The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Renwick has killed a valet who tried to blackmail him over his liaison with a married woman called Anita Kilner. Renwick pressures Sampson into sheltering him in his London flat, and a complicated scheme is devised to enable him to escape justice. Predictably, the plan goes awry, and soon Sampson finds himself pursued by the determined Inspector Westhall.

  Sampson’s boundless capacity for self-deception, in particular his belief that he is keeping one step ahead of his enemies, is central to the book’s appeal. His naivety is reminiscent of Edward Powell’s in The Murder of My Aunt (1934), Hull’s first novel, about the hapless attempts of a fat and greasy young man to dispose of his rather more intelligent Aunt Mildred. Like Francis Iles, Hull specialised in odious characters, and explained to the American critic Howard Haycraft that there was more to say about unpleasant people, whom he found more amusing. Hull continued to try to find new ways to present the darker side of human nature in a wry and innovative manner. He liked to experiment with structure, sometimes by ringing variations on the theme of the ‘inverted’ mystery. Excellent Intentions (1938), admired by Jorge Luis Borges, opens at the start of a trial for murder, but the identity of the accused is concealed from the reader. The victim was a deeply repellent individual: in such a case, how can justice best be done? Murder Isn’t Easy (1936), an ingenious example of unreliable narration, is set in an advertising business, and prompted Nicholas Blake to say in a review that Hull had ‘a great gift for character’.

  Like Iles, Hull guarded his privacy, saying with typical dry wit that he was convinced that a publicity photograph would be detrimental to his sales. Despite the success his work enjoyed in the Thirties, little is known about his personal life, other than that he was a chartered accountant, and a bachelor who gave his address as a gentlemen’s club in London. Elected to the Detection Club in 1946, he later became its Secretary.

  After the war, he continued to come up with clever ideas that were rich in irony, but realising their full potential proved an increasing challenge. Last First (1947) was dedicated to people who read the end of a detective novel first, and opens with the final chapter, while preserving the mystery, but the book as a whole does not do justice to the splendid concept. A Matter of Nerves (1950) is narrated by a murderer whose identity is withheld from the reader, but again the execution of the concept does not fulfil its promise.

  Chapter Twenty

  Fiction from Fact

  Crime writers have always found inspiration in real-life cases, although they have usually seasoned fact with a liberal helping of imagination. ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’, Edgar Allan Poe’s second tale chronicling the detective exploits of Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, fictionalised the killing of a young woman called Mary Rogers, and shifted the events across the Atlantic to France. Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) adapts incidents from ‘the Road case’, in which Inspector Whicher of Scotland Yard arrested Constance Kent, suspected of murdering her young half-brother. Arthur Conan Doyle, who investigated a number of crimes himself, most notably the Edalji case, probably drew on the criminal career of the arch-villain Adam Worth when creating Sherlock Holmes’ adversary Professor Moriarty.

  To this day, crime novelists make frequent and effective use of actual cases in building their stories, but perhaps this technique was most prevalent during the Golden Age of detective fiction, a period which overlapped with an equally notable, if much longer, era of real-life crime. In his essay ‘Decline of the English Murder’, George Orwell argued that: ‘Our great period in murder…seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr. Palmer of Rugeley, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs. Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson.’

  These cases attracted the attention of leading crime novelists. The Palmer, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson cases, for instance, were all plundered by Francis Iles. Jack the Ripper’s exploits inspired Thomas Burke’s chilling short story ‘The Hands of Mr Ottermole’, as well as The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes, another keen student of true crime.

  Orwell pointed out that, leaving aside the Ripper killings, six of the eight cases he highlighted were ‘poisoning cases, and eight of the ten criminals belonged to the middle class…sex was a powerful motive in all but two cases, and in at least four cases respectability—the desire to gain a secure position in life, or not to forfeit one’s social position by some scandal such as a divorce—was one of the main reasons for committing murder. In more than half the cases, the object was to get hold of a certain known sum of money such as a legacy or an insurance policy, but the amount involved was nearly always small.’

