The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Gilbert had been rudely interrupted while working on his first detective story by the Second World War, and Close Quarters did not appear until 1947. Set in a cathedral close, this accomplished debut was firmly in the Golden Age tradition, complete with three diagrams, a seemingly impossible murder and a crossword puzzle to solve. Gilbert soon took unique advantage of his experience as a prisoner of war in Italy to write an outstanding example of the impossible crime story, Death in Captivity (1952), which was filmed as Danger Within.

  Michael Francis Gilbert had a knack of time management which enabled him to pursue twin careers, and rise to the heights in both. As a solicitor, his client list included Raymond Chandler and the government of Bahrain, and he became second senior partner of a leading London firm. As an author, he wrote an extraordinarily diverse range of crime novels, as well as scores of short stories, and plays for radio, television and the stage; his honours included the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained achievement. When author and critic H.R.F. Keating chided him for being content to be regarded solely as an entertainer, Gilbert responded: ‘What is a writer to do if he is not allowed to entertain?’ Years later, writing Gilbert’s obituary, Keating acknowledged his friend’s modesty, and praised him for ‘invariably illuminating sharply aspects of British life and, on occasion, digging deep into the human psyche so as to point to an unwavering moral’.

  In addition to producing spy thrillers, adventure stories and police procedurals, he returned from time to time to the legal profession, notably in Death Has Deep Roots (1951), Flash Point (1974) and the undeservedly overlooked late novel The Queen Against Karl Mullen (1991). Stay of Execution and Other Stories of Legal Practice (1971) illustrates his mastery of the short form. The appealing Bohun featured in a handful of stories, but only the one novel; while regrettable, this reflects Gilbert’s determination never to write the same book twice.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Multiplying Murders

  Jack the Ripper remains the most notorious of all serial killers, but he was by no means the first. He was not even the first whose crimes sparked imaginative literature. The Ratcliffe Highway murders committed in London in 1811, for instance, inspired Thomas de Quincey’s ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. William Palmer’s audacious series of murders in the mid-nineteenth century are referenced in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Speckled Band’ and Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), and also supplied background elements of plot and character for Francis Iles’ Before the Fact (1932) and Donald Henderson’s little-known but excellent Murderer at Large (1936).

  Yet it was the Ripper case in 1888 which opened the floodgates as regards sensational literature concerning serial killings. An early example from 1897 was the serialised story ‘A Mystery of the Underground’ by William Arthur Dunkerley, writing as John Oxenham, in which a killer terrorises passengers on the Tube. The early scenes are gripping, although the climactic revelations fail to match their quality.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, Israel Rank charted the homicidal career of a rationally motivated criminal, while The Lodger achieved its success through the build-up of suspense, rather than by creating a mystery about the identity of the culprit. With the dawning of the Golden Age of detective fiction, the question was whether there was any place for serial killers in an ingenious whodunit.

  The elaborate games played between Golden Age writers and their readers might seem to preclude a story about a deranged psychopath such as the Ripper. But writers soon discovered that there were two ways in which the whodunit form might accommodate serial killings. One option was for the killer’s madness to be concealed beneath an apparently civilised exterior. Another was for the murderer to have a rational motive—financial gain, for instance, as with William Palmer—for the crimes, as well as sufficient ingenuity to pull the wool over the police’s eyes. 1928 proved to be a breakthrough year, with no fewer than three notable British serial-killer mysteries.

  In Anthony Berkeley’s The Silk Stockings Murders, Roger Sheringham and Chief Inspector Moresby both investigate the strangling of four young women. The different crimes have varying motives, an over-elaboration which weakens a characteristically innovative book, albeit far from the author’s best. In the United States, S.S. Van Dine (the pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright) had his hugely popular, yet famously insufferable, detective Philo Vance solve The Greene Murder Case, in which members of the eponymous family are eliminated one by one; the killer uses a handbook on murder as his template, a device that has been re-worked countless times. John Rhode’s The Murders in Praed Street added two additional elements to the mix—extreme ingenuity in murder methods, and a murder motive that was, at the time, pleasingly original, although subsequently it was borrowed so often that it came to seem hackneyed.

