The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  The story should be written in good English.

  Love interest is undesirable.

  Both detective and villain should be amateurs.

  Scientific detection is ‘too easy’.

  The reader should know as much as the detective.

  There should be a Watson: it is better for the detective ‘to watsonize’ than soliloquize.

  Even T. S. Eliot took a stab at devising rules for detective stories. Thus, ‘disguises must only be occasional and incidental,’ ‘elaborate and bizarre machinery is an irrelevance,’ and ‘the detective should be highly intelligent but not superhuman.’ Eliot was a stickler for fair play: ‘We should feel that we have a sporting chance to solve the mystery ourselves.’

  This idea of rules of the game was taken to extremes on the other side of the Atlantic. Using the pen name S. S. Van Dine, the American aesthete Willard Huntington Wright wrote ornately plotted detective novels starring the smug gentleman sleuth Philo Vance. Like Crofts and Douglas Cole, Van Dine turned to crime fiction during a period of illness, although in his case the cause was a secret cocaine habit. His literary addiction was to overdoing things, and he came up with no fewer than twenty rules for writers.

  Van Dine’s rules, like Milne’s, banned ‘love interest’, and he also decreed that the detective should never be the culprit. Depressingly, he argued that: ‘A detective novel should contain … no subtly worked-out character analyses, no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations … They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyse it, and bring it to a successful conclusion.’ Sayers proved more far-sighted, but both writers shared a fascination with unsolved murders, and Van Dine’s debut, The Benson Murder Case, was inspired by a killing that came closer than any other to supplying a real-life locked room mystery.

  Shortly after half past eight on a warm June morning in 1920, a housekeeper called Marie Larsen arrived at the Manhattan home of her employer, Joseph Bowne Elwell. The front double doors were locked, but she had a key and let herself in. An inner door was also locked, and again she opened it. Making her way into the reception room, she found Elwell sitting in an upright armchair, wearing only red silk pyjamas. His eyes were shut, but his mouth was open, as he fought noisily for breath. Although a vain man, he was wearing neither his toupee nor his dentures. She saw a cone-shaped bullet hole in his forehead, with blood trickling from it. He died without giving a clue to his killer’s identity.

  Elwell was a well-known man-about-town in Jazz Age New York. Nicknamed ‘the Wizard of Whist’, he was the most famous bridge-player of his day, and a leading teacher of the game to pupils including King Edward VII. A gambler, racehorse owner, unofficial ‘spy-catcher’, and dealer in bootleg liquor, he was also an energetic ‘chicken chaser’ (that is, philanderer). This multi-faceted life supplied so many possible motives for murder that the police were spoiled for choice. Was the culprit an abandoned mistress, a cuckolded husband, someone Elwell had cheated at cards, a fellow bootlegger, or the agent of a foreign power?

  Nobody was ever convicted of the crime, and there was probably a disappointingly mundane explanation for the ‘locked room’ aspect of the case. Some police officers suspected the killer slipped inside the house when the doors were opened to admit the postman. The likeliest murderer was Walter Lewisohn, a disturbed man jealous of Elwell’s interest in a beautiful dancer called Leonora Hughes, described in her publicity as ‘the dimpled wisp of grace from Flatbush’. Four years after the murder, Lewisohn was diagnosed with chronic delusional insanity and confined to a sanatorium for the rest of his life. Leonora enjoyed better luck, marrying an Argentinian known as ‘the Cattle Croesus’ because of his fabulous wealth, and living in luxury until her death in Buenos Aires in 1978.

  As for Elwell, his lifestyle is said to have influenced F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characterisation of Jay Gatsby, while the colossal success of The Benson Murder Case led to a string of bestsellers featuring Philo Vance. For The Canary Murder Case, Van Dine fictionalised another unsolved murder – the killing by chloroform of Dot King, hostess of a New York speakeasy. The Vance stories were filmed, and inspired a host of lucrative spin-offs, including a Philo Vance cocktail and a Canary ice-cream sundae.

