The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  On their marriage certificate, they lied about their ages, stating that he was 31 and she 37. This kind of deception was popular with Detection Club members – Arthur Morrison pretended to be younger than he really was, while Ngaio Marsh took advantage of her father’s four-year delay in registering her birth. During the honeymoon, the couple stayed in Venice, Split, Dubrovnik, and Greece before Max returned to work at Ur, a reluctant desertion that she teased him about in Death in the Clouds, where an archaeologist who abandons his wife for work is called a ‘barbarian’.

  Back at the dig, Max faced the wrath of Katharine Woolley. His marriage had inflamed her jealousy, and she reacted by forbidding Christie to return to Ur. Christie seemed to turn the other cheek, dedicating The Thirteen Problems to the Woolleys. But behaving badly towards a crime writer carries risks. Christie started plotting revenge.

  Neither travel nor romance slowed Christie’s productivity as a writer. Like so many of her colleagues in the Detection Club, she was a workaholic. The quality of what she wrote was mixed, but that was inevitable, partly because she was so prolific, but also because she was never afraid to take a risk and try something new. In 1930, she accepted a commission to write a short story for a competition designed to attract tourists to the Isle of Man. ‘Manx Gold’ launched a treasure hunt that anticipated by more than forty years the success of Kit Williams’ Masquerade. In the same year, her first stage play opened in London. Black Coffee, a spy thriller, enjoyed only limited success, but even so, it was made into two films within the next couple of years. The play was turned into a novel by Charles Osborne after Christie’s death, but his version was lifeless. Writing a novel in the Christie style, even with a ready-made plot, is not as easy as Christie made it look.

  The Mysterious Mr Quin gathered a dozen stories blending romance, detection and the supernatural which experimented with an unusual version of a Holmes–Watson relationship. Mr Quin appears when crime threatens the happiness of lovers, and is assisted by one of life’s spectators, the elderly Mr Satterthwaite. Sayers scoffed that the stories were not a very successful attempt ‘to combine detection with sentiment’ but she respected Christie’s willingness to try something different.

  Far more significant was The Murder at the Vicarage. This marked the first novel-length appearance of Miss Jane Marple, whose life in the quiet village of St Mary Mead had equipped her with all the worldliness and expertise needed by a Great Detective, because it gave her a deep understanding of human nature. Christie had tried Marple out in short stories before deciding that she was a strong enough amateur detective to take the lead in a novel.

  In her very first outing, ‘The Tuesday Night Club’, Marple modestly denies being clever, but says experience of village life ‘does give one an insight into human nature’. This was the secret of her success as a detective. Her very ordinariness made her a much more attractive character to many readers than the brilliant egotist Poirot. Her companions, including her nephew Raymond West, a trendy novelist, are sceptical. However, when the former Commissioner of Scotland Yard relates the story of a mysterious poisoning, Miss Marple, the ultimate armchair detective, puts aside her knitting and solves the puzzle, which reminds her of the story of ‘old Mr Hargreaves who lived up at the Mount’.

  In a pioneering full-length study of crime fiction, Masters of Mystery, H. D. Thomson recognized that Miss Marple was ‘an entirely new kind of detective … an incorrigible Cranfordian, a spinster and a gossip’. Yet Thomson saw no long term future for her: ‘Miss Marple can only hope to solve murder problems on her native heath. If Mrs Christie is planning a future for Miss Marple … she will be bound to find this an exasperating limitation.’

  Like so many other people, Thomson under-rated Christie. She proved more than equal to the challenge.

  Miss Marple’s debut was followed by The Sittaford Mystery. The setting is a snowbound village on Dartmoor, and there are some parallels with The Hound of the Baskervilles, including the presence in each story of an escaped convict, and a good helping of spooky atmosphere. From childhood, Christie was intrigued by ghosts and the paranormal, but her fundamental outlook was always down-to-earth.

  Apparently supernatural incidents supply red herrings in Christie’s novels, but she never failed to provide a rational solution to her puzzles. At around this time, Psychic News claimed that five hundred societies were affiliated to the Spiritualist’s National Union. People who, like Conan Doyle, had lost loved ones during the war often took comfort from spiritualism and séances, but for every believer there were plenty of sceptics, and many were members of the Detection Club. Berkeley featured a fake séance in Cicely Disappears, while Sayers’ Strong Poison mocks psychical research. The Coles included a dubious séance in Burglars in Bucks (a murder-free novel about which the most baffling puzzle is why the American edition was called The Berkshire Mystery though set in Buckinghamshire).

  In The Sittaford Mystery, a message from the spirit world during a séance announces that Captain Trevelyan has been murdered, and Trevelyan duly proves to have been bludgeoned to death. After a ‘least likely person’ culprit is unmasked, it emerges that a key clue was given in the first chapter, when the table-turners’ conversation touches on crossword competitions and acrostics. This is a detective puzzle emphatically connected to the enthusiastic game-playing of the period, rather than the killer’s psychology, which is left unexplored.

