The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  Annie Palmer’s refusal to face reality made a superb subject for a novelist obsessed with the psychology of killers and victims. Lina Aysgarth represents Berkeley’s attempt to get inside Annie’s mind, but his portrayal is flawed. When Lina becomes pregnant, she concludes that ‘at all costs Johnnie must not be allowed to reproduce himself’. Yet Berkeley, whose wives never bore him children, fails to answer a crucial question that would surely preoccupy a woman writer, or a man more instinctively empathetic with women – why Lina does not do more to protect her unborn baby.

  Before the Fact repeated the success of Malice Aforethought, although Berkeley was acutely self-critical. Six years after publication, he wrote that there were several real-life cases in which a wife must have known that her husband was poisoning or intended to poison her, and yet did nothing to save herself: ‘My aim was to explore this curious twist of female psychology and try to make it clear how such a thing can happen.’ He felt he had underplayed the way Lina’s bossy manner concealed an ‘instinctive submissiveness’. He thought her exasperating because she was always on the lookout for slights, never answering a question actually asked but rather responding to some implied criticism which she thought lay behind it. He concluded his mistake had been to tone down Lina’s awfulness in order to keep the reader’s sympathy for her. In later books, he took the opposite approach. Increasingly, his female protagonists came to resemble monsters.

  In 1941, Hitchcock filmed Before the Fact as Suspicion, with Cary Grant miscast as Johnnie. Not even the Master of Suspense could match Berkeley’s sheer nerve, and the ending of the film reversed that of the book, a change which Hitchcock later sought to blame on the studio. Berkeley told a correspondent that Hitchcock had never shared with him an idea of casting Alec Guinness as Dr Bickleigh in Malice Aforethought – ‘but then he wouldn’t. Authors do not exist for Mr Hitchcock, except as some low form of insect life to spin plots and characters like silkworms, for him to muck about.’

  So infuriated was Berkeley with the mess that Hitchcock made of Suspicion that for the first Iles book he ‘stepped up the price high enough to discourage him’. He was rich enough, and pig-headed enough, to refuse to allow the director to have his way. Yet if Berkeley and Hitchcock had made the effort to get to know each other, they would have found they had more in common than they realized. Two complicated and often unhappy men, they risked allowing their fascination with women to be soured by sadistic fantasies.

  Notes to Chapter 10

  Malice Aforethought was a stunning breakthrough.

  For all its originality, some aspects of the plot are reminiscent of C. S. Forester’s Payment Deferred (1926). This bleak and brilliant novel tells the story of William Marble, who murders a rich nephew for gain, only to receive his just deserts at the end in a savage twist similar to Berkeley’s. Plain Murder (1930) repeated the formula, with the background of an advertising agency, a setting Sayers used three years later. Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (1899–1966). The manuscript of his third crime novel, The Pursued, was lost, and the book did not achieve publication until 2011; some events in the story are reminiscent of the Crippen case. Forester turned away from crime fiction, and became celebrated for his adventure stories, including the naval series featuring Horatio Hornblower.

  A handful of ambitious ‘studies in murder’ were produced by authors outside the Detection Club, such as Joanna Cannan’s No Walls of Jasper (1930) and Lynn Brock’s untypical yet oddly compelling Nightmare (1932). Brock was a pseudonym for the Irish novelist and playwright Alister McAllister (1877–1943), whose convoluted whodunits featuring Colonel Warwick Gore were admired by T. S. Eliot. Cannan (1898–1961) wrote several detective novels, but is remembered mainly for writing pony stories for children. An even earlier example, often overlooked, is The House by the River (1921) by A.P. Herbert, which was filmed by Fritz Lang in 1950. Herbert (1890–1971) did not pursue his early interest in crime writing, but earned fame (and a knighthood) as a playwright, novelist, and advocate of law reform; he was also one of the more talented humorists to spend time as a Member of Parliament.

  the successful novelist who published Murder at School under the pseudonym Glen Trevor

  This was James Hilton (1900–1954), who achieved fame and fortune with novels such as Lost Horizon, We Are Not Alone, Random Harvest, and Goodbye, Mr Chips, all of which were filmed. The quality of his solitary detective novel and his few crime short stories make it regrettable that he abandoned the genre.

