The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Green for Danger was filmed in 1946 with the comic actor Alistair Sim cast as Cockrill. The result was one of the few examples of a highly successful movie version of an intricate whodunit novel, even though Sim plays the policeman for laughs. The book was only the third published by Mary Christianna Brand, but it confirmed her as a major crime writer, and she was elected to the Detection Club in 1946. In the same year she published Suddenly at his Residence, an accomplished impossible-crime story, and Cockrill’s other cases included Tour de Force (1955), a very well-plotted ‘holiday mystery’. His final case, Jape du Chine (another draft is called Chinese Puzzle) was written in 1963 but never published.

  After a long break, during which she achieved prominence with her ‘Nurse Matilda’ stories for children, Brand resumed writing crime fiction in the Seventies, but her moment had passed. She did, however, provide a reminder of her virtuosity by conjuring up a fresh solution to the puzzle in The Poisoned Chocolates Case when it was republished in the US in 1979, in tribute to her Detection Club colleague Anthony Berkeley, whom she once described as perhaps ‘the cleverest of us all’.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Justice Game

  Fiction devoted to breaking the law inevitably raises innumerable questions about justice. A striking feature of detective stories is that it is not only criminals who are inclined to break the law. In ‘The Abbey Grange’, Sherlock Holmes confides in Watson that ‘Once or twice in my career I feel that I have done more real harm by my discovery of the criminal than ever he had done by his crime…I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience.’ Every now and then in his illustrious career, Holmes turned a blind eye to criminal conduct, or even showed a willingness to break the law himself. His example was followed regularly by detectives in classic crime fiction.

  A memorable example occurs in one of Agatha Christie’s most famous whodunits, Murder on the Orient Express (1934), a story in which plot and theme both concern the question of how to impose justice when the law is helpless. Hercule Poirot propounds two very different explanations for the murder of a gangster called Ratchett, so as to allow the authorities an opportunity to arrive at an outcome which seems, as Christie assumed her readers would agree, morally right. A comparable theme runs through Christie’s outstanding non-series novel, And Then There Were None (1939).

  The notion of the ‘altruistic crime’ became a striking and recurrent element in much of the best detective fiction written during the Thirties. Authors were preoccupied by the thorny question of how to do justice, in moral terms, when the established legal process proved inadequate. This was more than an idle academic debating point. At a time of growing international tension, when dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini were expanding their power base in the most ruthless fashion, there were powerful reasons why the instinctively law-abiding wrestled with the question of when one person can justify killing another.

  The shortcomings of the legal process are anatomised time and again in classic crime fiction. Sydney Fowler’s The King Against Anne Bickerton (1930), built around extended accounts of an inquest and a murder trial, is interesting primarily as an extended diatribe against the perceived iniquities of the legal establishment. Fowler’s full name was Sydney Fowler Wright, and he worked as an accountant before going bankrupt, a misfortune which may have sharpened his distaste for the law. He became a well-regarded author of science fiction.

  The proceedings of inquests were often recounted in detail, and Milward Kennedy’s Death to the Rescue fictionalised a murder case in which the questioning of the prime suspect Philip Yale Drew was so brutal as to amount to ‘trial by coroner’. The unreliability of coroners’ juries, in an era when the law permitted them to name a person they believed guilty of murder, is wittily illustrated by Christie in Death in the Clouds (1935). At the inquest into the murder on an aeroplane of a blackmailer, the jurors’ xenophobia tempts them to point the finger of guilt at Hercule Poirot.

  Real-life miscarriages of justice inspired books such as F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow, while the race against time to avert the execution of an innocent person accused of murder, a trope of the genre, crops up in books as different as Clouds of Witness and Trial and Error. The trial scenes in both novels, as in Henry Wade’s The Verdict of You All (1926) and Malice Aforethought are described with flair and insight, although none of the authors were trained lawyers.