  These psychological components suited the cases to adaptation into Golden Age mysteries with a domestic milieu and a restricted circle of suspects. Reviewing Alan Brock’s Further Evidence (1934), Dorothy L. Sayers (whose own desire for respectability led her to conceal the fact that she had given birth to an illegitimate child) argued that ‘of all motives for crime, respectability—the least emphasised in fiction—is one of the most powerful in fact, and is the root cause of a long series of irregularities, ranging from murder itself to the queerest and most eccentric misdemeanours.’ This preoccupation with respectability, noted by Orwell, is a striking feature of classic crime fiction. As a suburban doctor tells a friend in Anthony Rolls’ Lobelia Grove (1932): ‘You don’t understand the importance of respectability in a place like this. Respectability is the ideal, the religion, the cruel god of these little men.’

  A keen student of true crime, Sayers was conscious that: ‘The usual fault of novels “based on” real life cases is a curious baldness of style, hovering between the two-dimensional outlines of a police-court report and the child-like brightness of one of Mr. Punch’s “Simple Stories”.’ She admired novels which overcame this difficulty, such as Catherine Meadows’ Henbane (1934), based on the Crippen case: ‘a fine novel of human passion and suffering, neither more nor less convincing because it happens to be a transcript of actual facts’. Meadows’ only other novel, Friday Market (1938), fictionalised the same case as Malice Aforethought, the story of Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the only solicitor to be hanged for murder.

  The trial of William Herbert Wallace in 1931 post-dated the murder cases cited by Orwell, but was equally remarkable. The Jury Disagree (1934) by George Goodchild and C. Bechhofer Roberts was among the novels inspired by William Herbert Wallace’s trial, but, as Sayers said, the duo’s story was not ‘a re-interpretation of the case…for the incidents have been altered and fresh material added, so as to produce an entirely different situation’. The possibilities for mystification offered by the evidence inspired not one book by the industrious John Rhode, but two. In Vegetable Duck (1944)—the title refers to a marrow stuffed with mince, a delicacy whose preparation also supplies an opportunity to commit an ingenious crime—Inspector Jimmy Waghorn opines that ‘if Wallace indeed murdered his wife, his motives for doing so, though undoubtedly obscure, were not beyond discernment. Himself a sensitive man, he had found the unintelligent companionship of his wife unendurable. The Wallaces were not sufficiently well-off to afford much diversion, and they were consequently shut up together, evening after evening, with no society but their own.’

  Possibly Rhode, who also took the unusual facts of the case as a starting point for The Telephone Call (1948), considered Wallace guilty of battering his wife Julia to death with a poker in their Liverpool home. Wallace was convicted of murder in 1931, only to have the sentence overturned on appeal, and the case became a cause célèbre. Dorothy L. Sayers analysed the facts in a long essay included in the Detection Club’s book The Anatomy of Murder (1936); she was unconvinced of Wallace’s guilt, not least because she did not think it made psychological sense for him to have killed Julia. Many years later, researchers identified an alternative culprit, although in 2013, P.D. James published an essay arguing that Wallace was
guilty of the crime. On balance, it seems more likely that Wallace was innocent, but the complexity of the puzzle continues to fascinate. As Raymond Chandler said, ‘The Wallace case is the nonpareil of all murder mysteries…I call it the impossible murder because Wallace couldn’t have done it, and neither could anyone else…The Wallace case is unbeatable; it will always be unbeatable.’

  Crime novelists whose work features incidents and characters taken from real life need to take care. This is the lesson of Milward Kennedy’s Death to the Rescue, written at the height of the fashion for giving actual cases the thinnest of fictional disguises. Authors in the second half of the century ranging from Patricia Highsmith to Val McDermid, and from Julian Symons to James Ellroy continued to make effective use of material from real-life cases, while avoiding Kennedy’s disastrous mistake.