  When J. K. Rowling … published a pseudonymous detective novel

  The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013), published as by Robert Galbraith.

  Two years passed before the public learned that Anthony Berkeley and Francis Iles were one and the same

  The identities lurking behind less celebrated pseudonyms sometimes remained unknown for decades. The fact that Miles Burton was a pen-name of Cecil John Street did not become widely known for forty years, while Cecil Waye was only revealed as another of his aliases in the twenty-first century.

  ‘Whowasdunin?’ was a new question for puzzle addicts

  See Martin Edwards, ‘Whowasdunin?’ in The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing.

  She chats cheerfully about ‘live electric wires inside the springs of an easy chair’

  See Tony Medawar, ‘Plotting a Detective Story – Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley’, CADS 51, April 2007.

  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 …’

  Berkeley deplored Gollancz’s description of one of the Iles novels as a ‘shocker’, which he felt halved his sales. See Francis Iles, ‘When is a Thriller not a Thriller?’, The Crime Writer, vol. i, no. 2, Summer 1954. This publication was the newsletter of the Crime Writers’ Association, founded by John Creasey on 5 November 1953. Unlike the Detection Club, the CWA has never elected members by secret ballot. Berkeley said that Gollancz ‘was handsome enough to admit later that he had been wrong, but the damage had been done’. Evidently the hurt lingered.

  11

  The Least Likely Person

  For Agatha Christie, the urge to explore real-life crimes was a natural outgrowth of dinner table discussions chez Berkeley. In 1929, she was prompted to write an article for the Sunday Chronicle about a recent series of mysterious poisonings in Croydon which became one of her favourite cases, a lifelong source of fascination. The Croydon mystery was also crawled over by such diverse investigators as Edgar Wallace, R. Austin Freeman, and former Inspector Walter Dew, ‘the man who caught Crippen’, but to this day it remains officially unsolved.

  ‘Something has gone wrong with my throat. I can’t speak. I can’t breathe.’ These were the last words of Edmund Duff to his wife Grace at their suburban villa in Croydon, on 27 April 1928. Edmund, a retired colonial civil servant, was fifty-nine years old and Grace seventeen years his junior. Edmund had been taken ill following a fishing trip, and after eating supper he complained of leg cramps and nausea. Grace called in the family doctor, Dr Elwell, who thought there was no cause for alarm, but twenty-four hours later Edmund was dead. At the inquest, a pathologist said, ‘One can quite exclude the possibility of poisoning,’ and a verdict of death by natural causes was recorded. The coroner sympathized with the tearful widow, who portrayed her married life as idyllic.

  Ten months later, Grace’s unmarried sister Vera Sidney said she felt ‘seedy’ after lunch. Her mother Violet, and the cook, and the family cat also became unwell, but Vera’s condition deteriorated, and she died a couple of days later. The doctor attributed her death to ‘gastric influenza’. Less than three weeks later, Violet Sidney also fell ill after eating her lunch, and blamed the ‘gritty tonic’ prescribed by her doctor as a pick-me-up following her bereavement. She died within hours.

  This disastrous series of events provoked suspicion, and the police decided to look into what had happened. When the bodies
of Violet and Vera were exhumed, analysis revealed traces of arsenic. Subsequently, despite Grace’s protests, Edmund’s remains were also exhumed, and again arsenic was found. Three separate inquests were held over a period of five months, complicating the search for the truth. Verdicts of murder by person or persons unknown were reached in relation to Edmund and Vera, but there was insufficient evidence to prove that Violet had been murdered.