  Van Dine’s fellow American writers of detective stories in the Golden Age style included Rufus King, Milton Propper, Todd Downing, and the psychologist and creator of super-elaborate whodunits, C. Daly King (whom Sayers called ‘a highbrow of highbrows’, her idea of the ultimate compliment.) The names of Q. Patrick, Jonathan Stagge and Patrick Quentin were used over the years by four writers in all – two men, two women – who between them produced a long run of high-calibre mysteries. The Grindle Nightmare, co-written by Richard Wilson Webb and Mary Louise Aswell, is a stunning example of Golden Age noir, complete with the killing and maiming of a child and animals. Sayers found the book disturbing, and no wonder.

  American fans of classic detective fiction who tried their hand at the genre included such unlikely figures as Georges Antheil, the avant-garde composer and author of an ‘impossible crime’ mystery, Death in the Dark (edited in the UK by T. S. Eliot for Faber) and Gertrude Stein, whose output included both Blood on the Dining Room Floor and an essay called ‘Why I Like Detective Stories’.

  The towering figure among American Golden Age writers was Ellery Queen, a pseudonym used by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, two cousins whom The Benson Murder Case inspired to write mysteries themselves. They heightened the interactive nature of ‘fair play’ novels by including ‘formal challenges to the reader’ to guess whodunit once all the clues had been supplied. Dannay and Lee were, like Sayers, shrewd and imaginative when it came to marketing. They also wrote as Barnaby Ross, and they publicized their books through a series of debates in which Lee pretended to be Queen while Dannay posed as Ross. Both wore black domino masks with ruffles underneath, so their faces could not be seen. Rumour-mongers claimed that Queen was really Van Dine, while Ross was said to be the critic and raconteur Alexander Woollcott, who later became Anthony Berkeley’s bête noire.

  A myth has grown up that Golden Age detective fiction was an essentially British form of escapism in response to the First World War, an effete counterpart to the tough and realistic crime fiction produced in the United States. Pulp magazine stories grew rapidly in popularity during the Twenties, as gifted writers such as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Chandler emerged. Hammett’s first two crime novels appeared in 1929, and The Maltese Falcon followed as the Detection Club was becoming established. Yet the distinction often drawn between the two countries is simplistic. In the US, tough guys and traditionalists co-existed until the Second World War.

  The key difference between the two countries, according to the American critic Howard Haycraft, was ‘the existence of the highly honourable company of the Detection Club … a virtual Academy of the genre … and constituting a goal and reward for ambitious newcomers’. Haycraft believed the Club gave British writers ‘one inestimable advantage denied to their American brethren’ – and to their colleagues in continental Europe, he might have added if crime fiction in translation had been as popular then as it is today.

  Is this why British Golden Age writers enjoyed greater success and had a more lasting influence than authors writing in a similar style in the US and elsewhere? The Detection Club fostered a collegiate spirit which buttressed members’ determination to try out fresh ideas – and to keep going in the face of the disappointments which are part and parcel of a writer’s life. Members did more than simply respect tradition – they were constantly challenging each other to take the genre to a higher level. As a result, they developed detective fiction in ways that lasted much longer than anyone expected.

  Britain’s leading standard-bearer for the principle of fair play in detective fiction was Ronald Knox. Monsignor Knox, as he was known, famously promoted the idea of ‘rules of the game’. Unlike Van Dine, Knox never took himself, or the idea of rules fo
r detective novelists, too seriously. Born in 1888, he was one of the Bishop of Manchester’s six children, and the family was astonishingly talented. His eldest brother, E. V. Knox, became editor of Punch and wrote one of the wittiest parodies of Golden Age detection, ‘The Murder at the Towers’. Another brother, Dillwyn, became an eminent cryptographer, cracking German codes in both world wars. Their sister Winifred – later, Lady Winifred Peck – produced several mainstream novels along with a couple of mysteries of her own. Ronald’s niece, Penelope Fitzgerald, another novelist, won the Booker Prize.

