The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Sayers was less taken with After the Fact (1935), based on the unsolved Luard case of 1908, in which Brock ‘reproduces the circumstances of the actual murder…but…provides a solution of his own, quite extraneous to the facts of the real case and not intended to elucidate them’. The Browns of the Yard (1952) is a post-war novel, featuring three generations of detectives, who grapple successively with a Victorian mystery reminiscent of the Constance Kent case.

  The Franchise Affair

  by Josephine Tey (1948)

  The Franchise is a large, isolated country house, recently inherited by Marion Sharpe and her elderly mother, but this story is a far cry from the country-house murder mysteries so common a few years earlier. Indeed, the book is a rare example of a successful crime novel which lacks a murder. Fifteen-year old Elisabeth Kane accuses the Sharpes of kidnap. She claims they attempted to force her, by whipping and starvation, to work as their maid, and her account seems, thanks to supporting circumstantial evidence, to have the ring of truth, but Marion Sharpe engages a staid but kindly local lawyer, Robert Blair, to defend her and her mother, and he becomes convinced of their innocence.

  As well as dispensing with a murder, Tey also relegates her series detective, Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, to a walk-on part, while Blair occupies centre stage. But the risks she takes pay off. Suspense mounts as Blair battles against the odds on his clients’ behalf, but the book owes its outstanding reputation to Tey’s flair for compelling depiction of human character. The ending is compassionate but realistic; Tey realised that a book as strong as this deserved something more thoughtful than a facile happy-ever-after resolution.

  The book was filmed in 1951, with Michael Denison as Blair, and has been televised twice, most recently in 1988 with Patrick Malahide in the lead. The plot’s origins lay in the strange case of Elizabeth Canning, a maidservant of eighteen who disappeared for almost a month in 1853, and claimed that she had been held against her will in a hay loft. Two of her alleged captors, Mary Squires and Susannah Wells, were put on trial and convicted, but an investigation by Sir Crisp Gascoyne, the Lord Mayor of London, established that Canning’s accusations were false. She was found ‘guilty of perjury, but not wilful and corrupt’, and was transported to Connecticut.

  The case provoked a public furore, and Canning’s disappearance was never conclusively explained. Three years before Tey’s novel appeared, the American author Lillian de la Torre, best known for her short stories featuring Dr Samuel Johnson as a detective, wrote up the case in Elizabeth is Missing (1945). An earlier book about the case, The Canning Wonder (1925), was written by the Welsh author and mystic Arthur Machen.

  Josephine Tey was a much less prolific detective novelist than most of her contemporaries. A Scot who spent much of her life caring for an invalid father, her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, As Gordon Daviot, she carved a distinct reputation as a playwright, and in 1932, John Gielgud made his name in the title role of her most successful play, Richard of Bordeaux. Tey’s first detective novel, The Man in the Queue (1929) introduced Alan Grant, and initially appeared under the Daviot name. Grant returned in A Shilling for Candles (1936), although he did not feature in Alfred Hitchcock’s film version, Young and Innocent, which bore minimal resemblance to the novel. In all, Tey published a mere eight crime novels, with the last, The Singing Sands, appearing posthumously in 1952. Nevertheless, the quality of her writing has ensured that her work has remained popular. The Daughter of Time (1951) sees Grant conducting a cold-case investigation into the alleged misdemeanours of King Richard III, and is one of the most celebrated novels concerned with real-life crime.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Singletons

  The puzzle of why a novelist, having ventured into detective fiction with success, never repeats the trick is sometimes easily solved, but is occasionally perplexing. Several classic crime novels are ‘singletons’, written by authors who only contributed a solitary, but memorable, novel to the genre. Tracks in the Snow is a striking example from the Edwardian era, with A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery a famous singleton from the early phase of the Golden Age.

