The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Joseph Jefferson Farjeon came from a distinguished literary family. His series character Detective X. Crook, a reformed criminal who becomes a private detective, appeared in many short stories, and after his first novel appeared in 1924, Farjeon became a popular novelist of whose best books Dorothy L. Sayers said ‘every word is entertaining’. His reputation faded after his death, but Mystery in White (1937), a characteristically atmospheric Christmas crime story, became an unexpected best-seller when republished in 2014.

  The ABC Murders

  by Agatha Christie (1936)

  Captain Arthur Hastings OBE, the narrator of many of Hercule Poirot’s early cases, says in a foreword that the ABC case presented his friend with ‘a problem entirely unlike any which had previously come his way’, and that the little Belgian showed ‘real genius’ in solving it. This novel is one of Christie’s masterpieces, and has been much flattered by imitation, although elements of the brilliant central plot idea were borrowed by Christie herself, for instance from a short story by G.K. Chesterton, “The Sign of the Broken Sword”.

  On returning to England from his ranch in South America, Hastings learns that Poirot has received a letter signed ‘ABC’ telling him to ‘look out for Andover on the 21st of the month’. On the appointed day, a woman called A. Ascher, who keeps a tobacconist’s, is bludgeoned to death in her shop. The crime appears to be motiveless, and a railway guide, also known as an ABC, is found at the scene. Poirot receives a second letter from ABC, drawing his attention to Bexhill-on-Sea on the 25th. On that day, a waitress called Elizabeth (or ‘Betty’) Barnard is found on a beach; she has been strangled with a belt, and again an ABC is discovered under her corpse. Poirot receives a third ABC letter, warning him of a crime at Churston on the 30th, but it arrives too late to prevent the murder of retired throat specialist Sir Carmichael Clarke.

  Hastings’ narrative is interspersed with short scenes featuring Alexander Bonaparte Cust, a commercial traveller dealing in silk stockings. An insignificant man who has suffered fits since sustaining a head wound during the war, Cust proves to have been in the vicinity of each of the crimes. Is he the murderer—and if so, what is his motive?

  Christie blends a rich mix of ingredients into an exceptionally gripping whodunit. Cust’s initials, and his line of business, are nods to Anthony Berkeley Cox, and The Silk Stockings Murders (1928), while the murderer’s correspondence with Poirot calls to mind the Marius letters in The Perfect Murder Case. Killings linked by the alphabet previously occurred in The Z Murders, and the circumstances of the first murder are reminiscent of the (still officially unsolved) real-life case that inspired Milward Kennedy’s Death to the Rescue.

  Christie touches on a favourite theme, the horror of living in an atmosphere of suspicion, and pokes gentle fun at both the ‘famous alienist’, Dr Thompson, who is called in to assist Scotland Yard, and the well-educated smart-alec police officer, a product of the reforms of Lord Trenchard, who oversaw the establishment of Hendon Police College. At the climax of the story, she even demonstrates how the murderer’s xenophobia contributed to the window-dressing of the crimes. All this is done with quite brilliant economy.

  Poirot tells a (distinctly unimpressed) Hastings that he never ceases to be fascinated by ‘the permutations and combinations of life’, and he was no doubt speaking for Christie. Just as Miss Marple spots parallels between apparently mundane village life and the melodramatic events of a murder case, so the Belgian detective’s understanding of human nature is the key to his success. And it is Christie’s acute insight into the way people the world over behave—including victims, suspects, murderers, and detectives—that helps to explain the enduring popularity of her fiction.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Psychology of Crime

  Is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) an example of crime fiction? Raskolnikov’s crime and its consequences are at the heart of the story, and Thomas Mann claimed that it was ‘the greatest detective novel of all time’, while Patricia Highsmith argued that it could be read as novel of suspense. Yet as Julian Symons said in Bloody Murder, while Dostoyevsky’s work reveals an interest in mystery and sensation, it was for him ‘only the means through which he expressed concerns far outside the interests of the crime novelist’.