  Soon, a host of detective novelists, including Neil Gordon (a pen-name of A.G. Macdonell, better known for his humorous writing) and Gladys Mitchell in Britain, and Ellery Queen and Q. Patrick in the United States, were trying their hand at this type of crime novel. Their work demonstrated that in a mystery featuring a series of linked murders, speculating about ‘who will be next?’ is often as tantalising as trying to deduce ‘whodunit’.

  J.J. Connington teased his readers with both questions in The Sweepstake Murders (1931). Nine members of a gambling syndicate win a fortune, but when one of them dies, litigation delays the pay-out. The survivors agree that the winnings should be divided between those who are alive at the time of payment, but the folly of this arrangement becomes evident when two more syndicate members meet an untimely end, apparently as a result of accidents. Unsurprisingly, the suspicions of the police are aroused, and their attention focuses on the survivors who will benefit from the deaths. One of them happens to be ‘Squire’ Wendover, the affable countryman who often acts as a sidekick to Connington’s series detective, Sir Clinton Driffield. Wendover is an unlikely murderer—but might he become the next victim?

  Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939) remains the supreme ‘who will be next?’ story. A series of murders, patterned on a nursery rhyme, takes place among a closed circle of ten people who have been lured to a small island under false pretences. As one death follows another, the tension mounts relentlessly. The novel has been adapted for stage, radio, television and film, and is an undisputed classic of traditional detective fiction. The term ‘serial killer’ had yet to be coined when Christie published her masterpiece shortly after the outbreak of war, but the novel of multiple murder had already become a permanent feature of the detective fiction landscape.

  The Perfect Murder Case

  by Christopher Bush (1929)

  A key element in the Jack the Ripper case, and the mythology surrounding it, was the correspondence purportedly sent by the killer to taunt Scotland Yard, most famously the ‘Dear Boss’ and ‘From Hell’ letters. Opinion remains divided as to whether the letters were hoaxes, but the concept of letters sent by a serial killer to tease an investigator on his trial fitted perfectly with the notion of the game-playing nature of classic detective fiction. Christopher Bush uses the device to build tension with considerable skill in his most renowned novel.

  The press and New Scotland Yard receive a letter from someone calling himself ‘Marius’, which opens: ‘I am going to commit a murder.’ The fair-play ethos underpins his announcement: ‘by giving the law its sporting chance I raise the affair from the brutal to the human’. Marius reveals the date when the murder will take place, ‘in a district of London north of the Thames’, and describes his proposed crime as ‘the Perfect Murder’.

  Two further letters give additional clues to the location of the killing, and cause a popular sensation: ‘Flapperdom arranged murder parties at hotels. The Ragamuffin Club had a special dance gala and a gallows scene painted for it…medical students organised a gigantic rag. An enormous fortune must have been laid in bets…what Ma
rius had intended to be the sublime was likely to become the gorblimey.’

  Despite the advance warning, the authorities fail to save Harold Richleigh from being knifed to death in his own home. John Franklin, a former intelligence officer and policeman, investigates on behalf of an enquiry agency run by the Durangos conglomerate. He is assisted by Ludovic Travers, the company’s financial wizard and author of Economics of a Spendthrift, widely regarded as ‘a dilettante with economics as a passionate hobby’ but also a formidable sleuth. The police struggle to make progress, but Franklin crosses the Channel in search of the answer, and dramatic climax takes place on a French island.

  Travers plays second fiddle to Franklin here, but proceeded to enjoy a crime-solving career of remarkable longevity, during which he developed a speciality in breaking seemingly cast-iron alibis, rather like a private-sector equivalent of Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector French. Over the years, as Bush strove to keep up with the times, Travers evolved into a comparatively conventional private eye, making his sixty-third and final appearance as late as 1968. If not quite a Great Detective, he was one of the most resilient.

