Gilbert’s Murder by Experts (1936) introduced the beer-drinking solicitor Arthur Crook, who became a long-running series character, his final appearance coming as late as 1974. His cases included The Woman in Red (1941), but Crook was eliminated from both the 1945 film version of the story, My Name is Julia Ross, and an effective but drastically altered re-make, The Dead of Winter, directed by Arthur Penn in 1987.
The Department of Dead Ends
by Roy Vickers (1949)
In ‘The Rubber Trumpet’, the first story about Scotland Yard’s Department of Dead Ends, Roy Vickers explains that the Department ‘came into existence in the spacious days of King Edward VII and it took everything that other departments rejected…The one passport to the Department was a written statement by the senior officer in charge of the case that the information offered was absurd. Judged by the standards of reason and common sense, its files were mines of misinformation. It proceeded largely by guesswork. On one occasion, it hanged a murderer by accidentally punning on his name.’
This quirky scenario is a world away from the scrupulous technical correctness of R. Austin Freeman’s inverted mysteries. Vickers makes clear that this is deliberate: ‘It was the function of the Department to connect persons and things that had no logical connection. In short, it stood for the antithesis of scientific detection.’ Yet the Dead Ends stories, ten of which were brought together in this book, rank alongside Freeman’s ground-breaking collection as the best short inverted mysteries. Introducing the collection, Ellery Queen acknowledged that Vickers’ stories were not as ‘deductively conceived’ as those in Freeman’s The Singing Bone, and that ‘the nature of the evidence is not as scientific or irrefutable’; chance plays a significant part. However he argued that Vickers’ stories were more gripping and suspenseful.
The Department, presided over by the likeable but low-key Detective Inspector Rason, ‘played always for a lucky fluke’. Sometimes this pays off, as in the case of George Muncey and the rubber trumpet, where the detectives ‘arrived at the correct answer by wrong reasoning’. Vickers makes a virtue out of this, skilfully enticing the reader to turn the pages: ‘the rubber trumpet had nothing logically to do with George Muncey, nor the woman he murdered, nor the circumstances in which he murdered her’.
In ‘The Man Who Murdered in Public’, the same facility for piquing the reader’s interest is demonstrated in the opening sentence: ‘How little do you know about a man if you only know that he has committed four murders?’ This story was inspired by the case of the ‘Brides of the Bath’, while Alfred Cummarten, the protagonist of ‘The Henpecked Murderer’, is based on Hawley Harvey Crippen. But we are told at the outset that ‘Cummarten made most of Crippen’s minor mistakes. He was not as anxious…that no-one else should suffer for his sins—a moral defect which brought its own penalty.’
The thirty-seven Dead Ends stories written from 1934 onwards by William Edward Vickers (known as Roy) secured his reputation as an imaginative and highly readable author. Yet they represent a tiny fraction of his output under several names. Because he was so prolific, some of his stories, especially those published early in his career when he was short of money, are slapdash. At his best, however, Vickers wrote vividly, and with feeling—especially about his pet hate, social snobbery, a subject which crops up in the Dead Ends story ‘The Case of the Social Climber’, as well as in novels such as Murder of a Snob (1949).
Chapter Nineteen
The Ironists
The ironic finale of C.S. Forester’s Payment Deferred was echoed by the ending of Francis Iles’ Malice Aforethought. Forester’s book was successful enough to be adapted for stage and film, but Iles’ novel made an even greater impression. Forester’s portrayal of the consequences of murder was downbeat in mood, whereas Iles’ story was not only well plotted but also shot through with the author’s characteristically cynical humour.
As Anthony Berkeley, Anthony Berkeley Cox devised tricky puzzles based on true crimes, notably in The Wychford Poisoning Case (1926), which fictionalises the mysterious and controversial death of James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton broker, in 1889. As Francis Iles, he went much further, presenting his readers with insight into the mindset of criminals and their victims, and relieving the darkness of his vision with flashes of cynical wit. A keen student of criminal trials, he was deeply troubled by the apparently unjust hanging of Edith Thompson for the murder of her husband in 1922, and he concluded that she had been ‘executed for adultery’. For him, irony was the perfect tool for expressing his belief that the legal machine sometimes malfunctioned with catastrophic results.