  Death to the Rescue

  by Milward Kennedy (1931)

  No Golden Age detective novel better illustrates the perils of fictionalising real-life cases than Death to the Rescue. The storyline is ambitious and experimental, and in dedicating the book to his friend and Detection Club colleague Anthony Berkeley, Milward Kennedy mused about the future of the detective fiction. The bulk of the story is narrated by Gregory Amor, a rich and conceited middle-aged bachelor with an unhealthy interest in young women. When his new neighbours slight him, he embarks on a lengthy investigation into their past, and chances upon a link with an unsolved murder of an old woman more than 20 years earlier. Garry Boon, a conceited actor with an excessive fondness for alcohol, emerges as a prime suspect during the inquest, but no proceedings are taken against him, and Amor comes up with a succession of increasingly elaborate theories about the case.

  Eventually, Amor hits upon the truth, but proves to be too clever for his own good. The narrative perspective suddenly switches, and Kennedy shows how the tables are ingeniously turned on the amateur detective. A locked-room murder is discovered, and the cleverness of the method defeats the agents of justice, who satisfy themselves that it is a case of suicide. The irony of the ending is powerful—but there is also an unintended irony in Amor’s repeated expressions of anxiety about possible libel claims arising from the record of his investigations.

  Six years after the book’s publication, Kennedy, his publisher, Victor Gollancz Limited, and the printer, Camelot Press Limited, found themselves in the High Court, facing a libel action brought by an American actor called Philip Yale Drew. In June 1929, Drew had appeared at the County Theatre, Reading for a week that saw the murder of a local tobacconist. Drew was interviewed by the police in connection with the crime, and when he gave evidence at the inquest he was closely questioned about his movements on the day of the murder. The case—and Drew’s part in it—attracted extensive publicity, but an open verdict was returned, and he was never charged.

  When in 1934 a cheap edition of Kennedy’s book was published, Drew was told about it, and concluded that the portrayal of Garry Boon defamed him. The case was settled out of court, with Kennedy acknowledging that he had drawn on the details of the inquest for the purposes of his novel. He maintained that he had ‘so disguised the characters and the events so as to prevent anyone thinking that Garry Boon referred to Mr Drew’, but he now appreciated that was incorrect. The defendants apologised to Drew, and made a payment of compensation to him. The book was withdrawn from circulation. This was a pity, because it was one of the most notable examples of Kennedy’s varied and intelligent crime fiction.

  After this unnerving episode, Kennedy’s creative powers flagged, and his final detective story in the classic vein, complete with another ‘challenge to the reader’ was Who Was Old Willy? (1940), a story written for children. After the Second World War, he wrote a handful of thrillers, but devoted most of his energies to reviewing the books of others.

  A Pin to See the Peepshow

  by F. Tennyson Jesse (1934)

  A noted historian and criminologist, as well as an author of detective stories, F. Tennyson Jesse was ideally equipped to write a novel based on the story of the woman at the centre of one of the most notorious criminal trials of the Twenties. Edith Thompson, hanged in 1923 (as was her lover, Frederick Bywaters) for the murder of her husband, was the model for Jesse’s protagonist, Julia Almond.

  Julia is introduced as an imaginative schoolgirl with high hopes for the future: ‘She would, of course, get on in the world, she never doubted that. She knew, because of the way she was treated here, at school, that that she was somebody, although she wasn’t the prettiest or even the cleverest.’ The passing years bring several disappointments, but fail to diminish her spirit. After her boyfriend is killed during the war, she accepts a proposal of marriage from a widower who works for a firm of gentlemen’s outfitters. But Herbert Starling does not excite her sexually, and although he treats her kindly during their honeymoon, ‘her body still felt battered as well as her soul’. Soon she finds herself attracted to other men, and after she meets Leonard Carr, a young man whom she had known years earlier, a passionate affair develops. One night, while he is drunk, Leo follows Julia and Herbert, and attacks the older man, striking a fatal blow. But to her ‘strange incredulity’, Julia, as well as Leo, is arrested and tried for murder.

