The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  Wilkinson was known as ‘Red Ellen’, a reference both to her politics and her distinctive fiery hair. During the Second World War, while serving as Parliamentary Secretary to Herbert Morrison, she also earned the nickname ‘the shelter queen’ after overseeing the distribution of ‘Morrison shelters’ to more than half a million households. In the post-war Labour government, she became Minister of Education, but she died of an overdose of barbiturates in 1947. Despite speculation that she might have committed suicide as a result of the failure of her personal relationship with Morrison, the coroner concluded that her death, which followed a period of serious ill-health, was an accident. She wrote two novels, as well as books on political subjects, but The Division Bell Mystery was her only excursion into the field of crime fiction.

  Death on the Down Beat

  by Sebastian Farr (1941)

  Music often plays in the background of detective stories, and reaches a dramatic crescendo in a handful of excellent mysteries. In The Nine Tailors (1934), Dorothy L. Sayers made bell-ringing central to both plot and theme, and she admired E.C.R. Lorac’s similar use of musical knowledge in The Organ Speaks (1935). Knowledge of Mozart’s Prague Symphony helps in solving the puzzle of Cyril Hare’s When the Wind Blows (1949), while there is a musical cryptogram in The Hymn Tune Mystery (1930) by George A. Birmingham (in real life the Rev. Canon James Owen Hannay). But Sebastian Farr’s sole foray into the genre is surely the most extraordinary of musical mysteries.

  Farr chose the epistolary form for an unusual story in which the loathsome conductor of the Maningpool Municipal Orchestra is shot dead during a performance of Strauss’ tone poem ‘A Hero’s Life’. Instead of a floor plan of a country house, the reader is provided with a diagram showing the layout of the orchestra, and no fewer than four pages of musical notation—all of which contain information relevant to the plot.

  The story is told primarily through indiscreet letters sent by Detective Inspector Alan Hope to his wife, supplemented by information from newspaper cuttings and an extensive selection of letters from members of the orchestra who might be able to cast light on the killing. The late Sir Noel Grampian had many enemies, but there are surprisingly few physical clues to the crime. Eventually, snippets of information gleaned from the documents in the case put Hope on the right track.

  The unorthodoxy of the story is appealing, although the indirect narrative method complicates the task of establishing the personalities of the chief suspects. Edmund Crispin (who under his real name Bruce Montgomery achieved distinction as a composer) was among the novel’s admirers. Nicholas Blake, in a review for the Spectator, acknowledged both the strengths and limitations of Farr’s approach: ‘Musicians will appreciate both the deductions made from the musical score and the milieu of a provincial orchestra—to say nothing of the amusing feud between Maningpool’s two music critics. The detection-fan may find the story’s tempo rather jerky and the final clues to the murderer more than sketchy.’

  Sebastian Farr’s publisher, J.M. Dent, made a mystery of who he was, as Gollancz and Benn did with the identities of Francis Iles and Glen Trevor. ‘Who is Sebastian Farr?’ was a question emblazoned on the rear cover of the dust-jacket. The blurb proclaims, with some truth, that the novel offers ‘something new in detective fiction. “Sebastian Farr” is the pen-name of a well-known musician, who is likely to find new fame as a conductor of criminal investigation. His plot is ingenious. He is, moreover, a writer of uncommon gifts. This is (forgive the pun) a farr, farr better thing than the average detective story.’

  Yet the book, like so many novels written during war-time, disappeared almost without trace, and—perhaps disappointed—Sebastian Farr never came back for an encore. In real life, he was Eric Walter Blom, who was born in German-speaking Switzerland. Blom moved to Britain, and spent his working life there, becoming a prominent music journalist and critic for many years prior to his retirement as the chief music critic of the Observer in 1954. The following year saw the publication under his editorship of the fifth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, a monumental work in nine volumes. His obituary in The Times remarked that ‘he had an almost feline wit’, but failed to mention his solitary novel. Nevertheless, the book deserves to be remembered for its originality, as well as for providing a pleasing illustration of Blom’s sense of humour and love of music.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Across the Atlantic

  Edgar Allan Poe’s first detective stories did not immediately prompt a flurry of imitations. The most successful American detective novel of the nineteenth century was The Leavenworth Case (1878) by Anna Katharine Green, dismissed by Julian Symons in his history of the genre, Bloody Murder, as ‘drearily sentimental’; although it was admired by Stanley Baldwin, Symons suggested that this tended ‘to confirm one’s gloomy view of politicians’ literary taste’.