  For W.H. Auden, Crime and Punishment is ‘a work of art which deals with murder’, compelling in the reader ‘an identification with the murderer which he would prefer not to recognise’. Similarly, Auden contrasted traditional detective stories involving the solving of a crime that has been committed, which he saw as escapist fantasies, with Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925), in which Josef K. is deemed to be guilty, even though the cause of his guilt is not clear. Auden, writing in the Forties, saw Josef K. as ‘a portrait of the kind of person who reads detective stories for escape’.

  A precise and truly satisfactory definition of the crime-fiction genre continues to prove elusive, but it is safe to say that it encompasses stories in which the focus is not on the detective or on the process of detection but rather on the behaviour and psychology of the criminal. Talented novelists uninterested in concocting intellectual puzzles for their readers to solve have long explored the mental state, not only of murderers. Such writers have in common with Dostoyesky and Kafka at least an interest in examining the effect of guilt upon their protagonists, and their work is often as deeply serious and thought-provoking as it is entertaining. In some cases their focus has been on the psychology of the victim, rather than of the perpetrator. Like authors of traditional detective stories, they often draw on material from real-life crimes, sometimes making radical changes to the facts of the case, sometimes using their imagination and a range of literary techniques (such as telling the tale by way of multiple viewpoints) to come up with fresh ‘explanations’ of mysterious unsolved crimes.

  In the Edwardian era, Israel Rank was the outstanding book of this kind, while Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Chink in the Armour (1912), inspired by the Goold murder case in Monte Carlo in 1907, builds suspense effectively as the danger facing the heroine becomes ever more apparent. After the First World War, A.P. Herbert’s The House by the River and C.S. Forester’s Payment Deferred were short, sharply written and rather cynical books which teased readers not with the question ‘whodunit?’ but rather by asking ‘will he get away with it?’ Herbert and Forester soon turned their attention elsewhere, and the same was true of Joanna Cannan after one fine novel in a similar vein, but interest in the work of Sigmund Freud (himself a detective fiction fan) was growing, and crime writers addressed psychology of crime with increasing zest and insight.

  Herbert had hit on a means of telling a crime story that would be adapted and developed in countless different ways by writers as gifted as Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. This makes it all the more surprising that The House by the River has received relatively little attention in histories of the genre.

  Anthony Berkeley, in a much-quoted dedicatory preface to The Second Shot (1930), argued that the future of the detective story lay either in experimentation with the manner of telling the story, or in an emphasis on character and atmosphere. He suggested that the detective story was already ‘developing into the novel with a detective or crime interest, holding its reader less by mathematical than by psychological ties. The puzzle element will no doubt remain, but it will become a puzzle of character rather than a puzzle of time, place, motive and opportunity.’

  The Second Shot was, Berkeley said, ‘the story of a murder rather than the story of the detection of a murder’; despite this, it boasted the trappings of a conventional detective story, including a map of the scene of the crime (which highlighted the locations of key characters at a crucial time) and an idiosyncratic sleuth, Roger Sheringham. Adopting the pseudonym Francis Iles, Berkeley dispensed with these elements in Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact (1932). The storylines in both novels were influenced by real-life cases, and the fo
cus was on psychology: of the murderer in the first novel, and on the mindset of a born victim in the second.

  The Francis Iles books were highly influential. Detective novelists who had started out in the late Twenties, such as Anthony Gilbert, Lynn Brock and Milward Kennedy, tried their hand at psychological crime fiction, as did newcomers to the genre in the Thirties such as C.E. Vulliamy, Richard Hull and Bruce Hamilton. In Hue and Cry (1931), Hamilton recounted the misadventures of a man who kills by accident and then flees justice. Hue and Cry is surely the only Golden Age novel to open at a football match, or to be set partly in a working-class railway town, apparently an amalgam of Crewe and Derby. While drunk, Tom Payton murders a wealthy director of the football club he plays for, and spends the rest of the story trying to escape justice. Hamilton creates a rounded character and describes with empathy the quiet desperation of ordinary people at the time of an economic slump.

