Berkeley seems aware here, as in his other books, that his attitudes towards women were deeply unhealthy. Was he using detective fiction as a substitute for a psychiatrist’s couch? Wrestling with his own confused feelings, he wrote: ‘The normal man’s attitude towards women is far, far more complicated than those women ever suppose, or than theirs towards him – interlaced with totally conflicting likes and dislikes, self-contradictory, altogether much more illogical and irrational than anything of the kind he has ever deplored in the women themselves.’
Berkeley did not let any of this slow down the story, and ‘Francis Iles’ became an overnight sensation. Critics marvelled at the cleverness and wit of Malice Aforethought, with The English Review raving that the book was ‘possibly the best shocker ever written. It is psychologically extraordinarily good; it is the work of a born novelist; it is humorous and witty as well as tragic.’ But not everyone was ready for such daring crime stories. Berkeley believed firmly in distinguishing between detective fiction, thrillers and novels of psychological interest, and deplored the general term ‘mystery’. Almost twenty-five years after the second Iles book, Before the Fact, he lamented that it had been ‘killed stone dead’ in the US because it was marketed as a ‘detective story’, and so disappointed those who simply wanted a well-clued whodunit.
Young, good-looking and sexually adventurous women like the supposed murderers Florence Maybrick and Edith Thompson exerted an irrestible attraction for Berkeley. He also displayed a disturbing empathy with apparently respectable middle-class Englishmen who commit murder. The inspiration for Dr Bickleigh’s crimes in Malice Aforethought came from the misadventures of Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong, a solicitor, church warden and freemason best known as the Hay-on-Wye Poisoner.
‘Excuse fingers,’ Armstrong said, handing a buttered scone laced with arsenic to a fellow solicitor called Oswald Martin. He had invited Martin for afternoon tea at Mayfield, his home in Hay. This legendary occasion captures perfectly the genteel nature of the kind of murder for which the Golden Age is famous.
Martin became violently sick after the tea party. His father-in-law, a local chemist, already had suspicions of Armstrong, because he bought arsenic in such large quantities. When tests on Martin’s urine revealed the presence of arsenic, the police were called in. While they carried out their investigations, Armstrong made repeated, and increasingly frantic, attempts to invite Martin and his wife back for another tea party. Like actors in a black comedy, the Martins found themselves resorting to ever more desperate reasons for their refusal.
Armstrong was arrested in his office on New Year’s Eve 1921. In his pocket was a pack of arsenic. After more arsenic was discovered at Mayfield, the body of his wife Katharine was exhumed. She had died the previous year, apparently of gastritis, but Bernard Spilsbury, the pathologist in the Crippen case, was called in to conduct a post-mortem. Her remains were in a relatively good state of preservation – due to the mummifying effects of arsenic. Armstrong was duly charged with her murder. He had been irritated by her nagging and domineering personality, and wanted the freedom to pursue his interest in other women, but at the time of her death nobody suspected foul play. Soon after that, he had found himself on the opposite side from Martin in a legal dispute. The Martins had received a box of chocolates from an anonymous well-wisher, which were later found to contain arsenic.
At his trial, Armstrong said he kept arsenic to kill off dandelions growing in the garden of Mayfield. His counsel suggested that Katharine was a hypochondriac who had dosed herself with arsenic either by mistake or intending suicide. But the prosecution called Spilsbury, whose implacably definite way with evidence in court spelled disaster for the accused. Spilsbury testified that the amount of arsenic found in Mrs Armstrong’s remains could only have resulted from poisoning. The judge’s summing-up extolled Spilsbury’s impartiality, and Armstrong was found guilty. He remains the only English solicitor to have died on the scaffold. True to type, he was wearing his best tweed suit.
The mystery of the identity of Francis Iles kept everyone guessing. Berkeley may have hated self-promotion, but his insistence upon anonymity proved a masterstroke, cleverly exploited by his new publisher. Victor Gollancz sparked a long-running debate by indicating that the pseudonym masked the identity of a well-known writer. So successfully was the secret kept that Berkeley’s authorship was still unknown when Before the Fact was published a year later. Gollancz seized his chance with gusto. ‘Who is Iles?’ demanded the dust jacket, which listed twenty candidates put forward in ‘the public prints’.