  The events of the story follow those of the Thompson–Bywaters case. Edith Thompson’s behaviour was foolish and naive, but Anthony Berkeley was among those who argued that the case resulted in a miscarriage of justice. A scornful phrase used by the trial judge supplied the title of As for the Woman (1939), published as by Francis Iles. Berkeley’s friend and confidante E.M. Delafield wrote the first novel based on the case, Messalina of the Suburbs (1924), while elements of Thompson’s personality are to be found in Margaret Harrison, a central character in The Documents in the Case.

  A Pin to See the Peepshow was successfully adapted for television in 1973 by Elaine Morgan, with Francesca Annis playing Julia. Writing about the poignant closing scenes, Morgan argued that: ‘The last chapters should be compulsory reading for anyone who still believes, for whatever high-minded reasons, that the death penalty ought to be reintroduced.’ Sarah Waters, author of The Paying Guests (2014), which also draws on the Thompson case, has written of her admiration for Jesse’s book, and for ‘the intensity of the narrative…its dogged commitment to its flawed, doomed heroine…the fidelity—and the tremendous humanity—with which A Pin to See the Peepshow embraces Thompson’s tragedy’.

  Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse studied art before becoming a journalist. She married a playwright, H.M. Harwood, and seven of her own plays were produced in the West End. She edited six volumes of the Notable British Trials series, and a fascination with criminal psychology prompted her to write Murder and its Motives (1924). She also created Solange Fontaine, a French sleuth with the ability—priceless for any detective—to ‘smell’ evil.

  Earth to Ashes

  by Alan Brock (1939)

  When Maude Ash befriends a stranger while selling poppies, one thing quickly leads to another. George Brooks takes her out for tea to an old mill, and soon finds himself invited to take lodgings with Maude and her invalid husband Dick. Maude is an attractive woman who finds domestic life frustrating, while George is both handsome and persuasive. Although she resists George’s overtures for some time, before long Maude succumbs to his charm. To her distress, she discovers that she is not the only woman in his life, and this revelation is swiftly followed by Dick’s sudden death.

  The focus shifts to the mysteriously unpredictable married life of Ada Strange and her husband Joe. Soon a body is found in a blazing car belonging to Joe Strange. But whose is the corpse? The investigation is led by Inspector Kennedy and his quicker-witted subordinate Constable Vine, and they soon become convinced that Joe Strange has faked his own death. But the man is nowhere to be found.

  Alan Brock notes in a foreword that the story was suggested by a ‘famous murder trial of a few years ago’, but emphasises that his novel departs
radically from the facts of that case; he was referring to the ‘blazing car murder’ committed by Alfred Arthur Rouse. Rouse was a travelling salesman and compulsive philanderer who murdered an unknown victim before setting fire to his Morris Minor, with the body inside, on Guy Fawkes Night in 1930. The case caused a sensation, and Rouse’s trial was notable for the forensic evidence of Home Office pathologist Bernard Spilsbury and the deadly cross-examination of Rouse by prosecuting Counsel Norman Birkett.

  Rouse may have conjured up his scheme after studying the then recently published spy novel The ‘W’ Plan (1929) by Graham Seton Hutchinson, writing as Graham Seton. The notion of burning a corpse beyond recognition in a blazing car attracted several Golden Age writers, including Dorothy L. Sayers, in her short story ‘In the Teeth of the Evidence’, J.J. Connington and Milward Kennedy.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that Alan St Hill Brock should be intrigued by the blazing-car case, given that his first published book was called Pyrotechnics. He came from a family whose fireworks company dated back to the late seventeenth century; the business flourishes to this day. Brock’s novels made varied and inventive use of plot material drawn from real life, and he also co-wrote a book about fingerprints with fellow crime novelist Douglas G. Browne.

  Dorothy L. Sayers admired Brock’s Further Evidence (1934), inspired by ‘a number of cases…where, though the jury’s conclusion was the obvious and probably the true one, an alternative explanation might be made to cover all the known facts’. Brock’s aim was ‘to construct a case on similar lines and to fill in all the gaps’, and although Sayers felt the result ‘hovers rather curiously between the detective story and the psychological crime study’, she was impressed.