Thorpe Hazell was another eccentric Great Detective. Hazell is a specialist railway detective, a vegetarian and health fanatic. After solving the puzzle of ‘Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture’, he declines Sir Gilbert’s offer of a cooked lunch. He has already ordered lentils and salad to eat at a railway station, and starts to perform his ‘physical training ante-luncheon exercises’. As the bewildered baronet watches him ‘whirling his arms like a windmill’, Hazell explains, ‘Digestion should be considered before a meal.’ He was created by Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch, rural dean of Aylesbury and an honorary canon of Christ Church. Whitechurch was supposedly the first detective story writer to devote such care to his description of police procedure that he checked the authenticity of his manuscripts with Scotland Yard.
Sayers believed detective fiction should never become predictable. She felt Baroness Orczy’s stories became formulaic, and perhaps Orczy came to the same conclusion. After making a fortune from her historical melodramas featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, she moved away from writing detective fiction, although she was a loyal member of the Detection Club. Orczy was born Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orczi, in Hungary. Her father, Baron Felix Orczy, was a composer and a friend of Liszt, but disgruntled workers set his crops and farm buildings on fire when he introduced farm machinery, and the family fled when she was three. They lived in Budapest, Brussels and Paris, before moving to London, where she learned English and studied painting. She married an English illustrator, and the couple translated children’s stories together. Orczy published detective short stories before concentrating on the Pimpernel, alias Sir Percy Blakeney, who helped French aristocrats to escape from the Revolution.
Orczy created two detectives as different from Sherlock as could be. Bill Owen, the enigmatic Old Man in the Corner, sits in the ABC Teashop on the corner of Norfolk Street and the Strand, fiddling with a piece of string as he unravels criminal puzzles on the basis of what he has read in newspaper reports and from occasional visits to court. He enjoys a contentious relationship with his ‘Watson’, Polly Burton, a young journalist. In the final story, it appears that the Old Man himself is the culprit.
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard is a collection starring Molly Robertson-Kirk, whose unique selling point as a detective is her ability is to use her domestic experience to spot clues that would elude a man. Yet the stories would make any feminist despair. Lady Molly has risen to the top of the ‘female department’ at Scotland Yard motivated solely by the urge to save her falsely convicted fiancé from prison. Having achieved her aim, she duly marries him, and retires from the force to spend more time in the kitchen and bedroom.
Sayers had no time for Lady Molly, and lamented the way fictional female detectives relied on intuition rather than their experience of the world. A brilliant female detective, Sayers reluctantly concluded, had yet to be created. There was a huge gap in the market, waiting for Agatha Christie to fill it with Miss Jane Marple. In the meantime, Sherlock Holmes’ most memorable rival was the unlikeliest – a diminutive Roman Catholic priest called Father Brown.
On a blustery March morning in 1904, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who had given a lecture in Keighley the night before, tramped across the Yorkshire moors to the house where his wife was staying. By his side was a recent acquaintance, a priest called Father John O’Connor. They made an odd couple – Chesterton, six feet four and twenty-one stone, dwarfed the priest – but they enjoyed each other’s company, and their conversation ranged far and wide. Lunacy, the problem of vagrancy, and the burning of heretics, as they headed towards Ilkley Moor. The shortcomings of Zola and anti-clericalism as they climbed the slope of Morton Bank. To keep out the cold, they recited ballads, and on the high moorland, they burst into song. When they reached Ilkley, they met two Cambridge students, who patronized the humble priest. But Chesterton realized that Father O’Connor had fought ‘solid Satanism’ all his life, and in comparison, the undergraduates were ‘two babies in the same perambulator’. From that unforgettable day sprang the idea for Father Brown, whose deep understanding of evil makes him a detective of extraordinary insight, and who is all the more formidable because he is so easy to underestimate, with his umbrella, brown parcels and inoffensive manner.