Literary detectives proposed solutions to the riddle ranging from the plausible to the crazy. Names put forward included such diverse writers as Hugh Walpole, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Edgar Wallace, and H. G. Wells. Some suspected that the author was a woman, suggesting Marie Belloc Lowndes, F. Tennyson Jesse, Stella Benson, Rose Macaulay – and E. M. Delafield. Trying her hand at a literary form of psychological profiling, Naomi Royde-Smith argued that the author could not be a woman, in view of the relentlessly cynical portrayal of the female characters. A clue in the text was the author’s familiarity with rural Devon. Berkeley had bought a country house there, Linton Hills, the previous year. None of the sleuths, however, discovered the biggest giveaway of Francis Iles’ identity: similarities between an obscure story signed by A. B. Cox, ‘Over the Telephone’ and Malice Aforethought made it obvious both were written by the same man.
Berkeley revelled in the speculation. In his cuttings book, he kept a record of all the mistaken guesses. However, he cringed at a suggestion by New York critic Alexander Woollcott that his rough drafts had been polished up by his friend Delafield. The jibe prompted Berkeley to take a pot shot at Woollcott in Panic Party. Even after that the hurt lingered, and Berkeley made a wounded reference to Woollcott when dedicating As for the Woman to Delafield.
Reflecting the level of interest in the puzzle of Francis Iles’ identity, two contemporary novels joked about it. In X v Rex, a thriller about a serial murderer of policemen, written under the pen name of Martin Porlock, Philip MacDonald amused himself by having Gollancz deny that Francis Iles was in reality Porlock. In The Provincial Lady Goes Further, Delafield included a scene in which she is assured by a fellow party guest ‘that Mr Francis Iles is really Mr Aldous Huxley. She happens to know. Am much impressed … but am disconcerted by unknown gentleman who tells me … he happens to know that Francis Iles is really Miss Edith Sitwell.’
There was a hidden edge to this joke. Given their closeness, Berkeley must have confided the truth to Delafield, and she was teasing him with the crack about Sitwell, an odd and famously unattractive woman whose poetry Berkeley no doubt detested. Hardly anyone else was in on the secret, not even his colleagues in the Detection Club. The success of the Iles puzzle prompted Gollancz’s old firm, Ernest Benn, to offer a prize of ten pounds for the first person to guess the identity of the successful novelist who published Murder at School under the pseudonym Glen Trevor. Keeping a secret was easier then than it is today. When J. K. Rowling, a long-time fan of Sayers and Margery Allingham, published a pseudonymous detective novel in 2013, elaborate precautions failed to prevent the truth about her identity leaking out within weeks. But two years passed before the public learned that Anthony Berkeley and Francis Iles were one and the same.
The next two Anthony Berkeley books, Top Storey Murder and Murder in the Basement, saw the return of Roger Sheringham and Chief Inspector Moresby. In the former, Sheringham is again too clever for his own good, coming up with an ingenious explanation when the truth proves simple and anti-climactic. One of the suspects is an Australian novelist, Evadne Delamere, a blend of Helen Simpson and Delafield.
Murder in the Basement begins and ends with a police procedural story, but includes an incomplete novel written by Roger. A woman’s body is later found in the cellar of a suburban house, and she is traced to a prep school, but her identity is not revealed. Roger’s manuscript, set in the recent past, describes m
ounting tensions in the school where, improbably, he had provided cover for a sick teacher friend, and where several female characters are potential murderees. Back in the present, Moresby tells him which of the women has been killed.
‘Whowasdunin?’ was a new question for puzzle addicts. An unidentified corpse is often found in crime novels, but here the challenge was to deduce which person, out of a number of possible candidates, was the victim. For good measure, Berkeley came up with a traditional ‘whodunit’ twist, and a murder motive, sexual repression, that was daring for the early Thirties. In a further refusal to conform to genre conventions, Roger is persuaded not to tell the police what he has discovered, and once again justice goes begging.
The idea of putting a mystery about the identity of a murder victim at the heart of a novel was borrowed by Raymond Postgate for Verdict of Twelve, and by the Americans Anita Boutell and Patricia McGerr on either side of the Second World War. Whowasdunins remain uncommon, but in 2013 Mark Lawson’s The Deaths adopted the form for a novel satirising a ‘closed circle’ of four rich couples in the aftermath of the near-collapse of the banking system in the twenty-first century. Once again, Berkeley’s influence was long-lasting.