  Donald Henderson’s Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (1943), a study of the misadventures of a wife-killer who embarks on a murder spree, was much admired by Raymond Chandler, who praised its ‘tragic-comic idealisation of the murderer’ in his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’. Henderson adapted the novel for the stage, and it was televised by the BBC in 1956. Goodbye to Murder (1946), in which Thelma Winterton’s quest for happiness leads to homicide, mined the same vein of quirky black humour, but lung cancer cut short the author’s promising career. Henderson was an actor turned scriptwriter who, under various names, published seventeen novels, including His Lordship the Judge (1936) as by D.H. Landels. Henderson’s eventful life included periods of extreme poverty (with several months spent living in a tent in the run-up to the war), work as a film extra and for the BBC and being buried under the wreckage of a bombed house in 1941. Had death not intervened, he might have built more extensively on the literary foundations laid by Iles.

  In the Fifties, crime writers on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Shelley Smith, Julian Symons, Patricia Highsmith, Helen McCloy and Margaret Millar, took the genre further, with assured novels casting light on dark corners of the human psyche. Sometimes they utilised tricky plot devices, but primarily as a means of exploring human behaviour. A comparison of Roger East’s Murder Rehearsal (1933) with The Last of Philip Banter (1947), published by the American John Franklin Bardin fourteen years later, shows how much had changed. In the earlier novel, a detective novelist’s admiring secretary notices parallels between his work-in-progress and three recent and apparently unconnected deaths; what follows is a lively story with a neat late twist. In Bardin’s book, a troubled advertising man discovers a manuscript which he may or may not have typed, and which seems to foretell events in real life, but the emphasis is on a study in psychological disintegration rather than whodunit or whydunit. East’s story is entertaining, and he made sporadic but enjoyable contributions to the genre; his real name was Roger d’Este Burford and he was one of the few people to have pursued careers both as a diplomat and as a screenwriter. Bardin’s novel, however, is the more memorable of the two.

  The lead given by the post-war generation of writers was in turn followed by Ruth Rendell, who in the course of a career lasting just over fifty years took the psychological mystery to new heights in books such as A Judgement in Stone (1977) and A Fatal Inversion (1987); the latter was one of a string of outstanding novels published under the name Barbara Vine. But she was also responsible for the highly popular ‘Kingsmarkham Chronicles’ featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford, a long series of whodunits. It is sometimes suggested that the psychological mystery supplanted the classic form of detective story, but that view is simplistic. The two kinds of crime fiction have co-existed for a century, and continue to do so. It is closer to the truth to say that modern writers such as Rendell in her later Wexford books have demonstrated, just as Dorothy L. Sayers did in the Thirties, that it is possible for a skilled author to say something of interest about society, and human nature, in a novel which in its essentials follows the classic form.

  The House by the River

  by A.P. Herbert (1920)

  Hammerton Chase is ‘a short half-mile of old and dignified houses, clustered irregularly in all shapes and sizes along the sunny side of the Thames…it had a unique, incomparable character of its own’. A couple called the Whittakers host a regular social evening, and those attending include Stephen Byrne, a handsome young poet, his pregnant wife Margery, their friend and neighbour, John Egerton, and pretty Muriel Tarrant, ‘the sole unmarried and still marriageable maiden in the Chase’. On returning home that night, Stephen exchanges a smile with the Byrnes’ attractive new maid, Emily Gaunt.

  One evening shortly afterwards, while his wife is out of the house, Stephen makes a clumsy attempt to kiss Emily, and when she resists his overtures and screams, he puts his hands around her throat to keep her quiet. But he squeezes too hard, and strangles her. His comfortable life, and everything he has striven for, is suddenly at risk as a result of his momentary folly. As her body lies in front of him on the floor, someone comes to the front door. It is not Margery Byrne, but John Egerton, and Stephen persuades the startled young civil servant to help him dispose of Emily’s corpse in the river.