  Another fake séance helps Poirot to get to the truth in Peril at End House. Christie’s scepticism about ‘messages from the other world’ is demonstrated by the satiric choice of a reluctant Hastings to play the part of a phoney medium. The book offers one of Christie’s cleverest ‘least likely suspect’ plots. As so often with her best ideas, it involved role reversal, a ploy she liked so much that she kept returning to it. While staying at a hotel on the Cornish coast, Poirot and Hastings learn that a pretty young woman has had three narrow escapes from death. Poirot fears that someone is trying to kill her and make it look like an accident. Murder duly follows.

  The storyline includes a secret engagement, crucial to the plot, and possibly inspired by Christie’s own engagement to Max. As so often in detective novels of the Thirties, cocaine is used by members of the ‘Smart Set’, and Christie cunningly exploits the ambiguity of terms like ‘dearest’ and ‘darling’. Simple tricks of this kind did not rely on specialist expertise, and were among her favourite techniques of misdirection. Her ability to supply readers with all the information needed to solve the mystery, and yet spring a surprise in the closing pages, was matchless.

  In Peril at End House, Hastings glances at the newspapers and concludes that ‘The political situation seemed unsatisfactory, but uninteresting.’ Even by his standards, this observation suggests a startling lack of awareness, but he was simply reflecting a widespread disgruntlement with politics. Christie herself was again concentrating on writing and married life. Yet between the date when the Detection Club first came into being and when it formally adopted its Rules and Constitution, a period of little more than two years, the political landscape changed out of all recognition.

  The aftershocks of the Wall Street Crash led to political as well as economic turbulence. In Britain, the general election produced a hung Parliament, but Labour formed a government under Ramsay MacDonald. This was the ‘Flapper Election’ – for the first time, all women over the age of 21 were eligible to vote, and it was symptomatic of the increasing prominence of women in public life that eight of the founder members of the Detection Club were female. Strikingly, five of the seven founder members born in or after 1890 were women. Their energetic participation was crucial to the Club’s social mix, and its success.

  Labour fought the election on the slogan ‘We Can Conquer Unemployment’, but idealism proved incompatible with the reality of taking power and responsibility. Severe public spending cuts caused a schism in the Labour ranks, and MacDonald outraged his natural supporters by joining forces with the Conservatives and Liberals to f
orm a National Government. He was widely regarded as a class traitor, and the Labour Party expelled him. Several of his associates were also thrown out – including one of the Detection Club’s founder members, Lord Gorell.

  In the general election of 1931, the National Government, dominated by Conservatives, won by a landslide. From then on, the real power rested with Stanley Baldwin (whose positive qualities included a passion for detective stories) and Neville Chamberlain. MacDonald remained Prime Minister, but was a figurehead, and much derided: R.C.Woodthorpe gave his name to a parrot in Death in a Little Town. Gorell continued to saunter around the corridors of power, and when he travelled to the USA, he was one of the first guests of the new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Later, he became chairman of the Refugee Children’s Movement, and as a result probably the first Christian to be legal guardian to Jewish children: ‘In all I had, at one time, over 3,000 children legally mine.’

  In contrast to Gorell and those incurable campaigners the Coles, Christie and Sayers concentrated on writing, and kept their distance from politics. Anthony Berkeley’s love of an argument, on the other hand, meant he took a close interest. Looking back in 1934, he said: ‘We really did think that a National Government, with a carte blanche from a desperate nation, might do something. For a time it looked as though they really would.’ Soon his hopes evaporated, and in a state of deep disgruntlement, this unlikely activist set about devising an extraordinary new political agenda of his own.

  Notes to Chapter 11

  the noted criminologist Richard Whittington-Egan

  His The Riddle of Birdshurst Rise is the outstanding account of the case.

  a commission to write a short story for a competition designed to attract tourists to the Isle of Man

  See Tony Medawar, ‘Gold and the Man with Legs for Arms’, CADS 13, February 1990. ‘Manx Gold’ was published in While the Light Lasts, a posthumous gathering of obscure Christie stories.

  The play was turned into a novel by Charles Osborne after Christie’s death

  Osborne, a music critic whose The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie reflects his love of her work, also adapted The Unexpected Guest and Spider’s Web into novels.

  Miss Marple was ‘an entirely new kind of detective’

  At about the same time, Patricia Wentworth (1878–1961) created Miss Maud Silver, a character often compared to Miss Marple, although she is a retired governess who has taken up a new career as a private detective. Wentworth, whose real name was Dora Amy Elles, was a prolific writer, and Miss Silver continued to investigate for more than thirty years.