  The Clue of the Postage Stamp by Arthur Bray (1913), subtitled ‘A tale of love and adventure’, is an exceptionally rare novel eagerly sought (but almost always in vain; there is not even a copy in the British Library) by philatelists as well as by collectors of crime fiction. The book was published in London and Dublin in a binding of pictorially printed paper-covered boards; it bore a fake postage stamp on the front, an innovative gimmick. Nothing is known of Bray, or whether the name was a pseudonym.

  S.R. Crockett’s The Azure Hand is an unusual singleton: the novel was published posthumously in 1917, and may have been written as much as a decade earlier. Crockett was, in his Victorian hey-day, a popular Scottish author, and may have ventured into crime fiction in the hope of maintaining a wide readership as tastes in fiction changed; if so, it is unclear why the book did not appear during his lifetime.

  Several authors of distinction tried their hand at detective fiction early in their careers, before turning their attention elsewhere. T.H. White and James Hilton are among those who wrote enjoyable singleton detective stories before moving on. The popularity of their later work justifies their abandonment of the genre, and the same could be said of C.P. Snow, whose Death Under Sail stood alone until, at the end of a long and distinguished career, he returned to crime writing, but with a very different kind of whodunit. The trouble was that A Coat of Varnish (1979) lacked the zest of his youthful jeu d’esprit.

  John Beynon introduced Detective Inspector Jordon of New Scotland Yard in his light thriller Foul Play Suspected (1935), but although he wrote two more books featuring the same character, Murder Means Murder and Death Upon Death were rejected by a host of publishers both before and after the Second World War, and never saw the light of day. Beynon, whose full name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, became disillusioned, and he argued in John O’London’s Weekly in 1954 that science fiction would replace detective stories: ‘There has been too much murder going on for too long …The present outbreak of rockets may be seen as the assault weapons softening up the detectives.’ His crystal ball may have malfunctioned on that occasion, but he had already become a bestseller after reinventing himself as John Wyndham, the name under which he published sci-fi novels such as The Day of the Triffids (1951).

  House Party Murder (1933) by Colin Ward was published both in Britain—under the estimable imprint of Collins Crime Club—and the US, achieving a good enough reception to justify a follow-up, but the author promptly slipped back into obscurity. The same was true of Gathorne Cookson, an accountant whose sole venture into the genre, Murder Pays No Dividends (1938) exploited his professional understanding of financial shenanigans.

  Sometimes authors wrote follow-up mysteries that publishers rejected; sometimes, as with the Johns, the husband and wife team responsible for Death by Request, life simply got in the way. Ivy Low published her solitary detective story, His Master’s Voice under her maiden name in 1930. Fourteen years earlier, she had married a revolutionary exile from Russia, Maxim Litvinov, and after he became the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs under Stalin in the year of the book’s appearance, her brief career as a crime writer came to a full stop.

  Well-written and entertaining, The Mummy Case (1933) was an Oxford mystery which might have launched a successful crime writing career, but Dermot Morrah opted to concentrate on writing leader articles for The Times and books about (and speeches for) senior members of the Royal Family. Murder at Liberty Hall (1941), set in a progressive school, was a solitary venture into detection by Alan Clutton-Brock, who is not to be confused with the author of Earth to Ashes. Clutton-Brock also wrote for The Times, serving as its art critic for a decade from 1945. He became Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge in 1955; in the same year inherited Chastleton House, a Jacobean mansion in Oxfordshire now
in the care of the National Trust, but seems not to have been tempted to return to the genre with a ‘murder at the manor’ mystery.

  Stanley Casson’s Murder by Burial (1938) offers insights into archaeology benefiting from the author’s expertise; they compensate for a flimsy plot based on a real-life accident involving two prominent archaeologists at Colchester in 1931. Stanley Casson was a director of the British Academy Excavations at Constantinople and also a Fellow of New College, Oxford. Rather more renowned than his solitary excursion into crime writing is the occasion when his famously absent-minded colleague the Reverend William Archibald Spooner invited him to tea to welcome ‘Stanley Casson, our new archaeology fellow’. When Casson pointed out that he was Stanley Casson, Spooner said, ‘Never mind. Come all the same.’