  Courtroom drama is a staple of the genre, and in the original version of The Mysterious Affair at Styles Poirot revealed the solution to the puzzle from the witness box. Christie borrowed this scenario from Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908), but her publishers regarded it as implausible. She agreed to rewrite the scene, and the result was a drawing-room denouement of the kind for which she became famous. Sad Cypress (1940), built around the trial of Elinor Carlilse for the murder of her wealthy aunt, is a soundly plotted Poirot novel, but Christie’s most famous courtroom story is ‘The Witness for the Prosecution’. The story first appeared in an American magazine in 1925 under the title ‘Traitor Hands’, was collected in The Hound of Death (1933), and has been adapted for the stage radio, television, and film, the most memorable version being Billy Wilder’s 1957 film starring Charles Laughton and Marlene Dietrich.

  Except for a prologue and an epilogue, the action of Eden Phillpotts’ The Jury (1927), an overlooked story with a neat finale, takes place in the jury room of an assize court in the west country. Gerald Bullett, a versatile man of letters skilled in the art of characterisation, used the same title eight years later for a better known book; his The Jury (1935) concerns the trial of Roderick Strood on a charge of murdering his wife. Bullett adapted the story in his screenplay for the 1956 film The Last Man to Hang?.

  Lawyers in crime fiction prove as fallible as the law itself. Solicitors embezzle funds in The Blotting Book and Antidote to Venom, and although Baroness Orczy’s Patrick Mulligan strives to achieve a just outcome for his clients, his methods verge on the unscrupulous. The same is true of H.C. Bailey’s second-string detective, Joshua Clunk, a shrewd but sanctimonious, hymn-singing solicitor who preaches ‘the Larger Hope, when business allowed’. John Dickson Carr’s Sir Henry Merrivale is a barrister and brilliant amateur sleuth who defends Jimmy Answell on a charge of murder in an outstanding locked-room novel, The Judas Window (1938), published as by Carter Dickson. The difficulty confronting Merrivale is that his client seems to be the only person who could possibly have killed his prospective father-in-law.

  Novelists ranging from Wilkie Collins to Lord Gorell trained as barristers, and Collins made repeated use of his knowledge of the law’s quirks and failings, as in The Law and the Lady (1875). It was rare, however, for authors of classic crime fiction to combine their writing with full-time legal practice. Two exceptions stand out. The barrister Cyril Hare is said to have learned the news that his first novel, Tenant for Death (1937) had been accepted for publication while in the midst of conducting a case. His portrayal of the unlucky barrister Francis Pettigrew had the ring of truth, although Pettigrew developed into a more conventional series character as the years passed.

  The solicitor Michael Gilbert, also distinguished in his branch of the profession, was in the early stages of his literary career as the twentieth century reached its mid-point. Over the decades, many of his novels and short stories benefited from his close understanding of the law and those who practise it, but for witty insights into legal life, Smallbone Deceased remains unsurpassed.

  Trial and Error

  by Anthony Berkeley (1937)

  Golden Age detective novelists often approached the concept of the ‘altruistic crime’ obliquely. With his customary effrontery, Anthony Berkeley tackled it head-on in Trial and Error. Typically, he sets the tone in the first line: ‘The sanctity of human life has been much exaggerated.’ At the age of fifty-one, a mild-mannered bachelor called Lawrence Todhunter learns fro
m his doctor that he is suffering from an aortic aneurism, and must not expect to live for more than a few months. His nature is to make himself useful, and at first he decides that the most valuable service he can render humanity is to carry out a political assassination: ‘There was certainly no lack of suitable candidates. Whether it came to rubbing out Hitler or bumping off Mussolini or even putting Stalin on the spot, the progress of humanity would receive an equal jolt forward.’ He takes soundings from friends, but receives the bleak advice that a dictator’s successor may be even worse: ‘Hitlerism wouldn’t collapse if Hitler were killed.’

  As a result, he decides to eliminate the most obnoxious individual he can find, and settles on Jean Norwood, a deeply unpleasant actress-manager. Unfortunately, Todhunter proves to be too successful as a murderer. After Jean Norwood is found dead, someone else is charged with the crime, and when Todhunter insists that he is guilty, nobody believes him. Berkeley presents the legal tangle with dry wit, showing a mastery of the plot twist matched only by Agatha Christie. His occasional sleuth Ambrose Chitterwick plays an important part in the story, not least in the closing pages, which culminate in a piece of Berkeley’s characteristic sleight-of-hand.

