The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  Eustace suggested a murder committed by adding poisonous muscarine to a meal containing otherwise harmless mushrooms. The difference between natural and artificially produced muscarine, he explained, was that the latter is optically inactive. They can be differentiated by using a polariscope, so if the presence of synthetically created muscarine can be shown, murder may be proved. This seized Sayers’ imagination, especially when Eustace proposed that the story might explore ‘the most fundamental problems of the phenomena of life itself’.

  Sayers realized she must abandon her hostility to ‘love interest’, and that the story demanded a ‘modern and powerful’ relationship between the key characters. She quizzed Eustace about the medical aspects of the plots of Wilkie Collins’ novels, and raised a question about arsenic as she mulled over the idea for the next Wimsey novel, Strong Poison. Although she had several projects in mind, she announced, ‘This fungus-story must be the next thing I tackle.’

  Soon she was ready to begin: ‘I will … make suitable arrangements for the Villain to poison the mushrooms without

  Poisoning himself

  Being obviously unwilling to share the poisoned dish

  Being suspected of popping a genuine ‘death cap’ into the dish

  If possible the trap should poop off while the villain is away in Town, or something. By the way, I shall want to know:

  What muscarine (artificial) looks like (whether clear or coloured, cloudy or transparent)

  What is the fatal dose

  What it smells and tastes like …’

  Their excitement grew rapidly. Eustace thought this ‘the best idea of my life’ and Sayers’ mood was ecstatic: ‘The sodium slaying scene sounds absolutely great!’ She was afraid that, as in the initiation ritual, somebody else might anticipate the plot: ‘I’m not breathing a word about it to anybody – hardly, even, to my husband – but these things seem to get “into the air”, and it would be dreadful to be forestalled.’

  Eustace researched the scientific means for solving the crime, while Sayers focused on character and story development. Eustace suggested the book might be called The Death Cap, but eventually they opted for The Documents in the Case. The pair signed a collaboration agreement, and their correspondence remained upbeat throughout 1929. In April, Sayers told Eustace that their American publisher was ‘tremendously thrilled’ by the idea of a detective story embodying ‘the very latest scientific ideas’.

  She pushed round to the press a news item about their joint project, to remind people of his track record as a writer of detective fiction. Her next brainwave was to propose ‘publicity photographs of Miss Dorothy Sayers and her mysterious collaborator in the laboratory – you know, showing just the back of your head and your hands, with really fine melodramatic lighting effects’. Just such a picture was taken of the co-authors by a firm of theatrical photographers in Soho. The striking image typifies Sayers’ flair for coming up with fresh angles to promote her books. She made sure that nobody outside her closest circle knew of her young son’s existence, but when it came to developing a public profile, she was the most modern of the Detection Club’s members.

  Edith Thompson’s doomed affair with Frederick Bywaters supplied the storyline, along with ‘all the usual claptrap about their having been made and destined by heaven for one another’. Accustomed to hiding her own emotions, Sayers was scornful of people who lacked the same discipline. Anthony Berkeley had much more sympathy for Edith’s love of fantasy and adulterous sex.

  The murder method and its detection were Sayers’ priorities. Her approach to story structure was influenced by the multiple viewpoints Wilkie Collins employed in The Moonstone. She composed fifty-three ‘documents’ in all, most of them letters. Pleased with what they had done, Eustace suggested further collaboration, but Sayers, still grieving for her parents, and worrying about how to make a good living after leaving Benson’s, was becoming anxious: ‘The story is turning out rather grim and sordid.’

  The book was finished on 8 February, but Sayers usually found, as many authors do, that once she had finished a book, she went through a phase of self-doubt, because the execution had not lived up to her original concept. When she sent the manuscript to Eustace, she said that she felt she had failed: ‘I wish I could have done better with the brilliant plot.’

  The Documents in the Case was daring and original, and Sayers was too harsh on herself. Yet it is a flawed novel. By focusing on the ingenuity required to detect the murder method, she sacrificed verve, and the characterization did not live up to the potential of the storyline. She lacked sympathy for her version of Edith Thompson, the bored and frustrated Margaret Harrison, who yearns to sweep away ‘the useless people’ who ‘get in the way of love and youth’.