  In the new century, Craig Kennedy, a scientist from Colombia University, created by Arthur B. Reeve was touted as ‘the American Sherlock Holmes; if anything, he bore a closer resemblance to Dr Thorndyke, but was neither as handsome nor quite as meticulous. Kennedy investigated mysteries involving such technological innovations as a lie detector, gyroscope and portable seismograph, but like all topical stories, they soon began to date. Jacques Futrelle’s Professor S.F.X. Van Dusen, tetchy and cerebral, was known as ‘The Thinking Machine’, and his cases include several of high quality prior to Futrelle’s death in the Titanic disaster. Mary Roberts Rinehart produced hugely popular ‘woman in jeopardy’ novels such as The Circular Staircase (1908), written in the literary style derided by Ogden Nash as ‘Had-I-But-Known’. Rinehart influenced countless writers of melodramatic suspense, the most gifted being Wales’ Ethel Lina White.

  Melville Davisson Post created an unscrupulous lawyer, Randolph Mason, who—like the amateur cracksman A.J. Raffles—later sided with the forces of law and order, and became less interesting as a result. Post’s major contribution to the genre was a series of historical mysteries set in rural West Virginia during the years before the American Civil War, and eventually collected in Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries (1918). Uncle Abner is guided by his deep religious faith, but he is more of a man of action than Father Brown; in ‘A Twilight Adventure’, he prevents a mob from lynching an innocent man, and lectures about the dangers of relying on circumstantial evidence. ‘The Doomdorf Mystery’ offers a celebrated example of an impossible-crime puzzle, but the enduring strength of the stories lies in their evocation of period and place.

  Ashes to Ashes (1919) by Isabel Ostrander, impressed Dorothy L. Sayers as ‘an almost unique example of the detective story told from the point of view of the hunted rather than the hunter’. Ostrander, like Futrelle, died young, and is now almost forgotten. The Bellamy Trial (1927) by Frances Noyes Hart, a highly successful mystery set during a murder trial, was admired by Julian Symons for ‘the powerful climax and the semi-hypnotic effect of the courtroom buzz upon the reader’.

  Neither Ostrander nor Hart made such an extraordinary impact on the American detective novel as S.S. Van Dine, the pen-name adopted by Willard Huntington Wright. His detective, Philo Vance, was rich, snobbish and self-consciously erudite, but the early novels in which he appeared sold in vast quantities; they made his creator—a failed literary novelist with a damaging cocaine habit—rich and famous. Vance’s first two cases were inspired by real-life crimes, and for a while, his popularity soared, aided by successful film adaptations. But Van Dine’s blend of artificiality and affectation did not provide a long-term recipe for success, and his reputation declined before his early death.

  Ellery Queen’s books, in which cleverly conceived puzzles were solved by a detective who shared his name with the author, enjoyed much greater longevity, not least because, as the years passed, they placed more emphasis on characterisation, and slightly less on intricacy of plot. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, whose long and distinguished career began with Fer de Lance
(1934), was the supreme example of the ‘armchair detective’. While he savoured beer and admired his orchid collection, his legwork was undertaken by Archie Goodwin, an energetic and engaging ‘Watson’.

  Erle Stanley Gardner’s defence lawyer Perry Mason became a household name, thanks to forty years’ worth of novels, which were adapted for radio, film and—most successfully—television. The first Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933), was published in a jigsaw edition by Harrap, a distinction shared by J.S. Fletcher’s Murder of the Only Witness (1933): the books were accompanied by jigsaw pieces which supplied a visual solution to the puzzle.

  Game-playing Golden Age mysteries were in stark contrast to the hardboiled crime stories so prevalent in the United States at much the same time. Tough American novels, often featuring private eyes, and written by authors who had served a literary apprenticeship writing for pulp magazines such as Black Mask, became so enduringly popular that it is often forgotten that elaborately plotted whodunits continued to flourish in the US prior to the Second World War.