  Charlie Christmas Bush, known as Christopher Bush, came from a family of modest means; his father supplemented his income through poaching. Bush worked as a schoolteacher before becoming a full-time author. He earned election to membership of the Detection Club in 1937, and Dorothy L. Sayers captured his strengths (and, implicitly, his limitations) when she said in a review that his work was ‘always workmanlike and pleasant to read’. Even more enthusiastic was Anthony Shaffer, a detective novelist himself before he found fame as a playwright, who said, ‘A Bush in the hand is worth two of any other bird’.

  Death Walks in Eastrepps

  by Francis Beeding (1931)

  Robert Eldridge takes a train from London to Norfolk. He is heading for the coastal resort of Eastrepps, home of his married mistress Margaret. Eldridge is besotted with Margaret, who is reluctant to seek a divorce if it entails losing custody of her young daughter. The affair is not Eldridge’s only secret. He is one of those villainous financiers who were as common in Golden Age detective fiction as they have been in the real world of twenty-first century commerce. His real name is James Selby, and sixteen years earlier, the crash of his company called Anaconda Ltd ruined many innocent investors—some of whom happen to live in Eastrepps. After years spent hiding in South America, he has re-established himself in Britain under a new identity. Although he has prospered, his victims have never been compensated.

  On the day that Eldridge visits Eastrepps, one of the residents is stabbed to death. Before Inspector Protheroe and his rather more intelligent sidekick Sergeant Ruddock can progress their enquiries, a young woman called Helen Taplow is also killed. Chief Inspector Wilkins of Scotland Yard is called in to lead the investigation, but more deaths occur in quick succession. A man is arrested, but proves to be innocent. The effect of multiple murders upon the local community, and in particular the mounting tension created by ‘the Eastrepps Evil’ are succinctly yet atmospherically conveyed.

  Eventually another arrest is made, and a trial takes place at the Old Bailey. That is not, however, the end of the story. The book is notable for a pleasing and original murder motive for the serial crimes, and the critic Vincent Starrett went so far as to say it was one of the ten finest detective stories ever written. Even in the early Thirties, that was slightly hyperbolic, but the tale is fast-paced, clever, and told in a stylish and entertaining manner.

  Francis Beeding was the best-known pseudonym used by a writing duo, John Leslie Palmer and Hilary Aidan St George Saunders ; they also collaborated under the names David Pilgrim and John Somers. Both men studied at Balliol College, but were not contemporaries at Oxford; they met while working for the League of Nations in Geneva, and their insight into the international situation lent strength to the long series of thrillers that they wrote together, as well to as a clever whodunit, He Could Not Have Slipped (1939).

  Their regrettably infrequent detective stories included The House of Dr Edwardes (1927), memorably filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Spellbound, and The Norwich Victims (1935), notable for the inclusion of photographs of the main characters, a gimmick which supplies a subtle clue to the central mystery. Murder Intended (1932) reverses a familiar Golden Age template, as a rich old miser eliminates her impecunious heirs. After Palmer’s death, Saunders produced The Sleeping Bacchus (1951) under his own name. The book was interesting not only as an impossible-crime story, but also as an updated version of Pierre Boileau’s Le Repos de Bacchus, published fifteen years earlier.

  X v. Rex

  by Martin Porlock (1933)

  Despite his success with relatively orthodox detective novels about the cases of Colonel Anthony Gethryn, Philip MacDonald strove to avoid formula, and to use story-telling techniques designed to thrill as well as to challenge the intellect. Recognising the potential of the serial-killer novel for generating excitement, in 1931 he published the fast-moving Murder Gone Mad.

  Two years later, under the cover of his occasional pseudonym Martin Porlock, he returned to serial killings. As with the earlier book, the events of X v. Rex move at breakneck speed. MacDonald keeps shifting viewpoint, making effective use of very short scenes and plenty of incident. MacDonald also supplies occasional witty asides, notably when a kaleidoscopic picture of what is going on in Britain at the time of the murders includes mention that the publisher, Victor Gollancz, ‘denies that Francis Iles is the pseudonym of Mr Martin Porlock’.