G. K. Chesterton never stopped coming up with ideas, and Father Brown was the best of them. He and E. C. Bentley met at St Paul’s School in London at the age of twelve, and formed a lifelong friendship. Bentley said Chesterton ‘was by nature the happiest boy and man I have ever known’. A larger-than-life character, fond of wearing a cape and crumpled hat, and carrying a swordstick, Chesterton wrote dozens of books and contributed to many more, besides producing hundreds of poems, a couple of hundred short stories, five plays, and more than four thousand articles for newspapers and magazines. Some of his views have stood the test of time, others now seem eccentric and questionable. Yet the strength of his spiritual values has caused Pope Francis to regard him as a potential candidate for sainthood.
In 1922, Chesterton published Eugenics and Other Evils (the title speaks for itself) in the face of a tide of contrary opinion. As the reality of Nazism became clear, ‘progressive’ backers of eugenics melted away, and Chesterton was vindicated. His natural sympathy for the underdog meant that during the Boer War, he was pro-Boer, while he detested imperialism. In partnership with the essayist and former Liberal MP Hilaire Belloc, he advocated ‘distributism’, an airy-fairy concept based on the notion that accumulation of capital should become the occupation of the many rather than the few. This was in keeping with Douglas and Margaret Cole’s enthusiasm for Guild Socialism, but the distributists saw ‘Jewish bankers’ as part of the problem facing society, and this led to accusations of anti-Semitism. The danger of pouring opinions endlessly into print is that not all of them stand up to scrutiny, especially after the passage of time.
Chesterton was on safer ground when he wrote his essay ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’, arguing that the detective story ‘is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life’. That reference to poetry is significant. From Poe onwards, a strikingly high proportion of detective novelists have also been poets. They are drawn to each form by its structural challenges.
As for the work of the detective, Chesterton wrote: ‘The whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry.’ This is not so far away from Raymond Chandler’s honourable private eye prowling the mean streets, neither tarnished nor afraid.
The Innocence of Father Brown, a collection of twelve stories, appeared in 1911. Whereas Sherlock Holmes specialized in deductive reasoning and used scientific aids – fingerprinting, microscope and magnifying glass – to investigate crime, Father Brown is intuitive. He relies on philosophy and his knowledge of sin to solve mysteries. Holmes had his Watson, but the little priest had God on his side. The starting point of a story is often a clever puzzle – in ‘The Hammer of God’, for instance, the question is how a man’s skull could be smashed to bits by a tiny hammer – but the real force of the tales lies in a pungent moral or social precept. In ‘The Blue Cross’, Father Brown recognises that the disguised criminal, Flambeau, is not a priest because he attacks reason, which is ‘bad theology’.
In ‘The Queer Feet’, Father Brown makes a witty and telling point about social class: ‘It must be very hard work to be a gentleman, but, do you know, I have sometimes thought was it may be almost as laborious to be a waiter.’ Similarly, in ‘The Invisible Man’, a story of an apparently impossible murder, Father Brown realises that the culprit is mentally invisible: ‘Nobody ever notices a postman, somehow, yet they have passions like other men.’ In ‘The Mistake of the Machine’, Father Brown shows contempt for the newly fashionable lie-detector, which he thought as valuable as ‘that interesting idea in the Dark Ages that blood would flow from a corpse if the murderer touched it’.
Chesterton was not a Cathol
ic when he started writing about Father Brown, but was received into the Catholic Church in 1922. The cost of launching G.K.’s Weekly, a personal soapbox, prompted him to resurrect Father Brown, just as Conan Doyle’s desire to fund work in the field of spiritualism caused him to write further Sherlock Holmes stories. Chesterton had prudently avoided hurling his detective into a waterfall, and attributed the priest’s long absence to years spent working in South America.