  Ellen Wilkinson was already a high-profile political campaigner at the time The Division Bell Mystery appeared. Even better known at the time she produced Twice Round the Clock in 1935 was Billie Houston. Houston was such a celebrity that two photographs of her appeared on the front of the book’s dust-jacket. Born in Renfrewshire as Sarah McMahon Gribbin, she and her sister Katherina Valarita Veronica Murphey Gribbin (who prudently changed her name to Renée Houston) formed a music hall act called the Houston Sisters. Singing, dancing and telling jokes (usually with Billie in drag), the duo enjoyed immense popularity for a decade and a half; they even appeared in a short musical film produced with an accompanying soundtrack a year before the first genuine ‘talking picture’, The Jazz Singer.

  Houston’s novel is a country-house murder mystery, with a prologue featuring the discovery of the corpse of a repellent scientist, followed by an account of the build-up to the crime, and then by the story of its unravelling; a structure of this kind was also adopted by Henry Wade in his masterly novel of police procedure, Lonely Magdalen (1940). Houston planned and wrote her story ‘in many dressing-rooms all over the country’, and the book was said by her publishers to be product of ‘a life-long ambition and an absorbing interest in criminology, and its success may mean to its author more than the thunderous applause from a packed theatre’. The joy of achieving publication proved short-lived. In 1938, after one matrimonial quarrel too many, Houston’s actor husband Richard Cowper killed himself by drinking poison. She subsequently married a distinguished Australian journalist, and pursued a new life of quiet domesticity, giving up both the stage and crime writing; her sister Renée became a well-known actor, appearing in such diverse films as A Town Like Alice and Carry On at Your Convenience.

  Rarely, a singleton is the product of a novelist who has already established a reputation. Gory Knight (1937) was produced by not one but two successful writers, Margaret Rivers Larminie and Jane Langslow. The authors spoof a quartet of Great Detectives—Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, Reggie Fortune, Dr Priestley—as well as Inspector French. The four famous sleuths are invited separately by the nephews and nieces of Miss Pyke, who want her to see what a ‘real’ detective is like. The central mystery concerns the disappearance of a cook, and although the plot is too lightly boiled to justify the length of the book, the agreeable prose reflects the joint authors’ way with words. Margaret Rivers Larminie was a champion badminton player and a popular novelist, but not—other than with this book—in the field of detective fiction. Her work includes The Visiting Moon (1932), a witty novel about people in unhappy marriages. Jane Langslow was an unfamiliar name even when Gory Knight appeared. This is because it is a pseudonym, a family name concealing the identity of Larminie’s half-sister, Maud Diver, another successful writer of mainstream fiction. Diver was born in the Himalayas, and spent many years in India; colonial life in the sub-continent supplied the background for much of her fiction. At the time Gory Knight appeared, both Maud Diver and Margaret Rivers Larminie were past their peak as novelists. They amused themselves with a gentle send-up, unusual if not unique as a detective story co-written by half-sisters. But they never repeated their experiment in crime.

  Darkness at Pemberley

  by T.H. White (1932)

  ‘Originality in detection seems impossible in 1932,’ proclaimed the front cover of the dust-jacket for the first edition of Darkness at Pemberley, ‘but doesn’t this blend of the “scientific” detective story and the thriller—by a poet, who can therefore write English prose—achieve it?’ The boldness of this rhetorical question was characteristic of Victor Gollancz, who published many of the most remarkable detective novels of the Thirties, although the claim to originality is dissipated by the additional promise that ‘The climax is a thrilling chase across England in high-powered cars.’

  Flawed yet fascinating, eccentric and extraordinary, the novel uniquely fuses divergent types of fiction. Not content with combining a locked-room puzzle and a bizarre manhunt, White blends an Oxbridge college setting with a country estate background familiar from Pride and Prejudice. The novel’s verve, energy and unevenness mark it as the work of a young, inexperienced author, but the calibre of writing presages a distinguished literary career.