The success of Malice Aforethought encouraged other authors to give stories about crime an ironic twist. One or two of them even deployed irony in order to make political points. An example was Bruce Hamilton, who joined the Communist Party during the Thirties. He infused his plots with a socio-political dimension, not least in a strange and highly original novel published in 1937, Rex v. Rhodes: The Brighton Murder Trial. The book is presented in the style of an entry in the then-popular series of ‘famous trials’. In the guise of editor, Hamilton makes it clear that the story is set a few years in the future, when there is conflict between the forces of the left and the extreme right, with the Communists destined to prevail. The man on trial, Rhodes, is a Communist accused of killing a leader of the Brighton branch of a right-wing group. The main evidence against him—which seems damning—comes from two young, and possibly thuggish, men who worked for the victim. The focus of the story is not on what has actually happened, but on whether Rhodes will survive the trial process.
Sic Transit Gloria (1936) was an experimental novel by Milward Kennedy. The storyline reflects the troubled mood of British society in the shadow of looming international conflict. James Southern determines to find out whether Gloria Day killed herself or was murdered, and ultimately finds himself reflecting on the morality of murder for political purposes, and playing ‘the part of justice…A jury could only have secured injustice. What did the law matter—if the law could not have secured justice? People talked of judicial murder: was not judicial failure to secure the just punishment of a murderer just as bad?’ This question about the justifiability of murder—could the crime, in some cases, amount to an act of altruism?—became a recurrent element in Golden Age fiction, cropping up in novels written by Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, and especially evident in the work of ironists such as Iles and his disciples.
Like the bitingly ironic Verdict of Twelve, Richard Hull’s Excellent Intentions (1938) also focused on the deliberations of jurors, although none of Hull’s work had a political dimension. Hull’s stories focus on individuals rather than society at large or the class system. Making use of irony, unreliable narrators and tricky story structures, he explored the misadventures of the malevolent with formidable inventiveness. Arguably, he never surpassed the success of his first crime novel, The Murder of My Aunt (1934), but several of his later books are witty and off-beat studies of criminal behaviour which deserve to be better known.
It is no coincidence that Verdict of Twelve, Excellent Intentions and Anthony Berkeley’s Trial and Error addressed the fallibility of the legal system. This was a recurrent theme in the Thirties, an age of anxiety during which the plots of two of the finest detective novels ever written, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and And Then There Were None (1939) reflected similar dissatisfaction with the limitations of conventional justice.
In the hands of novelists determined to explore the paradox of a system of justice that too often delivered injustice, irony was more than a literary tool; it became a weapon. The master of the ironic twist never published another book after 1939, either as Berkeley or Iles, and inevitably his influence faded. But it is evident in James Ronald’s This Way Out (1940), a fictionalisation of the Crippen case featuring a man goaded into murder, which was filmed with Charles Laughton as The Suspect, and in a supe
rb novel published by a barrister in 1952. Edward Grierson’s Reputation for a Song charts the ruthless destruction of a man’s good name: far from preventing injustice, the law is manipulated so as to achieve it. The Ironists may, as Julian Symons argued, have lacked staying power, but the sardonic originality of their best work remains compelling.
Malice Aforethought
by Francis Iles (1931)
The first book published by Anthony Berkeley Cox under the name of Francis Iles was set deep in the Devon countryside, in a village brimming with as many petty rivalries and as much gossip as Agatha Christie’s St Mary Mead. But Malice Aforethought is nothing like The Murder at the Vicarage. The gulf between Miss Marple’s debut and Iles’ is reflected by the tone of the very first paragraph: ‘It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr. Bickleigh took active steps in the matter. Murder is a serious business. The slightest step may be disastrous. Dr. Bickleigh had no intention of risking disaster.’