  The Book Guild named the book as detective story of the year. ‘I’m famous!’ Sayers whooped, and the prize money paid for her and Mac to take a trip on the Mauretania. But disaster struck when she heard from one of those knowledgeable readers whose correspondence writers dread. He claimed that the scientific solution did not work, and in a broadcast talk for the BBC, Sayers admitted to ‘a first-class howler’. Her confession proved premature. Eustace’s further researches led him to reassure her that the criticism was unfounded: ‘very comforting after all the agonies and the criticisms we had’. Eustace was now a member of the Detection Club, but their proposed scientific detective character never materialized, and they never wrote together again.

  Eustace was left to resume his infrequent collaboration with Edgar Jepson, who owed his place among the founder members of the Detection Club more to his clubbability than to his detective fiction, of which only ‘The Tea Leaf’ has stood the test of time. Jepson wrote thrillers and supernatural stories as well as mysteries, and was briefly an editor of Vanity Fair. His son Selwyn also became a crime writer, while his daughter Margaret, also a novelist, was mother of the writer Fay Weldon.

  Sayers enjoyed editing anthologies for Victor Gollancz, and corresponded with dozens of authors, agents and publishers in her quest for stories of distinction. Milward Kennedy offered two stories which had won prizes in a Manchester Guardian competition when submitted under the improbable pseudonyms of E. Grubb and Gasko. Another unlikely pen name, Loel Yeo, concealed the identity of P. G. Wodehouse’s stepdaughter Leonora. She wrote ‘Inquest’, a story so witty and original that it is sad she never published a crime novel prior to her tragic early death following a ‘routine’ operation.

  To keep her readers happy, Sayers brought back Wimsey, but she decided his priorities needed to change, and in Strong Poison, he fell for Harriet Vane (whose surname might just have been a nod to Berkeley’s The Vane Mystery). Their relationship suffered various setbacks, but developed over the next few years, setting a pattern for detective series that broke decisively with the past. Previously, detectives had not ‘grown’ in the course of a series, however long-running. Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown are much the same in their final appearance as in their first, because the stories shy away from their emotional lives. The same is true of Hercule Poirot, whose exaggerated characteristics scarcely varied over half a century. Sayers’ decision to give new depth to Wimsey, and to set up a relationship with Harriet that was psychologically credible, paved the way for her successors to create series detectives who were much more than ciphers.

  After an unhappy affair with the unworthy Philip Boyes, Harriet buys arsenic from a chemist’s while researching for a book. Boyes duly dies of arsenic poisoning, and she is tried for murder. The outcome is a hung jury, and while she awaits a retrial, Wimsey rides to the rescue. The detective interest lies in working out howdunit rather than whodunit, but the real focus is on the relationship between Wimsey and Harriet. Sayers’ technique for achieving realism was to draw on the experience of her own doomed affair with John Cournos – a cathartic but risky strategy which provoked Cournos to retaliate with his own barbed fictional version of their relationship. She was rapidly transforming the detective story into som
ething more than a game between writer and reader. So, in a very different way, was Anthony Berkeley.

  Notes to Chapter 9

  ‘Our worthy friend Harrison passed away this evening in excruciating agony …’

  This account of the collaboration between Sayers and Eustace is based on Sayers’ letters, the chapter in Barbara Reynolds’ biography about the writing of The Documents in the Case, and ‘Proceedings of the 1983 Seminar’ (Witham, Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1983).