  Ronald was educated at Eton and Balliol, and became President of the Oxford Union. Having taken a vow of celibacy at the age of seventeen, he converted to Catholicism, taking up the Catholic chaplaincy in Oxford, before encountering the young and lovely Daphne, Lady Acton. She had married a Catholic and sought tuition from Knox. Later, she confided in Evelyn Waugh that she had fallen in love with her priest, though he was twice her age. Knox either did not realize or pretended not to notice. Sayers, however, thought Knox unreliable, and he found her overbearing.

  During the First World War, Knox worked with Dillwyn, code-breaking for naval intelligence, and became addicted to word games. He published A Book of Acrostics, and his ‘Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes’, an early example of Sherlockian scholarship, earned the appreciation of Conan Doyle. His second detective novel, The Three Taps, introduced Miles Bredon, the investigator from the Indescribable Insurance Company. Bredon’s wife Angela assists him, while dutiful nannies take care of the children. One of Knox’s biographers speculated that Dashiell Hammett modelled one of his most famous characters, Nora Charles, on Angela Bredon.

  Knox’s introduction to Best Detective Stories of the Year (1928) included what he called a ‘Decalogue’: ten commandments for the detective story writer. Many of these ‘rules’ were conceived tongue-in-cheek. He would have been amazed, as well as amused, to find so many commentators in later years taking his jokes at face value. According to Knox, ‘The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow … All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course … Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable … No hitherto undiscovered poisons should be used, nor any appliance which need a long scientific explanation at the end.’

  ‘No Chinaman must figure in the story,’ Knox also insisted, poking fun at thriller writers whose reliance on sinister Oriental villains had already become a racist cliché. The most famous culprit was Sax Rohmer (the exotic pseudonym of Birmingham-born Arthur Ward), creator of the villainous Fu Manchu, embodiment of ‘the Yellow Peril’.

  Knox knew perfectly well that most of his ‘rules’ were ludicrously strict: ‘No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right … The detective must not himself commit the crime … The detective must not light on any clues are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.’ Some rules did make sense in terms of constructing an artistically satisfactory narrative: ‘The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind … Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.’

  Tellingly, Knox added: ‘Rules so numerous and so stringent cannot fail to cramp the style of the author … The game is getting played out; before long, it is to be feared, all the possible combinations will have been used up.’ Many books written during the Golden Age were certainly formulaic and dull. In the hands of writers of real ability, though, the detective story proved highly flexible and capable of almost infinite development. Almost half a century after Knox devised his Decalogue, the distinguished Czech writer Josef Skvorecky published Sins of Father Knox, a collection paying homage to the classic form. Skvorecky challenges the reader in each story not only to identify the criminal but to spot which of Knox’s commandments has been broken.

  When Sayers hit upon the idea of an initiation ritual for new members of the Detection Club, she cannibalized Knox’s Decalogue. The ritual is often described as cloaked in secrecy, which is odd, given that Chesterton set it out in full in an article for The Strand. He said he did this ‘in the age of publicity and public opinion’ to set a good example to ‘the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, the Freemasons, the Illuminati … and all the other secret societies which now govern the greater part of public life’.

  Since the Thirties, the ritual has been revised regularly as each generation of members tries to combine the essence of what binds them together with a touch of humour, although the concept of an oath taken by the initiate endures. The original version quoted by Chesterton included a catechism conducted by the President (or ‘Ruler’):

  Ruler: Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on, nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?

  Candidate: I do.

  Ruler: Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader?

  Candidate: I do.

  Ruler: Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science?

  Candidate: I do.

  Ruler: Will you honour the King’s English?

  Candidate: I will.’

  But the ritual had a sting in the tail, with the Ruler’s final remarks having a touch of menace: ‘You are duly elected a Member of the Detection Club, and if you fail to keep your promises, may other writers anticipate your plots, may your publishers do you down in your contracts, may total strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints and may your sales continually diminish. Amen.’