As well as writing at a furious pace, Berkeley seized the moment with Helen Peters. Helen’s husband had built an agency with a glittering list of clients including the actor and writer Frank Vosper, Henry Wade and E. M. Delafield. A tough negotiator, Peters had several run-ins with Victor Gollancz, whose attitude towards authors was rather like Hitchcock’s attitude towards actors.
Peters’ eye roved as much as Berkeley’s. Having met a woman who became the second of his three wives, he left Helen in the spring of 1932. Helen had two young children on her hands, but she and Berkeley became romantically involved, and he sought a divorce from Margaret. Although it took time for the Peters’ divorce to be made final, Berkeley set up home with Helen at Linton Hills. He liked to spend his summers in the countryside, returning to London for the winter.
Berkeley may be the only crime novelist in history to have married his literary agent’s former wife. With anyone else, this would spell career suicide, but Peters felt relieved that Helen had found someone else. Outwardly, at least, the two men’s relations remained civilised. Berkeley’s career remained on an upward curve. His effrontery was as breathtaking in life as in fiction. He was the sort of man who could get away with murder.
After the success of Malice Aforethought, Berkeley was itching to resume his work as Francis Iles. When he did so, he based his novel on an astonishingly bold premise, and amused himself (if not the new woman in his life) by dedicating this latest novel of wife-murder to Helen.
Before the Fact recounts the fate of a born victim. As with Malice Aforethought, the book dazzles from the opening paragraph: ‘Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her husband nearly eight years before she realized that she was married to a murderer.’
Lina Aysgarth ought to be far more appealing than Dr Bickleigh. She suffers, whereas he inflicts suffering. The snag is that her reluctance to face up to unpalatable facts, and then to save herself, is maddening. She is swept off her feet by the amiable but selfish Johnnie Aysgarth, and, although appalled by each fresh example of his ruthless self-indulgence, she turns a blind eye to forgery, infidelity and ultimately murder. At one point, he conducts a rehearsal of a proposed murder. Agatha Christie soon took the same idea a step further in a clever whodunit of her own, in which an apparently inexplicable crime turns out to have been committed by an actor – who else? – as a rehearsal for another killing.
For all her intelligence, Lina is breathtakingly naïve, with an inferiority complex to rival those of Chitterwick and Bickleigh. Beneath a quiet exterior runs a streak of masochism, evident not only in her devotion to Johnnie but also during her brief separation from her husband. She flees to her sister, who lives (as Berkeley did, when in town) in Hamilton Terrace in St John’s Wood, and is introduced to Ronald Kirby, with whom she has an unconsummated fling. Berkeley indulges a favourite interest when he has Lina provoke Kirby into spanking her, an experience which causes her to exult: ‘That’s the stuff!’
The Aysgarths live in a house called Dellfield – yet another nod to Delafield. Did elements of Lina’s personality reflect Berkeley’s frustration about Delafield’s commitment to an unsatisfactory marriage with an unworthy man? As in Malice Aforethought, there are tennis parties and dismal social gatherings of people who do not like each other much, mirroring Berkeley’s view of Devon life: ‘For one who takes pleasure in despising his neighbour more than himself, the English countryside of this decade offers exceptional opportunities.’
Sayers makes a delightful guest appearance in the book. She is thinly disguised as Isobel Sedbusk, whom Lina’s sister Joyce describes as ‘not nearly so formidable as she looks. In fact, she’s a very good sort. No nonsense. And intelligent; but keep off religion.’ Berkeley had learned from experience to keep off religion when talking with Sayers over dinner at the Detection Club. But he enjoyed her company, and was amused by her assertiveness, as well as her dress sense: Sedbusk ‘boasted of weighing fifteen stone, and boomed in proportion … She was inclined to talk a little too much about her own line of work, and liked showing her familiarity with the tools of her trade, such as blood and rigor mortis: but she was amusing and had plenty of other interests as well. In spite of the fact that she wore black sombreros and had a masculine cut about her clothes, she was an ardent feminist.’