  and even his sexual orientation

  Trevor Hall’s ‘Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace’ in Dorothy L. Sayers: Nine Literary Studies offers imaginative but questionable speculation about Eustace’s sexual proclivities that is reminiscent of Roger Sheringham’s less successful detective work. Professor Lars L. Bottiger’s paper in the ‘Proceedings of the 1983 Seminar’ portrays Eustace as an ‘open, charming and easy-going’ man with a taste for gambling, drink and women, whose happiest days were spent in the army, but who found it difficult to adjust to peacetime. Eustace supplemented his income from medicine by writing, and was an eccentric whose dislikes ranged from seagulls to women wearing trousers. At the start of the Second World War, when age and drink were taking their toll, Eustace found ‘a temporary job in the mental hospital in Cornwall, fitting the lunatics with gas masks’.

  the improbable pseudonyms of E. Grubb and Gasko

  Kennedy was so taken with the name E. Grubb that he gave it to a character in Angel in the Case, published under the pen name Evelyn Elder.

  P. G. Wodehouse’s stepdaughter Leonora

  See Sophie Ratcliffe, ‘P.G. Wodehouse: a Life in Letters’, The Guardian, 4 November 2011. In marrying the twice-widowed actress and dancer Ethel Wayman, ‘Wodehouse not only gained a wife. He also “inherited” her 11-year-old daughter Leonora. Wodehouse adored being a stepfather … Leonora – or “Snorky” as she soon became – was far more precious to Wodehouse than any of his biological relations.’ Her sudden death in 1944 was a crushing blow: ‘I really feel that nothing matters much now.’ Her widowed husband, Peter Cazalet, went on to train Devon Loch, the Queen Mother’s racehorse that mysteriously collapsed fifty yards short of winning the 1956 Grand National while being ridden by Dick Francis (later, like his son Felix, a member of the Detection Club).

  10

  Wistful Plans for Killing off Wives

  Berkeley bought his very own country house, Linton Hills, in a remote part of north Devon, and promptly set a murder there. His detective stories were now as convoluted as his love life, but more successful. The acclaim which greeted The Poisoned Chocolates Case prompted him to bring Ambrose Chitterwick back in The Piccadilly Murder. At the Piccadilly Palace Hotel, Chitterwick witnesses a murder, and as a result of his evidence a Major Sinclair is arrested and charged with poisoning his wealthy aunt. But a group of people, including Major Sinclair’s wife, try to persuade Chitterwick that all is not as it seems.

  Chitterwick and Sheringham reflected exaggerated aspects of Berkeley’s complex personality. Where Sheringham was outspoken and offensive, Chitterwick was meek and mild, yet surprisingly tenacious when the need arose. Like Berkeley, he was fascinated by criminology – and had issues with women. When, in The Piccadilly Murder, Judith Sinclair offers him her body in return for help in saving her husband from the gallows, he is terrified. Sigmund Freud enjoyed the mysteries of Christie and Sayers, but he seems not to have read Berkeley – a pity, since understanding Berkeley’s psychology would have been a challenge even for him.

  The Linton Hills house, renamed ‘Minton Deeps’, featured in The Second Shot, another Berkeley novel which expanded a short story, this time ‘Perfect Alibi’. In finest Golden Age tradition, the book included an elaborate map of the estate on the endpapers, showing the positions of the main suspects at a critical time on the afternoon of the murder. But Berkeley recognized that the conventional country house murder story was becoming played out.

  The endpapers for Anthony Berkeley’s The Second Shot, showing Minton Deeps, and ‘supposed positions’ of the prime suspects.

  His fresh twist was an idea which Christie later adapted for Towards Zero, namely that, although detective stories typically begin with the discovery of a murder, events preceding the crime are key to the process of detection. Roger Sheringham – fallible as ever – distracts the police into believing that the victim suffered an accidental death, when really the case involves a ‘justifiable homicide’. Murder motivated by good intentions became a recurrent theme in detective fiction in the Thirties. But the real significance of The Second Shot is that it shows Berkeley beginning to focus on the point of view of the criminal, rather than the detective.