  John Dickson Carr and C. Daly King were ingenious exponents of the impossible-crime story whose work was received with particular warmth in Britain, but there was no shortage of American writers writing impressive mysteries in the same vein, such as Clayton Rawson, Joseph Commings, Hake Talbot and Anthony Boucher. Boucher, who also wrote as H.H. Holmes, became an influential editor, critic and translator; the Bouchercon mystery convention, which flourishes to this day, is named after him. Writers such as Rufus King, Milton Propper and Todd Downing enjoyed their share of success, as did Earl Derr Biggers, creator of Charlie Chan.

  The collaborators who, in 1936, joined forces under the name Q. Patrick, Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Wheeler compiled two ‘crime dossiers’ in 1938, File on Fenton and Farr, and File on Claudia Cragg, but soon followed Ellery Queen’s lead, and adjusted their approach as reading tastes changed. They adopted a variant pseudonym, Patrick Quentin, and a more hard-bitten style, but still came up with ingenious scenarios, as in Puzzle for Fiends (1946), in which series character Peter Duluth wakes up after being attacked to find himself in unfamiliar surroundings, and being taken for someone else by people who claim to be members of his family.

  With a few exceptions, notably Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse, and Joel Townsley Rogers’ dazzling The Red Right Hand, hard-boiled novels bore scant resemblance to ingenious whodunits, with not a crossword puzzle clue in sight. The nearest equivalent to the English country house was probably the Sternwood mansion in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), in which definitive gumshoe Philip Marlowe (‘I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.’) made his debut. Chandler remains the most renowned of Hammett’s contemporaries to have emerged from the pulps, but he was in excellent company. Vivid and often violent books such as Little Caesar (1929) and High Sierra (1940) by W.R. Burnett, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1943) by James M. Cain, and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948) by Horace McCoy, all had an immediacy that made them ideal for film-makers. These were not cerebral mysteries, but novels with visceral power.

  The same was true of the ‘emotional thrillers’ of Cornell Woolrich, who also wrote as William Irish and George Hopley. Woolrich had a gift for conjuring up memorable situations. In the William Irish novel Phantom Lady (1942), an unhappy husband’s alibi for the time when his wife was murdered depends on a woman who seems not to exist. When he is sentenced to death, there is a race against time (a device at which Woolrich excelled) to prove the woman was not a phantom, and identify the real culprit. The movie versions of Woolrich’s fiction helped to define the film noir genre.

  Laura (1943) by Vera Caspary and The Big Clock (1946) by Kenneth Fearing also became superb films. In each book, the contrasting viewpoints of multiple narrators are as effective as in those very different novels, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and The Documents in the Case. Fearing was also responsible for an extraordinary novel, on the outer margins of the genre, which told a story through the voices of a bewildering number of narrators, Clark Gifford’s Body (1942), set in a future where an idealist seeks to overthrow a government controlled by Fascists. The only (remotely) comparable crime novel of the period is Bruce Hamilton’s Rex v. Rhodes: The Brighton Murder Trial (1937).

  The vast majority of the celebrated American crime writers of the first half of the twentieth century were men. But as the century’s mid-point approached, women authors made their presence felt. Chandler described Elisabeth Sanxay Holding to his publisher as ‘the top suspense writer of them all. She doesn’t pour it on and make you feel irritated. Her characters are wonderful; and she has a sort of inner calm which I find very attractive.’ He started work on a screenplay based on her The Innocent Mrs Duff (1946), but abandoned it; she enjoyed better fortune with This Reckless Moment, a film version of The Blank Wall (1947) which was loosely re-made in 2001 as The Deep End.

  Holding was far from being the only female crime novelist of distinction to emerge on the other side of the Atlantic during the Thirties and Forties. Dance of Death (1938), the dazzling debut of Helen McCloy, introduced the psychiatrist Basil Willing, whose sleuthing career lasted for more than forty years. Elizabeth Daly wrote sixteen mysteries in the classic vein; her series detective, Henry Gamadge, was an antiquarian bookseller, and her admirers included Agatha Christie.