  After her body is found, an inquest is held, but the outcome is that the finger of suspicion points at John, rather than at Stephen. Stephen behaves disingenuously, and with supreme selfishness, while John’s loyalty prevents him from telling the truth. Soon, the wretched young civil servant becomes a social pariah, quite unable to win over the woman he adores, Muriel Tarrant. Meanwhile Stephen becomes a father for the second time; increasingly daring and ambitious with his poetry, he also pursues his own interest in Muriel. The Thames, alternately attractive and menacing, plays a central role in the story’s events as the tension mounts.

  Herbert’s brisk, yet at times lyrical, narrative benefits from a series of ironic vignettes, such as the witty portrayal of the verbose lawyer, Mr Dimple, but the main focus is on Stephen and John, and the ramifications of their doomed friendship. The reader knows the truth about the crime, but remains uncertain as to whether justice will be done or denied—and, if it is done, by what means.

  Alan Patrick Herbert was a man of many parts. His most famous novel, The Water Gypsies (1930), again manifested his love of the Thames, while his Misleading Cases, first published in Punch, satirised the innumerable failings of the legal system; he had trained as a barrister, but never practised. When Misleading Cases was adapted for BBC TV in the Sixties, the screenwriters included Herbert, Alan Melville and Michael Gilbert. Herbert campaigned for reform of the divorce laws, among other causes, and sat as independent MP for Oxford University for fifteen years; he was knighted in 1945.

  Today The House by the River is best remembered as a 1950 film directed by Fritz Lang, and judged by some critics an underrated example of ‘Gothic noir’. The music for the film was written by George Antheil, an American renowned for his avant-garde compositions; under the name Stacey Bishop, he was also the author of an extravagant detective novel in the classic tradition of the locked-room mystery, Death in the Dark (1930), edited for Faber by T.S. Eliot.

  Payment Deferred

  by C.S. Forester (1926)

  William Marble is a middle-aged bank clerk with a stupid, spendthrift wife, two children and a host of debts. He is at his wits’ end when an unexpected visitor calls at the Marbles’ little house in Dulwich. This is Jim Medland, Marble’s nephew, who has just arrived in England and does not know a soul in the country. Jim has inherited money, and makes the mistake of letting his uncle see that his wallet is crammed with notes. The two men talk about investments, but Jim is unwilling to help out his uncle financially. Marble makes a swift decision, and after sending his wife off to bed, he poisons Jim’s whisky, and buries his body in the garden.

  Annie Marble suspects nothing, and Marble’s luck seems to have turned. He persuades a bookmaker to collaborate with him on a speculation on the fortun
es of the franc which proves so profitable that suddenly, he has more money than he can cope with. He starts drinking heavily, and becomes involved with a gold-digging dressmaker, while remaining grimly aware that he can never risk moving away from the scene of his crime. Marble is haunted by fear that his secret will be discovered, and Forester charts his disintegration in sharp, disdainful prose. Payment Deferred is a short but striking book; despite the young author’s inexperience, it remains a compelling read.

  Cecil Scott Forester was a successful novelist who remains well regarded, but his contribution to the crime genre has long been undervalued. This was partly because Forester, whose real name was Cecil Louis Troughton Smith, became celebrated as the author of books such as The African Queen (1938), together with the series of historical seafaring tales featuring Horatio Hornblower. Forester regarded Payment Deferred as a ‘straight’, realistic novel; because there is no detection, he did not see it as belonging to the same tradition as the mysteries of Poe and Collins, Doyle and Chesterton.

  Payment Deferred was adapted for the stage, and filmed with Charles Laughton, and Forester continued for a few years to dabble in studies of criminal psychology. Plain Murder (l930) is one of the earliest crime novels where the action revolves around office life; set in an advertising agency, it pre-dates by three years Sayers’ more famous Murder Must Advertise. Astonishingly, Forester’s third crime novel, The Pursued, was lost, and not published until 2011. By the standards of 1935, when the book was written, Forester’s frankness about the sexual relations between a suburban housewife and her violent husband is daring. As in Forester’s earlier studies of crime, his dark and compelling evocation of the claustrophobic, financially straitened nature of life in lower middle-class England between the wars provides a vivid reminder that those years were far from a ‘Golden Age’ for millions of people. Small wonder that so many of them sought solace and escape in detective fiction.