Outwardly a pillar of the community, Bickleigh is an unhappily married fantasist whose meekness conceals a sadistic streak. He falls for another woman, and concludes that his future happiness depends on his disposing of his domineering wife. Bickleigh’s crime is reminiscent of the poisoning in the case of Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the only British solicitor ever to be hanged for murder, and the final plot twist owes something to Payment Deferred. But what set Malice Aforethought apart was the cool wit of the story-telling, which makes the book compulsive reading despite the shortage of characters with whom readers would wish to identify. It was entirely in keeping with the ironic tone of the book that it was dedicated to the author’s wife, from whom he became divorced less than a year later. For good measure, he endowed Bickleigh with some of his own personality traits.
Malice Aforethought received a rapturous reception from critics, and was followed in 1932 by another ambitious and extraordinary Iles novel, which drew on aspects of the real-life case of Dr William Palmer. Before the Fact begins in equally arresting fashion: ‘Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her husband for nearly eight years before she realised that she was married to a murderer.’ Although the reader is thus let in on the secret right from the outset, the urge to see what—if anything—will happen to the pleasant but desperately naive Lina is irresistible. The closing pages are dark and memorable; the ending of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 film version, Suspicion, was very different, and much less powerful.
The title of the third and final Iles book, As for the Woman (1939), was taken from a dismissive remark of the judge who presided over the Thompson–Bywaters trial in 1922. This novel, again remarkable for the lack of sympathetic characters, explores how murder might be committed by accident, and suggests that guilt or innocence are as much matters of luck as of moral rectitude or turpitude. Iles’ publishers, oddly, described the book as ‘a love story’, a misreading of the story that, in a suitably ironic twist, may have contributed to the author’s despair. As for the Woman was supposed to be the first volume of a trilogy, but Iles never published another novel.
Family Matters
by Anthony Rolls (1933)
One of the first crime novelists to follow in the footsteps of Francis Iles was another talented writer who disguised his identity with a pseudonym. C.E. Vulliamy adopted the name Anthony Rolls for his first novel, The Vicar’s Experiments (1932), which traces the misadventures of a homicidal clergyman. Lobelia Grove, about two murders in a garden suburb, appeared in the same year.
Family Matters soon followed, earning a rapturous review from Dorothy L. Sayers in The Sunday Times: ‘The characters are quite extraordinarily living, and the atmosphere of the horrid household creeps over one like a miasma.’ The story, she explained, ‘concerns the efforts of various members and friends of the Kewdingham family to get rid…of one of the most futile and exasperating men who ever, by his character and habits, asked to be murdered’.
At the time the book was written, the effects of financial crisis, with the Wall Street Crash, followed by the economic slump, were being felt far and wide. The conventional wisdom is that Golden Age fiction never addressed the economic realities of the Thirties, but that assessment is overly simplistic. Detective novelists of the period usually avoided dwelling on the hardships suffered by millions of people in Britain and elsewhere, because their main objective was to offer their readers escapism, but inevitably their storylines and characters were influenced by what was happening in the world at large.
Robert Kewdingham has become one of the long-term unemployed. When he seeks refuge in a fantasy world, his young and pretty wife Bertha is driven to despair. Given that two men find her attractive, motives for murder abound, but attempts to poison Kewdingham soon go awry, creating what Sayers described as ‘a most original and grimly farcical situation’. Although Sayers had no idea whether the medical aspects of the plot were technically correct, she declared herself ‘quite ready to accept anything that is told me by so convincing an author’ and admired an ‘ironic surprise-ending, pregnant with poetical injustice’, which was firmly in the Francis Iles tradition.
Colwyn Edward Vulliamy studied art, and published Charles Kingsley and Christian Socialism in 1914. While serving in the Middle East during the war, he developed an interest in archaeology, which was reflected in his fourth crime novel as by Anthony Rolls, Scarweather (1934), as well as in his non-fiction. Throughout his literary career, he displayed a gift for satire that strengthens his novels, and compensates for a recurrent failure to create plots strong enough to fulfil the promise of his opening chapters.
