks Sir Gilbert Pugh to read an enclosed dossier of documents with an open mind in an effort to understand ‘exactly what took place in my late father’s household’. A sequence of letters supplemented by an occasional note provides insight into the passions swirling around suburbia. Margaret Harrison, attractive and impulsive, is finding married life with her staid older husband increasingly tedious. The Harrisons take in two lodgers, a poet called Jack Munting and an artist, Harwood Lathom, and before long, Margaret finds herself increasingly drawn to Lathom.

  Sayers’ starting point for the central situation in the novel was to fictionalise the key relationships in the Thompson–Bywaters case (Bywaters is even name-checked by Lathom when he pontificates about respectability in the suburbs), but the criminal modus operandi in the story, and its ultimate consequence, differ from those in the real-life case. A parallel is also drawn between the rashness of the killer in the story and that of Patrick Mahon, hanged in 1924 for the murder of his pregnant lover. Yet the ‘true crime’ elements form only one thread of an elaborately woven story.

  Sayers utilises multiple viewpoints, notably those of Munting and the Harrisons’ troubled ‘lady-help’, Agatha Milsom, to tackle subjects such as middle-class values, personal responsibility and the nature of relationships between men and women. Above all, she takes the bold step of integrating her detective plot with the question put by Munting towards the end of the book: ‘What is Life?’ He is taking part in an erudite dinner-party discussion with a parson, a curate, a physicist, a biologist and a chemist, during the course of which the truth about an ingenious plan to commit an apparently perfect crime emerges. As the curate says to Munting, the scientific means of detecting the truth is ‘better than Crippen and the wireless’. But perhaps he reflects Sayers’ anxiety about the complicated nature of the scheme when he adds: ‘Only they’ll have a bit of a job explaining it.’

  Robert Eustace was the pen-name adopted by Eustace Robert Barton, a doctor who began to co-author crime fiction in the late nineteenth century, often in collaboration with L.T. Meade, although occasionally on his own. With Edgar Jepson, Eustace wrote a much-anthologised impossible-crime short story, ‘The Tea Leaf’, and he became a founder member of the Detection Club. The danger of tackling complex and unusual ideas in the guise of crime fiction was illustrated when The Documents in the Case was criticised for scientific inaccuracy, although further research satisfied Eustace that the complaint was itself mistaken. But the damage was done, and although he and Sayers had contemplated continuing to collaborate, she decided to go her own way, and Wimsey made a swift return to action.

  The Young Vanish

  by Francis Everton (1932)

  This intriguing, eccentric story begins with a sequence of apparently unconnected deaths. The question for Inspector Allport is whether it was ‘chance, and nothing but chance, that half a dozen prominent Trade Union officials, all of whom held moderate views, should have succumbed to one form of accident or another in the short space of a few weeks?’. At a time when ‘a second general strike was brewing’, is a right-wing serial killer responsible—or are sinister Russians to blame?

  Everton’s detective is one of the ugliest in fiction: ‘from whatever angle you looked at Allport, he seemed to have met with an accident…Seen full face, his eyes bulged and the dimple in the middle of his chin created a grotesque impression. And the rear view was not much better…but nature had given him, in compensation, a first class brain.’ His powers of deduction are further challenged following the discovery of the body of a man with his head inside a gas stove in a workman’s house in Bermondsey. An inquest returns a verdict of suicide, but Allport is not satisfied with easy explanations.

  The plot complications come thick and fast following the discovery of a charred corpse in a motor car; many of them are technical, and the clues include diagrams of marks made on three different matchboxes. Allport receives expert help from an engineering company called Sheepbridge Stokes Centrifugal Castings. The company’s technical director advises him about the ‘metallurgical fingerprints’ to be found on the cylinder blocks of internal combustion engines, and suggests ‘that this is the first occasion on which metallurgical and spectrographic analysis has been called to the aid of the Law’.

  The book takes its strange title from an inn in Glapwell, Derbyshire, which features in the story, and the author’s insistence that it is not to be confused with a real-life inn with the same name in Glapwell seems like a case of protesting too much. Everton also notes that ‘there really is a company registered under the name of The Sheepbridge Stokes Centrifugal Castings Co. Ltd.’. Given that the business was run by Everton’s family, his cunning plan was presumably to use his detective novel as a form of commercial advertisement.