  Was this finale contributed by Anthony Berkeley? It smacks of the waspish humour that was his trademark. Yet while he and Sayers adored the fun of the ritual, their detective stories were becoming increasingly realistic and ambitious.

  Notes to Chapter 8

  a floor plan of the crime scene, the kind of garnish that became a familiar ingredient of Golden Age novels

  See R. F. Stewart, ‘Die-agrams’, CADS 18, February 1992, one of the most amusing articles ever written about Golden Age detective fiction.

  Even T. S. Eliot took a stab at devising rules for detective stories.

  See Curtis Evans, ‘T. S. Eliot, Detective Fiction Critic’, CADS 62, February 2012.

  he came up with no fewer than twenty rules for writers

  See S. S. Van Dine, ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’, American Magazine, September 1928.

  Van Dine’s fellow American writers of detective stories in the Golden Age style

  My understanding of American Golden Age fiction derives in particular from the work of Howard Haycraft, Ellery Queen and the novelist and critic Anthony Boucher. Charles Daly King (1895–1963) was an American writer whose elaborate and idiosyncratic whodunits appealed even more to British readers than his fellow countrymen. Daly King, a psychologist whose other published work includes texts on psychology, coined the word ‘obelist’, and used it in three book titles. It is typical of his eccentricity that, having defined the word in Obelists at Sea (1932) as ‘a person of little or no value’, he then re-defined it in Obelists en Route (1934) as ‘one who harbours suspicion’. The latter novel includes no fewer than seven diagrams, a ‘cluefinder’, and a ‘bibliography of references’.

  The towering figure among American Golden Age writers was Ellery Queen, a pseudonym used by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee

  The influence of Daniel Nathan, alias Dannay (1905–82) and to a lesser extent Manford Emanuel Lepovsky, alias Lee, (1905–71) on the genre’s development was long-lasting, especially in the Unite
d States. That influence was not confined to novels, and was enhanced by the success of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which flourishes to this day, as well as criticism and commentary relating to the genre.

  Chesterton set it out in full in an article for The Strand.

  See G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Detection Club’, The Strand (May 1933).

  Since the Thirties, the ritual has been revised regularly

  An account of changes to the ritual appears in Gavin Lyall, ‘A Brief Historical Monograph on the Detection Club Initiation Ceremony’ (unpublished; Detection Club archive).

  9

  The Fungus-Story and the Meaning of Life

  ‘Our worthy friend Harrison passed away this evening in excruciating agony,’ Sayers announced gleefully on 11 January 1930. She was breaking the news to an enigmatic collaborator about a novel they were writing together, just as the Detection Club came into existence. Their book became a landmark in detective fiction – but the pair never worked together again.

  They became writing partners as a result of Sayers’ work on Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. To highlight scientific and medical detection, she chose two stories co-authored by Robert Eustace. ‘The Face in the Dark’ was an innovative scientific detective story from the late 1890s; Eustace had supplied technical expertise, with the writing undertaken by the prolific Victorian, L. T. Meade (the pseudonym of an early feminist, Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith). ‘The Tea Leaf’, a Golden Age classic that Eustace co-wrote with Edgar Jepson, was a locked room mystery. A man is stabbed in a Turkish bath, but the weapon vanishes inexplicably.

  Despite a career in crime fiction spanning more than forty years, Robert Eustace was the most mysterious member of the Detection Club. For decades after his death, students of the genre speculated about his identity, his date of birth, and even his sexual orientation. One wild theory suggested he was married to Sayers. In fact, he was born in 1871, his real name was Robert Eustace Barton, and he was a doctor working at a mental hospital in Northampton. Sayers invited him to lunch, and they got along famously. Within a matter of weeks, he had inspired her to contemplate a detective novel more ambitious than, anything she had attempted so far. Given her long-standing interest in ‘howdunit’, she liked the idea of utilizing Eustace’s scientific imagination to produce a novel of a new sort. She wanted to give Wimsey a rest, and create a detective with scientific expertise.