Sedbusk shares Sayers’ interest in unusual methods of committing murder. She chats cheerfully about ‘live electric wires inside the springs of an easy chair’, and Lina learns from her that Johnnie adapted a murder method used in real life by a Victorian doctor called William Palmer. Sedbusk also unwittingly reveals to Johnnie an undetectable means by which he can kill Lina. This never-revealed method was an invention, calculated to irritate traditionalists, but Berkeley did not care about scientific accuracy. He was focusing on the psychological make-up of a sociopath and his victim.
Upper-middle-class characters at leisure in rural England might dominate the story, but there is nothing cosy about Before the Fact. The final scene is daring and unique. Berkeley contrives one of the most shocking climaxes to any British crime novel of any era. What is even more extraordinary is that it had its origins in real life.
‘When will it all end?’ asked Annie Palmer, after a series of mysterious deaths in the small Staffordshire town of Rugeley, where her husband William practised medicine. The answer was that Dr Palmer would be executed on 14 June 1856 in front of a crowd of thirty thousand people. Unfortunately, Annie too was dead by then, and so were four of their children.
The first member of Palmer’s circle to die was a man called Abley, whose wife was rumoured to be having an affair with the doctor. Abley met his end in 1846, after sharing a drink of brandy with Palmer at the local infirmary. The doctor then married Annie Palmer, and her mother was next to go. The former mistress of a wealthy colonel, she had inherited his fortune when he committed suicide, but died while visiting the Palmers. An obliging local doctor called Bamford certified the cause of death as ‘apoplexy’. A bookmaker to whom Palmer owed a handsome sum also died after coming to stay with the Palmers, and the cash he was carrying and his betting book, which recorded Palmers’ losses, went missing.
Four of Palmer’s five children by Annie (he was also said to have fourteen illegitimate children from his days as a medical student) died in infancy from ‘convulsions’, although a story later circulated that they had licked honey from their father’s fingers. They were followed to the grave by one of his creditors, and an uncle whom he challenged to a brandy-drinking contest. Annie surely feared the worst when her husband took out an insurance policy worth £13,000 on her life. Yet she seemed incapable of doing anything to save herself in the face of overwhelming circumstantial evidence that she was married to a man who, for all his amiab
ility and regular church-going, was extremely dangerous to know. She died not long after he paid the first premium.
‘My poorest dear Annie expired at ten minutes past one,’ Palmer recorded in his diary, adding, ‘She was called by God to the house of bliss she so well deserves.’ Any distress he felt did not prevent him from proceeding to have sex with their housemaid, who soon became pregnant. According to the ever-helpful Dr Bamford, Annie died from ‘English cholera’. Palmer’s alcoholic brother Walter, whom he plied relentlessly with gin and brandy, was no more fortunate. This time, the insurance company carried out an investigation, and a boot boy told them that he had seen Palmer pouring something into Walter’s glass. A further setback was that Walter’s wife made a claim on the insurance policy.
After a race meeting at Shrewsbury, Palmer went for a celebratory drink with a horse-owner called John Parsons Cook, who had just won more than two thousand pounds. On downing a brandy, Cook cried, ‘Good God, there’s something in that which burns my throat!’ Palmer ministered to him, naturally to no avail, and Cook died eight days later. By that time Palmer had already forged a cheque to draw on Cook’s account, as well as a document purporting to show that Cook owed him £3,500. He had also secured another death certificate from Dr Bamford, now eighty years old, stating the cause of death as ‘apoplexy’. Palmer attended the post-mortem, and tried to take away the jar containing the stomach, saying, ‘I thought it more convenient.’
He did not stop there, intercepting the post-mortem report, and attempting to win the local coroner’s goodwill with gifts of a twenty-pound turkey, a brace of pheasants, a barrel of oysters and a cod. But Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor, the leading toxicologist of the day, found traces of antimony in Cook’s remains. Annie’s body was exhumed, and once again antimony was found. Palmer was charged with murder, but because local feeling against him was running high, special legislation was passed to enable him to be tried at the Old Bailey. The evidence against him was circumstantial, and his denial of guilt sufficiently plausible to persuade his barrister to express a personal, if unprofessional, belief in his client’s innocence. None of this made any difference to the verdict, but Palmer’s composure did not falter. Legend has it that, standing on the scaffold, he looked at the trapdoor, and said, ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’
The Golden Age of Murder Page 15