The Incredulity of Father Brown appeared in the same year as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but although Chesterton and Christie both displayed a flair for misdirection, they were very different writers. Poirot’s Catholicism is incidental, and Christie never allowed theological argument to interrupt the careful unravelling of her puzzles, even when her subject was murder at the vicarage. Father Brown has more in common with Jane Marple than with Poirot. Like the priest, the spinster from St Mary Mead relies on a deep understanding of human nature, coupled with an unassuming personality which keeps criminals off their guard. Just as the quality of the Sherlock Holmes stories sank after his disappearance at the Reichenbach Falls, so the later Father Brown stories made less impact than their predecessors. Chesterton could not help preaching, but detective fiction and didacticism seldom mix well.
Like Chesterton, E. C. Bentley came up with his best story while walking – although on his own, and over a period of six to eight weeks. He lived in Hampstead, and it took him an hour to stride to Fleet Street, where he worked as a political journalist. Commuting each day on foot, he worked out the storyline of Trent’s Last Case. He wrote the book at a standing-up desk, because he disliked the idea of a sedentary occupation, and the only place where he could stand up to write was in his own house. The novel achieved a success Bentley never repeated. Yet it is no mean feat to have changed the course of detective fiction history. And that is what Trent’s Last Case did.
As a schoolboy, Edmund Clerihew Bentley devised a simple verse form, to which he gave his middle name. In 1905, he published a selection of ‘clerihews’, with illustrations by Chesterton, under the name ‘E. Clerihew’. Typically, a clerihew is biographical and whimsical, comprising four lines of irregular length and the rhyme structure AABB. For all their inherent limitations, clerihews have never gone completely out of fashion, with examples composed by writers as diverse as W. H. Auden and Spike Milligan. Bentley even wrote a clerihew about Sayers:
Miss Dorothy Sayers
Never cared about the Himalayas
The height that gave her a thrill
Was Primrose Hill.
Bentley’s son Nicolas, an illustrator and occasional crime writer, accompanied the verse with a caricature of her, but privately Sayers expressed her dissatisfaction: ‘It makes me all chin and no forehead, whereas in fact I am all head and no features, like a tadpole.’
In 1910, Bentley decided ‘to write a detective story of a new sort’. He intended a swipe against a lack of realism in the portrayal of fictional Great Detectives like Holmes: ‘It should be possible, I thought, to write a detective story in which the detective was recognizable as a human being.’ His aim was to make ‘the hero’s hard-won and obviously correct solution of the mystery turn out to be completely wrong. Why not show up the infallibility of the Holmesian method?’ Readers took Trent’s Last Case at face value, not caring that it was meant to be ‘not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories’. The book became an immediate and an enduring success, and has been filmed three times.
Bentley did more than mock literary convention. He stumbled across a format for the twisting mystery, a blend of game-playing and mental gymnastics that still fascinates readers in the twenty-first century. His ground-breaking experiment inspired a new generation of writers who turned to detective fiction once ‘the war to end wars’ was over. They found that the length of a novel offered much greater scope for elaborately plotted whodunits. Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown (as well as Martin Hewitt, Thorpe Hazell, and Lady Molly) enjoyed their finest hours in short stories. The plots were too slender to sustain full-length novels. In the hands of Detection Club members during the Golden Age, the novel at last became the natural form for the detective story. It has remained so ever since.
The phrase ‘Golden Age of detective fiction’, coined in 1939, has stuck. Yet opinions vary about how long the Golden Age lasted, as well as whether it really was as golden as admirers claim. Julian Symons thought it logical to define the Golden Age as the period between the two world wars, and it is difficult to argue. Of course, Christie and her disciples continued to produce new books, and enjoy much success, long after that time, but most of the classic detective fiction appeared between the wars. To begin with, many Detection Club members treated their novels like a game, and consciously tried to ‘play fair’ with their readers. Before long, subversives like Berkeley found it was more exciting to break the rules.
Notes to Chapter 7
her essay introducing the first volume of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror
Sayers’ essay remains among the most insightful examinations of the genre’s development. Other influential studies are listed in the Select Bibliography.
his essay ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’
The essay first appeared in ‘The Speaker’ in October 1901, and was included in Chesterton, The Defendant (London: Johnson, 1902).