After a long period of parole, Vulliamy returned to a life of crime in the Fifties, producing half a dozen further mysteries, this time under his own name. The first and most successful of these post-war novels was Don Among the Dead Men (1952). The story follows a similar pattern to The Vicar’s Experiments, and was filmed in 1964 as A Jolly Bad Fellow. Unfortunately, not even an excellent cast, a script by the author of the screenplay for Kind Hearts and Coronets and a soundtrack by John Barry enabled it to make a lasting impression.
Middle Class Murder
by Bruce Hamilton (1936)
Middle Class Murder, also known as Dead Reckoning, betrays the influence of Malice Aforethought, whose author is given a subtle hat-tip by the inclusion in the story of the names Berkeley and Cox. But whereas Anthony Berkeley Cox, alias Francis Iles, was a disgruntled Conservative, Bruce Hamilton flirted with communism, and gave his portrait of a wife-killer a socio-political context.
The book opens memorably, with Tim Kennedy drafting a fake suicide note from his wife Esther, who has been disabled and disfigured in an accident. Kennedy is a successful dentist in an affluent Sussex village, superficially likeable and charming, but wholly self-centred. Hamilton’s account of how he ‘graduated into homicide from the school of arm-chair murderers’ is laced with irony: ‘this class of people, nearly always recruited from the middle station of life, is habitually taken with so little seriousness as a potential menace to society that it is considered safe to indulge and even pamper it. It is given fairy-tales in the form of the detective story…The middle class, taken as a whole, lacks the toughness required for murder. It is frequently strong in imagination, but fearful of any action that has not the sanction of class-tradition. Besides, it is squeamish about hanging…In the last issue, they know their musings for what they are—the poetry of the respectable.’
He contrasts this with the rare exception: ‘… who will regard the most dreadful of crimes as preferable to the loss of conventional good opinion and the economic consequences it entails. Then you get the true middle-class murderer, a figure of awful menace and awful fascination.’
Kennedy is vain, proud and obstinate, but his charm disguises these flaws, and nobody guesses at his monstrous selfishness: ‘He was incapable of any real feeling for others.’ Yet, as
with Crippen, a real-life middle-class murderer of an earlier generation, ‘You could not help liking him.’ When poor, damaged Esther tries to re-kindle their sex-life, Kennedy feels a disgust sharpened by his infatuation with a younger woman.
Although forced to abandon a plan to disguise Esther’s death as suicide, he successfully contrives a fatal accident. In an ironic passage typical of Francis Iles’ followers, the coroner notes that he was ‘a devoted husband, full of the most tender concern for his wife’s health and welfare’. But Kennedy’s pursuit of Alma Shepherd is complicated not only by increasing money and business troubles, but also by the ultimate indignity for a middle-class professional man—he falls victim to a blackmailer. Hamilton charts his decline and fall with chilly cynicism.
Arthur Douglas Bruce Hamilton, a godson of Arthur Conan Doyle, seems destined to be remembered mainly as the elder brother of the more gifted Patrick Hamilton, whose biography he published in 1972. A talented novelist in his own right, Bruce published an excellent first novel, To Be Hanged, in 1930 (for which Conan Doyle supplied an admiring quote), and tried something different with each succeeding book. His final novel, Too Much of Water, was set on board a passenger ship bound for the West Indies. A high-calibre closed-circle whodunit, it was rather typical of Hamilton’s career as a literary ‘nearly man’. He published it as late as 1958, by which time the vogue was for bleaker books focusing on criminal psychology, of the kind he had written more than twenty years earlier.
My Own Murderer
by Richard Hull (1940)
A specialist in unreliable narrators, and a crime writer with a taste for ironic twists matched only by Francis Iles, Richard Hull surpassed himself in this book by giving his own real name (Richard Henry Sampson) to the amoral solicitor who tells the story. The opening paragraph is characteristic of Hull, and sets the tone in the best Iles tradition: ‘Even before he murdered Baynes I never was really much attracted by Alan Renwick, which in a way makes it odd that I did so much for him…the relations between solicitor and client are very seldom subject to the stress to which they were put in this case.’
The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books Page 23