  The Sidney and Duff family circle supplied several potential culprits, but nobody was charged with the crimes, and Christie took care not to invite a libel claim by making any allegations. She wondered if the murderer was driven simply by a lust for killing, but thought it likelier that a personal and domestic motive lurked beneath the contented façade of suburban life. The Croydon mystery had many possible interpretations, and she borrowed elements from the case for three of her novels. Above all, she sympathized with the innocent, whose lives were ruined by the sins of someone else. Remembering her own trauma, she spoke with feeling about the nightmarish existence of people who come into the public eye through no fault of their own, and who find their friends look at them wonderingly, and who become targets for autograph hunters and ‘curious idle crowds’.

  At one point, Grace’s brother Tom was the prime suspect, because he possessed a quantity of arsenical weed-killer. He emigrated to the United States, and never saw his sister again. Much later, he said he thought her dangerous. The likelihood is that Grace was the secret poisoner. One theory is that she murdered her husband because she had fallen for Dr Elwell, and killed her sister and mother for money. She left Croydon after the deaths, supposedly to make a new life in Australia. In fact, she ran a boarding house on the English south coast for many years, her guests suffering no known ill-effects, and she lived until her eighty-seventh year.

  Late in her life, the noted criminologist Richard Whittington-Egan turned up on Grace’s doorstep. He accused her of having committed the murders, but promised not to publish his theory until she was dead. With the menacing confidence of a born survivor, she retorted by pointing out that he might die before her, but he lived to tell the tale.

  Christie was as intrigued by real life murders as Berkeley, but her private fantasies were very different from his. While he tortured himself with dreams of an unattainable woman, Christie’s idea of heaven was a trip on board the legendary Simplon-Orient Express. The steam train represented the last word in luxury. Even the list of stops en route sounded irresistibly romantic: London–Paris–Lausanne–Milan–Venice–Trieste–Zagreb–Venice–Sofia–Stamboul. And then on, by the Taurus Express, to Aleppo and Beirut. For Christie, a ticket for the train was a passport to freedom.

  Train travel offered surprise, excitement, and mystery. Impossible to predict who one’s companions might be, those people with whom one would be thrown together for a few short days and then never meet again. The Orient Express brought together people from widely diverging backgrounds. The compartments of one of its coaches might become a closed-off world, where anything might happen. Even murder.

  Christie loved to discover new places, and new people. For all her shyness, she appreciated good company. This was why the Detection Club meant so much to her. What she hated was occupying centre stage. Archie’s betrayal and the disaster of her disappearance made her wary of strangers, and in the immediate aftermath of divorce, she felt lonely.

  Meeting fellow detective novelists lifted her spirits, and she rediscovered her zest for writing, and for life. Travel offered escape from harrowing memories. Two years after her disappearance, with Rosalind away at school, she decided to take a break abroad. She bought tickets for a trip to the West Indies, but a conversation over dinner led to a last-minute change of plan. A couple she met had just returned from Baghdad, and their vivid holiday memories captivated her. They rhapsodized about the joy of travelling there by train rather than sea. Entranced by the prospect of taking the Orient Express to visit the cradle of civilization, Christie rushed off to Thomas Cook’s office to change her tickets. She wanted to see for herself the archaeological excavations at Ur.

  The prospect of discovering the secrets of the Middle East at first hand was irresistible. As a form of detective work, archaeology was in vogue. Five years earlier, Lord Carnarvon’s long-running excavations in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings had resulted in Howard Carter opening a sealed door leading to a burial chamber. Venturing inside, he set eyes on the sarcophagus of the Boy King, Tutankhamun. The discovery caused a sensation, and Ancient Egypt became the height of fashion. Hieroglyphic embroideries taken from the walls of the tomb featured in dress designs, while garish scarabs were sought-after accessories which played a part in novels as diverse as Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise and Walpole’s The Killer and the Slain. Carnarvon’s sudden death, soon after the tomb was opened, fuelled talk of ‘the Mummy’s Curse’.