  Francis Everton’s real name was Francis William Stokes, and he studied engineering at Nottingham University, later becoming well known as an engineer with a creative turn of mind, who patented several inventions, and eventually became managing director of Sheepbridge Stokes. Allport was introduced in Everton’s first novel, The Dalehouse Murder (1927), of which Arnold Bennett rhapsodised that it was ‘at least as good as any detective story I have read since Conan Doyle and Gaston Leroux’. Everton exploited his technical know-how in books such as The Hammer of Doom (1928), set in a foundry, and Insoluble (1934), which involved industrial chemistry. Dorothy L. Sayers said the latter novel was ‘intriguin
g and…full of life and movement’, but after Murder May Pass Unpunished (1936), Everton abandoned the genre, presumably to devote his energies full-time to the mysterious world of centrifugal castings.

  Death of an Airman

  by Christopher St John Sprigg (1934)

  Edwin Marriott, an Australian bishop on leave in England, wants to learn to fly from one end of his diocese to the other. He joins Baston Aero Club, managed by the vivacious Sally Sackbut, and is on hand when the aeroplane of flight instructor Major George Furnace plummets to the ground. At the inquest, a coroner’s jury returns a verdict of death by misadventure, before the discovery of a letter sent by the dead man to society beauty Lady Laura Vanguard suggests that Furnace committed suicide. When an autopsy reveals a bullet in the dead man’s brain, however, the Bishop becomes fascinated by the question of who shot him, why—and how. The Bishop and Inspector Bray of Scotland Yard, working in tandem, uncover a criminal racket, but in his quest for the truth, the Bishop eventually finds his own life in jeopardy.

  The story ‘bubbles over with zest and vitality’, as Dorothy L. Sayers said in The Sunday Times; she applauded ‘a most ingenious and exciting plot, full of good puzzles and discoveries and worked out among a varied cast of entertaining characters’. The atmosphere of life at the Aero Club is credibly evoked, although Sayers noted that the appeal of the mystery does not derive from fair-play detection. She did not, however, regard that as a major flaw: ‘The solution depends upon certain flying technicalities which are outside the province of an ignorant critic like myself. Mr. Sprigg certainly gives the impression of being thoroughly at home in the air, and his buoyant and vigorous style carries us blithely through all the complications of the intrigue.’

  As she surmised, Christopher St John Sprigg understood the world he describes in the novel. He and his brother inherited legacies from an aunt which enabled them to set up an aeronautics publishing business, Airways Publications Limited, which produced a journal called Airways as well as flying magazines. His early books included The Airship: Its Design, History, Operation and Future (1930) and Fly with Me: An Elementary Textbook on the Art of Piloting (1932), while British Airways (1934) illustrated his fascination with the potential for global connectivity brought about by international air travel.

  The first of his seven detective novels, Crime in Kensington (Pass the Body in the US) appeared in 1933. After soaking himself in the work of Marx, Engels, Lenin and company with his habitual energy, Sprigg joined the British Communist Party. In 1935, he adopted his mother’s surname when publishing as Christopher Caudwell This My Hand, a crime novel markedly different from his previous mysteries, all of which were rooted in the Golden Age tradition. As Caudwell, he concentrated on serious literary work, writing a Marxist critique of poetry, Illusion and Reality (1937); Studies in a Dying Culture (1938); and poems that have been much acclaimed. In December 1936, he enlisted with the International Brigade of the Spanish Loyalist Army, and trained as a machine gunner, but was killed in battle at Jarama the following February, having packed an extraordinary range of achievements into a restless life that lasted a little less than thirty years. The last of his lively mysteries, The Six Queer Things, appeared posthumously in 1937.

  A.B.C. Solves Five

  by C.E. Bechhofer Roberts (1937)

  A.B.C. Hawkes, a sleuthing scientist, tackles five puzzles in this slender—and extremely rare—collection of stories. A.B.C. shares a cottage in Sussex with a Welsh ‘Watson’ called Johnstone, but the pair spend much of their time travelling the world in a floating laboratory of A.B.C.’s own design, the 600-ton yacht Daedalus. A.B.C.’s fame as ‘the most distinguished living British scientist’ is such that, even when they land at Batum in Bolshevist Russia, the man in charge of landing permits declares, in halting French, his pride at meeting the great man in the flesh.

  The stories have an engagingly cosmopolitan flavour. A.B.C., multi-lingual and multi-talented, investigates the murder of a Hindu scientist in Berlin, rescues a bullfighter from death in Seville and foils a threat to world peace in Georgia. Returning to England, he saves the life of Muriel Panton, the glamorous tragic actress with whom he had previously had an extremely improbable romance.

  A.B.C. seems to have made his first appearance in ‘The Island under the Sea’, which was published in the Strand magazine in 1925. Featuring an exotic female preserved in a ‘huge slab of solid glass and crystal’ and originating from Atlantis, this fantasy adventure was prefaced by a rather defensive author’s note saying that the story was ‘written in collaboration with a well-known Professor of Science so the reader may rest assured that nothing is related that could not actually have happened’. There is no mention of the un-named Professor in A.B.C. Solves Five.