  Trial and Error is no less cynical about crime than Malice Aforethought, and might have appeared under the Francis Iles name but for the presence of Chitterwick, who had previously appeared in two Berkeley novels. Despite the book’s excellence, its author stopped publishing crime novels after 1939. In that year, a final novel appeared under the Berkeley name—the disappointing impossible-crime story Death in the House—along with an under-appreciated Iles novel, As for the Woman.

  Berkeley’s presentation of the legal technicalities in Trial and Error prompted questions, which he answered in an introductory note to a later edition. Explaining that he had based one part of the plot on the complications that ensued following a murder committed in a London pub in 1864, he said: ‘There were…two men in prison at the same time, each of whom had separately been found guilty of the death of the same man, and the authorities clearly did not know what to do about it.’ In the circumstances, he argued, it was reasonable for his story to feature a private prosecution, but if not, ‘I am very, very sorry.’ Berkeley’s scepticism about the workings of the law and the machinery of justice was never more evident than in this unpredictable and highly entertaining novel.

  Verdict of Twelve

  by Raymond Postgate (1940)

  An epigraph from Karl Marx (‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary their social existence determines their consciousness’) supplies an early clue that Verdict of Twelve is no conventional crime novel. Yet despite Raymond Postgate’s unrelenting focus on the haphazard workings of the English justice system, he also fashions a fascinating story that combines exploration of human nature with a teasing mystery.

  The first and longest of the book’s four sections presents studies of the twelve members of a jury convened for a murder trial. The jurors are a varied bunch, and one of them has got away with committing a murder. Their personal backstories play a key part in their attitude to the evidence presented by prosecution and defence. The events leading up to the trial are recounted in a lengthy flashback. The main characters are an eleven-year-old boy, Philip, and his unpleasant aunt, Mrs Rosalie Van Beer, who have grown to loathe each other.

  The third part of the book, ‘Trial and Verdict’, is notable for Postgate’s description of the shifting attitudes of the jurors, once they have retired to decide whether or not the accused is guilty, which are illustrated visually with ‘recording dials’ summarising what is in each juror’s mind. True originality is extraordinarily difficult to achieve in a crime novel, and the inner workings of a jury had previously been explored in Eden Phillpotts’ The Jury, in The Jury Disagree, by George Goodchild and C.E. Bechhofer Roberts (1934), and in one of Richard Hull’s finest mysteries, Excellent Intentions (1938). Yet Postgate’s treatment of the jury’s deliberations is distinctive. A brief final section adds a suitably ironic and dark flourish.

  Verdict of Twelve was first published in Britain early in the war, ‘in conditions hardly favourable for the success of a new novel’, as a later edition put it; nonetheless, the American edition was swiftly acclaimed in the New Yorker as probably ‘the best mystery of this year and many years to come’, and by Raymond Chandler in his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’.

  Raymond William Postgate came from a wealthy family, and studied at Oxford before becoming a pacifist, and serving a short term of imprisonment for refusing to be conscripted. Briefly a member of the fledgling British Communist Party, he defected to the Labour Party, which was led by his father-in-law, George Lansbury, from 1932–1935.

  Postgate’s sister Margaret shared his political outlook, and married the left-wing economist G.D.H. Cole. The Coles were prolific detective novelists, although none of their books compares in quality (or social insight) with Verdict of Twelve. Postgate occasionally reviewed detective fiction, and was responsible for an enjoyable anthology, Detective Stories of To-day (1940) Somebody at the Door (1943), like Verdict of Twelve,explored the ways in which a person’s background influences their behaviour, and can lead to crime; the sombre nature of life during the Second World War is well-evoked, and the culprit’s modus operandi is uniquely dependent on war-time conditions. Postgate founded the Good Food Club, compiling the first edition of The Good Food Guide in 1951, but after producing a third crime novel, The Ledger is Kept (1953), which again inevitably failed to surpass the brilliance of his debut, his appetite for the genre was sated.