Bentley decided ‘to write a detective story of a new sort’
He described planning and writing the book in Those Days.
Part Two
The Rules of the Game
Ask A Policeman, the second book from the Detection Club, published by Arthur Barker in 1933.
8
Setting a Good Example to the Mafia
The Golden Age detective novel was not dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton, yet readers might be forgiven for thinking otherwise. In Trent’s Last Case, Philip Trent refers to ‘detective sportsmanship’, and the notion of playing by the rules of the game in detective fiction was not new even then. The prominent Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, author of a Victorian locked room classic, The Big Bow Mystery (which features a Scotland Yard detective with the marvellous name of Wimp) argued that everything in the solution must derive logically from clues already given to the reader.
One of the earliest detective novelists to focus on ‘fair play’ was the old Etonian Lord Gorell, who had a spell as Under-Secretary of State for Air in David Lloyd George’s government before defecting to the Labour Party. He gave a clue to his strengths and limitations in the title of his autobiography, One Man, Many Parts. A jack of all trades, yes, but it would be harsh to dismiss Gorell as a master of none.
Ronald Gorell Barnes was the second son of a High Court judge who received a peerage. During the war, his bravery earned him the Military Cross, but his career as an infantry officer ended when a German machine gunner shot him in the leg. His elder brother, who inherited the title, was killed not long after winning a DSO on the Somme, and Ronald became the third Baron Gorell in 1917. In the same year, he published his first crime novel, In the Night.
Gorell (like Arthur Conan Doyle before him) was a good enough cricketer to play at first-class level. For people of his station in society, whatever their political views, the sport was idealized as exemplifying high moral standards in action. Cheating simply ‘was not cricket’. During the Golden Age, cricket mattered, and so did the idea that one should play by the rules – and abide by their spirit. In the early Thirties, when an England team touring Australia intimidated and injured opposing batsmen with fast bowling that was regarded as unsporting, it sparked an international diplomatic incident. The English euphemism for these tactics was ‘leg theory’; the Australians called the bowling ‘bodyline’. The West Indian cricket writer and Marxist C. L. R. James went so far as to argue that the ‘Bodyline Affair’ signalled ‘the decline of the West’.
Gorell’s aim was ‘to deal fairly with its readers … Every essential fact is related as it is disc
overed and readers are, as far as possible, given the eyes of the investigators and equal opportunities with them of arriving at the truth.’ He supplied a floor plan of the crime scene, the kind of garnish that became a familiar ingredient of Golden Age novels. An unpleasant elderly businessman is bludgeoned to death in his own country house, and the apparent solution is that ‘the butler did it’, but Gorell offers a neat final twist and an unexpected culprit. He wrote occasional crime novels until the Fifties, but never surpassed In the Night.
Alan Alexander Milne, another cricket lover, wrote only one detective novel, The Red House Mystery, but it enjoyed enormous popularity. Again the setting was an English country house. A family black sheep recently returned from Australia is found shot dead in a locked library and two guests, Antony Gillingham and his friend Bill Beverley, decide it would be fun to ape Holmes and Watson. Even at this early point, the tropes of the detective story are gently guyed, and Antony says, ‘I oughtn’t to explain ’til the last chapter, but I always think that’s so unfair.’ One chapter is called ‘Mr Gillingham Talks Nonsense’, which captures the spirit of the enterprise. A. A. Milne was, like Berkeley, a regular contributor to Punch, and became assistant editor. He was an early screenwriter for the British film industry, as well as a prolific playwright, and two years after The Red House Mystery appeared, he immortalized his son Christopher Robin in Winnie-the-Pooh.
For all its associations with sportsmanship, cricket is governed by complicated laws, and Milne reckoned that if the detective novel was a game, readers and writers needed to know the rules. When The Red House Mystery was reprinted, he set out half a dozen key points:
The Golden Age of Murder Page 12