  An alternative title given to this book in the US is The Mystery of the Dead Police, which lacks subtlety but at least gives a clear indication of the link between the crimes. An unknown murderer is eliminating police officers in London and its environs with considerable ingenuity—in one instance, by concealing a gun under a sandwich board. The central character is the mysterious Nicholas Revel, a suave rogue who assists the police with their investigation, but is also a prime suspect.

  The culprit confides in a journal, which gives some insight into his motivation, although the subtleties of criminal psychology were not MacDonald’s forte. This structural device is an attempt to address a flaw in Murder Gone Mad, where the deranged killer’s mindset was not satisfactorily conveyed, and has been borrowed many times.

  MacDonald’s vivid story-telling meant that he was ideally suited to writing cinematic screenplays, and a move to Hollywood soon reduced his productivity as a novelist. The year after the book appeared, he was responsible for adapting it as The Mystery of Mr X, with Robert Montgomery as Revel. In 1952, the film was re-made as The Hour of 13, with Peter Lawford playing Revel, and the events of the story moved back in time to the Victorian era.

  Several of MacDonald’s novels were filmed, although he did not always write the screenplays himself. He was not responsible, for instance, for the script for either the original film version of The Nursemaid Who Disappeared, based on his 1938 novel of the same name, or 23 Paces to Baker Street, the better-known re-make. His lasting fame as a screenplay writer is owed rather to his contribution to two films that rank in most lists of all-time classics, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and the sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet.

  The Z Murders

  by J. Jefferson Farjeon (1932)

  When Richard Temperley arrives at Euston Station following a trip to the Lake District, he decides that before moving on to his next destination, he will take refuge in a nearby hotel. An elderly and rather disagreeable fellow passenger, who had snored his way through the train journey, follows suit. Within minutes the other man is shot while sleeping in an armchair, and Temperley has had a brief encounter with a beautiful young woman who promptly flees the scene. When the police arrive, Detective Inspector James questions Temperley, and then shows him a token that has been discovered at the crime scene: ‘a small piece of enamelled metal. Its colour was crimson, and it was in the shape of the letter Z.’

  Fascin
ated by the woman, Temperley discovers that her name is Sylvia Wynne and that she lives in Chelsea. Instinct convinces him that, whatever she may have to hide, she is not a murderer. He goes in search of her, with the police (whose treatment of him throughout seems remarkably good-natured in the circumstances) in hot pursuit. On arriving at her studio, however, he discovers another crimson Z, lying on the carpet.

  The villain is apparently some kind of ‘signature killer’ (although that term had yet to be invented) but Sylvia’s terrified refusal to tell Temperley what she knows, and her habit of disappearing from sight before he can make sure of saving her from whatever fate awaits, lead to further complications. The pair take part in a bizarre cross-country chase, first by train and later by taxi, before Farjeon finally reveals the truth, and unmasks one of the most sinister culprits in Golden Age fiction.

  A passage shortly before the climactic scenes captures the appeal of the puzzle set in this kind of story: ‘There was not even any theory to work upon. The murders…occurred, apparently, at any time and at any place. They appeared to be motiveless and purposeless, and to form no settled scheme. Within thirty hours three tragedies had occurred, known already as “the Z Murders” in thousands of homes, and countless anxious lips were voicing the questions, “How many more?” “Where will the next occur?” and “Who will the next victim be?”

  By compressing the action into a day and a half, Farjeon ensures that he never loses his grip on the reader’s attention. The plotting is melodramatic, and the portrayal of the principal villain lurid, while there are regular cliff-hangers similar to those in the stories of Francis Durbridge. But whereas Durbridge’s approach to writing was strictly functional, Farjeon cared about his prose, and liked to spice his mysteries with dashes of humour and romance. Time and again, imaginative literary flourishes lift the writing out of the mundanity commonplace in thrillers of this period.