  Christie had been quick to jump on the bandwagon with a Poirot story, ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’, and she later mined her knowledge of Ancient Egypt for a ground-breaking historical detective novel, Death Comes as the End. Now her priority was to visit Mesopotamia, as Leonard Woolley’s claim to have identified the site of the Biblical Flood was all over the news. She intended to travel on her own, believing she had become too dependent on other people – Archie, her secretary Carlo Fisher, her agent Edmund Cork. Her aim was to find out what sort of person she really was.

  The Orient Express took her from Calais to Istanbul. She crossed the Bosphorus and, after a short stay in Damascus, reached Baghdad and found herself in what she called ‘Memsahib Land’. She was no colonialist, not a woman who wanted to spend her time in idle gossip, treating the British-governed city as an outpost of London. Taking a letter of introduction, she headed off for the excavations at Ur.

  Before the First World War, Leonard Woolley had worked with T. E. Lawrence in Syria and Egypt. His work made it possible for scholars to trace the history of Ur from its beginnings in 4000 BC. Woolley’s wife Katharine had recently enjoyed The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and the couple went out of their way to make Christie welcome. For her part, she relished being treated as a writer of note and honoured guest, rather than merely Archie’s wife.

  Katharine Woolley was beautiful, controlling, and volatile. Her first husband had shot himself at the foot of the Great Pyramid shortly after their honeymoon – possibly a reaction to being told that she did not intend to consummate their marriage. She preferred the company of men to women, but the men were required to look, not touch. Her mood swings were frequent and extreme. One minute, she was offensive and insolent, the next irresistibly delightful. Christie, an obsessive people-watcher, suspected Katharine could also be dangerous. Fortunately, Katharine concluded that the quiet, pleasant novelist represented no threat to her status as Queen of the Dig, and Christie got on so well with the Woolleys that they invited her to come back again as soon as she could.

  After returning to England in time for Christmas with Rosalind, Christie delivered the manuscript of a book called Giant’s Bread, not a detective story but a mainstream novel about a gifted musician called Vernon Deyre. Notable for its untypically positive representation of Jewish characters, the book appeared the following year under a pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. Christie’s authorship was kept secret even longer than the identity of Francis Iles. She said later that she felt guilty about departing from her usual sort of story, but she kept busy enough with detective fiction, writing short stories, a stage play, and a novel. She also bought a small mews house in Cresswell Place, Chelsea, and lent it during the summer to the Woolleys.

  Christie returned to Ur in February 1930, and this time she met Leonard Woolley’s assistant, who had been away during her previous visit, suffering from appendicitis. Max Mallowan was twenty-five years old, the Oxford-educated son of an Austrian father and French mother. She found him affable and self-assured.

  Katharine Woolley became more domineering than ever. She was a bulimic who sent members of her husband’s staff off to the sou
k to buy Arab confectionery, for her to binge on and then vomit up. Max and the other young men were often instructed to brush her hair, but if any of them found her tempting, they were doomed to disappointment. She shrank from any hint of sexual contact. Gossip on the dig was that the most intimate part of her relationship with her husband was that she allowed him to watch her bathe at night. There was even a bizarre rumour that she was actually a man. Perhaps this was inspired by Gladys Mitchell’s debut novel, Speedy Death, which features a cross-dressing explorer.

  Without meaning to, Katharine did Christie a good turn by insisting that Max escort her on a tour of local sights. He and Christie enjoyed each other’s company, and when she was summoned back to England because Rosalind was ill with pneumonia, he offered to accompany her. Rosalind recovered, and Christie socialized with Max in London.

  To her amazement, he proposed marriage. She was a divorced woman, fifteen years his senior, and he was a Catholic, but with him she felt ‘quiet and safe and happy’. After agonizing long and hard, she accepted, and Max left the Catholic Church because it would not recognize the marriage. They kept their engagement secret because she was afraid of being harassed by the Press, and married on 11 September.