  Tragedy at Law

  by Cyril Hare (1942)

  For this unorthodox variation on the concept of a crime novel set in a realistically evoked working environment, Cyril Hare drew on his own experience. Fifteen years spent practising at the Bar, and a spell as a judge’s marshal, meant that he was ideally suited to describing life on a judicial circuit.

  The book’s characterisation is as credible as its milieu. Francis Pettigrew, who acts as amateur sleuth, is a disillusioned barrister, moderately successful and acutely aware of his own shortcomings, in a manner unthinkable in Great Detectives, and perhaps even in some members of his own profession. He recognises that he lacks some subtle quality that ‘was neither character nor intellect nor luck, but without which none of these gifts would avail to carry their possessor to the front’. There is something rather modern about Pettigrew, not least his passionate opposition to capital punishment. His attitudes are not shared by Sir William Hereward Barber, a severe High Court judge, who advocates extending the death penalty. Pettigrew calls this ‘stretching the stretching’, which can perhaps be described as gallows humour.

  As Mr Justice Barber travels from town to town, dispensing justice in his austere manner, he becomes involved in a sequence of bizarre incidents. He receives a threatening note, and someone evidently wishes him ill. To a seasoned reader of detective stories, the judge seems destined for victimhood. Yet his wife (another lawyer, with whom Pettigrew had once been in love) saves him from an apparent attempt on his life. Murder does not occur until a very late stage of the book—in the twenty-first of twenty-four chapters.

  Pettigrew collaborates with Hare’s usual investigator, Inspector Mallett, in solving the mystery, which turns upon an obscure (but fairly clued) point of law. Unlike those amateurs who involved themselves in murder cases for their own amusement, however, he is a reluctant detective. He cannot treat murder in the raw as a game, because he is too sensitive to the pain that it leaves in its wake. Sceptical about the nature of justice, he wonders ‘whether his client would be hanged merely because the Judge had a down on his counsel’. And the bitterly ironic twist at the end of the story is as brilliant and unusual as anything in the Iles canon.

  Cyril Hare’s real name was Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark. His first crime novel, Tenant for Death (1937), introduced the shrewd M
allett, who investigated the murder of a crooked financier. Pettigrew returned to appear in four later novels, continuing to exploit his legal expertise in helping to solve mysteries. He began to enjoy better fortune, marrying a young woman he met while working in a government department during war-time in With a Bare Bodkin (1946) and acting as a deputy judge in That Yew Tree’s Shade (1954). In spirit, Hare’s fiction—especially his Christmas mystery, An English Murder (1951)—belongs to the Golden Age, but in portraying Pettigrew, he anticipated crime novelists of a later generation by creating a character of flesh and blood.

  Smallbone Deceased

  by Michael Gilbert (1950)

  Just as Cyril Hare made superb use of his understanding of the world of judges and barristers in his detective stories, so his friend Michael Gilbert exploited his knowledge of life in a solicitors’ practice to witty effect in one of the finest workplace-based detective novels. The tranquillity of the respectable Lincoln’s Inn firm of Horniman, Birley and Craine is rudely disturbed by when a deed box is opened to reveal a corpse. It belongs to Marcus Smallbone, who had been co-trustee of the valuable Ichabod Trust with the firm’s recently deceased senior partner.

  The investigation is led by Chief Inspector Hazlerigg, who made regular appearances in Gilbert’s early novels and short stories, but as so often in classic crime novels, the professional detective’s enquiries are supplemented by the work of a talented amateur. When Henry Bohun, a young solicitor, explains why he discounted one suspect—‘No-one who sings Bach like that could kill a man with a piece of picture-wire’—the older man is tolerant: ‘You’d get on well with our modern school…They think that all detection should be a combination of analysis and hypnosis.’ Highly readable, the book is packed with incidental pleasures.