  In November 1930, he and Sayers exchanged their latest novels, and he inscribed her copy of The Second Shot: ‘Take ye in one another’s washing.’ He shared her ambitions for the genre. In a prefatory note to The Second Shot he argued: ‘The days of the old crime puzzle pure and simple, relying entirely upon plot, and without any added attractions of character, style, or even humour, are, if not numbered, at any rate in the hands of the auditors … The detective story is already in process of developing into the novel with a detective or a crime interest, holding its readers less by mathematical than by psychological ties … It will become a puzzle of character rather than the puzzle of time, place, motive and opportunity … There is a complication of emotion, drama, psychology and adventure behind the most ordinary murder in real life, the possibilities of which for fictional purposes the conventional detective story misses completely.’

  These far-sighted remarks hint at an astonishingly personal puzzle of character. He addressed his remarks to the dedicatee of The Second Shot, his agent A. D. Peters. He had included a Doctor Peters in a story about wife-seduction, ‘Unsound Mind’, and, still unable to drive the name out of his head, gave it to a detective in ‘The Mystery of Horne’s Corpse’, a ‘vanishing body’ puzzle about a corpse that keeps disappearing from the apparent scene of the crime. These clues suggest his fascination with Peters’ wife, Helen. And the mishaps of marriage coupled with dangerous desires prompted him to write his masterpiece.

  With Malice Aforethought, Berkeley slipped into a fresh identity as smoothly as a fictional villain adopting a disguise. He amused himself by borrowing the name of that old family black sheep, his smuggler ancestor Francis Iles, and keeping his authorship a secret. Malice Aforethought was a stunning breakthrough. The novel focuses throughout on the perspective of the criminal, not the detective. The tone is set in the famous opening paragraph: ‘It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took active steps in the matter. Murder is a serious business. The slightest step may be disastrous. Dr Bickleigh had no intention of risking disaster.’

  Meek, seemingly insignificant men who reveal unexpected personal qualities – good and bad – under pressure are staples of Berkeley’s fiction. Dr Bickleigh is a striking example. Henpecked by his unlovely older wife Julia, Bickleigh suffers from an inferiority complex, which he fails to cure through a combination of an active and entertainingly described fantasy life and a series of affairs. The Devon village where gossip is a way of life is described with satiric glee. Berkeley charts the doctor’s self-deceptions with ironic precision: ‘From what he had seen of marriage he did not doubt that most married men spend no small part of their lives devising wistful plans for killing off their wives – if only they had the courage to do it.’

  Bickleigh reads Thomas de Quincey, and concludes, ‘Murder could be a fine art: but it was not for everyone. Murder was a fine art for the superman. It was a pity that Nietzsche could not have developed de Quincey’s propositions. Dr Bickleigh had no doubt whatever that in murder he had qualified, not only as a fine artist, but as a superman.’ When the doctor becomes infatuated with an attractive but neurotic and unreliable heiress, he resolves to do away with Julia. Bickleigh’s perspective on his changing fortunes during his trial for murder is as naïve as ever, and paves the
way for a bitterly ironic ending.

  Reflecting Berkeley’s jaundiced world view, Malice Aforethought was crammed with unsympathetic characters. As a result Bickleigh, for all his failings, is someone the reader roots for – while fearing for him. The finale sees a miscarriage of justice perpetrated by a legal system whose crude and clumsy workings Berkeley despised. But he could not resist playing jokey games. During Bickleigh’s trial, an expert named Clerihew makes a fleeting appearance. The character was named in honour of E. C. Bentley, and soon Detection Club members were including references to each other, or their detectives, in their novels as a matter of course.

  All three novels written under the Francis Iles name draw heavily on Berkeley’s personal life. So Bickleigh not only has a name sounding much the same as Berkeley, but is the same age as his creator, suffers from an inferiority complex, and is an incurable womanizer and fantasist. Berkeley dedicated the book to Margaret, and since it tells the story of a man who is planning to kill his wife, the compliment could hardly have been more barbed. Although the reader is invited to identify with Bickleigh, there is a shocking side to his nature quite apart from his willingness to commit murder. When a whiny former lover, Ivy Ridgeway, makes a nuisance of herself, he hits her in the face, and reacts to what he has done ‘with mixed emotion; half of it was disgust, and half of it a queer, shouting exultation’.