  The first novel of Helen Eustis, The Horizontal Man (1946) was at the time of its publication hailed as a compelling and original study in morbid psychology, even though today it seems almost as dated as a mystery about murder in a manor house. Eustis did not pursue a career as a crime writer, but the enjoyable detective stories produced by Canada’s Margaret Millar during the Forties served as a prelude to a sequence of superb novels during the following decade.

  In 1950, the most influential of all American women crime writers appeared on the scene. Patricia Highsmith spent many years living in Europe, and felt she was under-appreciated in her native country, but her books were as transformational as those of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Ironically, in later life she was pleased to become one of the few Americans elected to membership of that most traditional of literary social networks, the Detection Club.

  The Dain Curse

  by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

  The Continental Op, the private eye who recounted the story of his blood-soaked foray into the gangster-cluttered town of Personville in Red Harvest (1929) returned to investigate a very different type of mystery in The Dain Curse. The earlier book concerned corrupt politicians and crooked police officers, whereas its successor is a dark, elaborate Gothic folly featuring stolen jewels, the sinister Temple of the Holy Grail and a family haunted by tragedy.

  The Op is called in to investigate the theft of diamonds from the home of Edgar Leggett, a scientist, and it quickly becomes clear that this case forms part of a much larger drama concerning Leggett’s family and spanning a quarter of a century. The first part of the story ends with the unmasking of a killer, who warns Edgar’s daughter Gabrielle: ‘you’re cursed with the same black soul and rotten blood that…all the Dains have had’. As the story twists and turns, and the body count of people close to Gabrielle continues to rise, the challenge for the Op is to defeat the Dain curse and save her.

  Both Continental Op novels began life in serial form, in the magazine Black Mask, and the episodic origins of The Dain Curse are evident from its unusual structure, which stitches together four distinct mystery stories. Hammett’s concept was admirably ambitious: he was combining a hard-boiled detective with a plot as extravagant as anything to be found in the outlandish Golden Age novels of his fellow countryman S.S. Van Dine. His execution of the concept is artistically flawed, but although the story is eccentric and melodramatic, it is also oddly compelling.

  Hammett was to dismiss the book as ‘a silly story…all
style’, and some critics have agreed with him, including one of his biographers, Julian Symons, who felt Hammett was much more at home ‘writing about gunmen, swindlers, crooks…His touch was much less sure with family curses and erotic religious cults.’ Another biographer, the crime writer William F. Nolan, was more sympathetic, arguing that this is ‘the most romantic of Hammett’s Op stories, involving symbolism, allegory and mysticism’.

  Dashiell Hammett worked for Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, and drew on his experience when he started writing fiction for magazines. For a time, he reviewed detective fiction, and he regarded Anthony Berkeley’s Roger Sheringham as ‘of all the facetious amateurs…engaged in solving mysteries that are too much for the police…the most amusing—well, anyhow, the least annoying—to me’. He thought Anthony Berkeley’s second novel, The Wychford Poisoning Case (1926), brisk and entertaining, but with an ‘unsporting’ solution. The American critic James Sandoe highlighted the coincidence that The Dain Curse, with its multiple solutions, appeared in the same year as Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case. In their contrasting ways, Hammett and Berkeley were both kicking against the stereotypes and conventions of the genre.

  The Dain Curse was swiftly followed by two memorable private-eye novels, The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Glass Key (1931). The Thin Man (1934) was lighter in tone, but also highly successful, spawning a series of popular films. Although Hammett lived for more than thirty years after the book appeared, he was dogged by alcoholism and ill-health, and never produced another novel; however, he had already achieved enough to be guaranteed literary immortality.

  The Curious Mr Tarrant

  by C. Daly King (1935)

  The Curious Mr Tarrant is one of the most renowned collections of stories focusing primarily on impossible crimes. Ellery Queen described the eight ‘episodes’ narrated by Jerry Phelan, who acts as Watson to Trevis Tarrant’s Holmes, as ‘in many ways the most imaginative stories of our time’. King’s work illustrates the truth that, alongside the more acclaimed ‘hard-boiled’ crime fiction of the era, some of the most remarkable Golden Age mysteries were written by American authors. Yet this book’s publishing history is as unorthodox as the stories it contains; despite being greeted with acclaim in some quarters, it was not even published in the United States until 1977.