  Bechhofer Roberts put A.B.C.’s scientific genius to work in the service of detecting crime, producing a series of short mystery stories, collected in two volumes, of which this is one, and A.B.C.Investigates, also published in 1937, is the other. A solitary novel, A.B.C.’s Test Case (1936), sees the great man investigating the death of a motor-racing baronet. The suspects include a psychologist who claims to be able to prove survival after death by means of word tests applied through a medium.

  Born Carl Erich Bechhöfer, in London but of German heritage, Carl Erich Bechhofer Roberts started writing while still a student. Occasionally, he anglicised his name to Charles Brookfarmer; later, he removed the umlaut from his surname, and added the name Roberts. After enlisting as a trooper with the 9th Lancers in 1914, he became a military interpreter, and an expert on Russia.

  He served as secretary to Lord Birkenhead, who practised at the Bar as F.E. Smith, and secured the acquittal of Crippen’s mistress Ethel Le Neve at her trial for murder. In addition to writing Birkenhead’s biography, he adopted the pen-name ‘Ephesian’, a play on F.E.’s initials. A meeting with the influential esotericist George Gurdjieff kindled an interest in spiritual teaching, but scepticism prevailed, and his scorn for fraudulent mediums is reflected in Tidings of Joy (1936). This was one of a handful of crime novels and plays co-authored with a more prolific writer of detective stories, George Goodchild, to whom A.B.C. Solves Five (in which he is given a teasing name-check by A.B.C. himself) is dedicated.

  The Jury Disagree (1934) fictionalised the Wallace case, while The Dear Old Gentleman (1935) updated the Sandyford murder case of 1862. Both novels were collaborations with Goodchild, and reflect Bechhofer Roberts’ enthusiasm for criminology. He was called to the Bar in 1941, and edited books of trials, including that of Helen Duncan, the last person in Britain to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. He also collaborated with C.S. Forester on a play about Edith Cavell, and wrote biographies of Paul Verlaine and Conservative politicians (including the improbably titled Stanley Baldwin: Man or Miracle?). His light-hearted thriller about a gangster, Don Chicago, subtitled Crime Don’t Pay, was filmed in 1945. Having survived a car crash caused by a drunk driver at Eze in France, he fictionalised the accident in Tidings of Joy (1936), co-authored with Goodchild, but his luck ran out in 1949 when he was killed after his car crashed into a refuge near Euston station.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Long Arm of the Law

  The police detective often cut a hapless figure in classic crime stories. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens created capable detectives in Sergeant Cuff and Inspector Bucket, both of whom had real-life models, but the Sherlock Holmes stories did nothing for the reputation of Scotland Yard. Arthur Conan Doyle hit on the idea of highlighting Sherlock Holmes’ genius by contrasting his brilliance with the less than stellar work of Inspector Lestrade. Decades later, Agatha Christie adopted Doyle’s method in her presentation of the relationship between Hercule Poirot and Inspector Japp—and, with a little variation, that between Jane Marple and Inspector Slack.

  The first major British crime writer to create a gifted police detective who became a major series character was A.E.W. Mason, who
se Inspector Hanaud had his own equivalent of Dr Watson in Julius Ricardo. Shortly afterwards, Frank Froest, who had acquired a larger-than-life reputation while climbing through the ranks of the Metropolitan Police, struck a blow for the professionals by publishing The Grell Mystery, which made clear his low opinion of ‘story-book detectives’.

  The First World War changed detective fiction as it changed much else. Freeman Wills Crofts decided that the time was ripe for a complicated and teasing mystery to be solved by a hard-working police officer’s persistence and scrupulous attention to detail. Inspector Burnley’s tireless work in The Cask had none of the showmanship displayed by Hercule Poirot in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, but Crofts’ approach was realistic and fresh. By the time he introduced Inspector French in his fifth novel, he was already regarded as one of the leading exponents of detective fiction.

  His lead was followed by G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, who laboured under the misapprehension that, in presenting a professional detective, colourlessness was a virtue. Even when Superintendent Wilson resigned, and became the most highly regarded private detective in the country, he was no Sam Spade, and the Coles soon restored him to Scotland Yard. Nor was he the only the professional policeman who tried his luck in the private sector; Cecil M. Wills’ Detective Inspector Geoffrey Boscobell, a rather more interesting character, left his job after the disappearance of his wife and son, and pursued his later investigations unconstrained by the bureaucracy and regulation of the Yard.