  An unpleasant don called Beedon is found shot in his locked room in St Bernard’s College, Cambridge. The corpse of an undergraduate is also discovered, and the case appears to involve murder followed by suicide. The story’s initial impression of conventionality is supported by the inclusion of three plans of the crime scene. The crime is suitably ingenious, but Inspector Buller solves the case rapidly, and confronts the culprit. He is rewarded with a prompt confession—in private: ‘I’m sorry to drag you out. Walls have ears, you know…and we scientific criminals get to be a little pernickety.’ The bad news is that although the villain has killed three times in quick succession, Buller is quite unable to prove his guilt.

  Disheartened, Buller resigns from the police force, and travels to Derbyshire to meet two old friends. At Pemberley, he tells the lovely Elizabeth Darcy (descended from ‘the famous Elizabeth’) and her brother Charles the story of his disastrous last case. Charles has personal experience of bitter injustice, and attempts—unsuccessfully—to take the law into his own hands. Like so many crime writers in the Thirties, White was intrigued by the moral conundrums arising when the legal system fails to secure justice. Buller and the Darcys find themselves menaced by a deranged yet infinitely cunning murderer, and the story takes several wildly improbable turns as the characters become increasingly embroiled in what Elizabeth describes as ‘this Four-Just-Men business’. Preposterous as the story becomes, it fulfils Gollancz’s promise of originality.

  Terence Hanbury White, known as ‘Tim’ to many friends, read English at Queen’s College, Cambridge, which is fictionalised as St Bernard’s. He worked as a schoolteacher, and experimented with different genres. He co-wrote with Ronald McNair Scott, a light thriller called Dead Mr Nixon (1931), while an impossible crime mystery plays a small part in one of the stories told in Gone to Ground (1935), an eccentric novel subtitled A Sporting Decamero. His breakthrough came when he published The Sword in the Stone (1938), a tale of the boyhood of King Arthur. The book eventually formed part of the sequence of Arthurian novels known as The Once and Future King, which provided source material for the Lerner and Loewe stage musical and film Camelot, and influenced J.K. Rowling’s stories about Harry Potter.

  The Division Bell Mystery

  by Ellen Wilkinson (1936)

  A remarkable number of Golden Age detective stories were set in the world of Westminster, presumably because politicians made such popular murder victims. None, however, benefited from as much inside knowledge of the Parliament’s corridors of power as The Division Bell Mystery, whose author was a former MP and future minister.

  The Home Secretary has a dinner meeting with a shady money-man called Oissel, but is required to abandon his guest when summoned by the Commons division bell. During his short absence, Oissel is shot. At first, suicide is suspected, but the police—and Oissel’s beautiful daughter Annette—are convinced that he did not kill himself.

  Rob
ert West, a young Conservative MP and Parliamentary Private Secretary, is desperate to protect his party’s reputation and hold on power. He is entranced by Annette, and decides to play the detective. The story becomes a race against time—the mystery needs to be solved before scandal results in the government’s collapse.

  West is aided, and sometimes obstructed, by a variety of characters—an old friend, a likeable journalist, a stolid policeman, a suave financier, and a society hostess. The rapid shifts of scene and succession of plot developments help to move the story along at a rapid lick. Fair play is not a conspicuous feature of the slightly anti-climactic solution, and the reader is left bemused by the incompetence of the original investigation of the crime scene, but otherwise the book is thoroughly entertaining. Wilkinson’s readable style is characteristic of a gifted communicator, and she presents West sympathetically, even though her outlook on the world was very different from his.

  Ellen Cicely Wilkinson was born in Manchester to working class parents. She trained as a teacher and embraced socialism during her teens, becoming national officer for a trade union in 1915, and a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, while remaining a member of the Labour Party. In 1924, having left the CPGB, she was elected to Parliament, and she remained an MP until 1931, when Labour was routed in the general election. She returned to Westminster as Member for Jarrow four years later, and was closely associated with the Jarrow March of 1936.