  12

  The Best Advertisement in the World

  ‘Most authors are not intelligent enough to see it, but there is no advertisement in the world like having your work broadcast,’ according to the playwright Rodney Fleming in Death at Broadcasting House. This detective novel, brimming with inside know-how about the making of a radio programme, was co-written by two BBC staff members, Val Gielgud and Holt Marvell. Marvell was the pseudonym of Eric Maschwitz, who also wrote the lyrics to ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. Gielgud, brother of the more famous John, and himself an actor as well as a radio producer, was elected to the Detection Club after the Second World War.

  Like his fictional mouthpiece, Gielgud understood the power of the mass media. And when Sayers, Christie and Berkeley were approached by the BBC about the possibility of broadcasting a collaborative mystery together, they jumped at the chance. Publicity on this scale seldom came the way of detective novelists. The result was a pioneering enterprise linking the broadcasting and print media, and enabling detective story fans to participate interactively. People could listen to the story on the wireless, read it in The Listener, and then take part in a prize competition judged by Detection Club member Milward Kennedy.

  The project was made possible by the creation of the BBC. The British Broadcasting Company, which became a corporation in 1927, was run by a Glaswegian control freak called John Reith, who insisted that announcers should wear a dinner jacket and bow tie, and speak in a standardized pronunciation. Then, as now, the BBC could not please everyone. Douglas Cole wrote in the New Statesman, shortly after the BBC was granted a Royal Charter, ‘Whatever the BBC does is, of course, wrong.’

  An early scandal embroiled Ronald Knox. People complained that the BBC schedules were dull and lacking in variety, so Knox, already recognized as a gifted satirist, was hired to liven things up. On January 15, 1926, he broadcast live from Edinburgh. The BBC’s studio was located at the back of a music shop in George Street. The studio was small and cramped, but that did not matter with a one-man show. Knox gave the performance of his life – a parody of a news bulletin called ‘Broadcasting from the Barricades’.

  The BBC announced that this was a work of humour and imagination, enhanced by ‘sound effects’, still a novelty. Knox’s script began innocuously, before moving to a news item about a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. One witty giveaway was that the protesters were led by a man called Poppleberry, secretary for the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues. Music and cricket news were interspersed with reports of increasing violence. Listeners heard an explosion at the Savoy Hotel (created by smashing an orange box next to the microphone) and a dignitary named Sir Theophilus Gooch was ‘roasted alive’ on his way to the studio to talk about housing for the poor. ‘He will therefore,’ Knox solemnly informed his audience, ‘be unable to deliver his lecture to you.’ The clock tower of Big Ben was brought crashing to the ground, and the Minister of Traffic was hanged from a tramway-post on the Vauxhall Bridge Road. Finally, the BBC itself was stormed.

  Knox’s satire played on the widespread fear, months ahead of the General Strike, that British workers would follow their Russian comrades and overthrow the state. Many listeners took it as deadly serious. One called the Admiralty, demanding that the Royal Navy set off up the Thames to tackle the rioters. Twenty minutes after the programme finished, Knox sat down to dinner, unaware he had caused panic across the nation. About ten million people tuned in, and the impact was all the greater because heavy snow in London delayed the delivery of newspapers revealing that all was well. Knox’s spoof was the first of its kind, possibly inspiring Orson Welles’s legendary version of War of the Worlds, which terrified American listeners twelve years later.

  The newspapers reacted with noisy outrage. ‘People Alarmed All Week-End’ wailed a headline in the Daily Express. Sir Leo Money, a former Liberal minister who had turned to socialism and writing for newspapers after losing his seat in Parliament, condemned the programme as ‘utterly humourless’. The Lord Mayor of Newcastle complained that his wife had been seriously upset. Rumours swirled that Knox was ‘blacklisted’ by the BBC because of the furore he had caused, but he worked with the BBC again as soon as the Detection Club sprang into life.

  Chastened by reaction to ‘Broadcasting from the Barricades’, the BBC struggled to come up with innovative new ventures before the Talks Department decided to risk a serialized detective story written by a team of writers. The ‘round robin’ story form had emerged in the nineteenth century, notable examples including The Fate of Fenella, a sensational story blending the irresistible ingredients of adultery, murder, and mesmerism. Two illustrious contributors were Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. But Golden Age detective novelists had never tried their hand at a round-robin story. The constraints of playing fair by listeners and readers were bound to prove testing.

  Six leading authors were approached: Sayers, Berkeley, Christie, E. C. Bentley, Knox and Hugh Walpole. Over lunch at the Savoy, they discussed the project with Howard Marshall, an up-and-coming young man who later became a pioneering commentator at live broadcasts of state occasions and major sporting events. They decided that each writer ought to broadcast the instalment of the story that he or she wrote, and Walpole agreed to circulate a synopsis. The writers of the first three instalments – Walpole, Christie and Sayers – would move the story
along ‘according to their own several fancies’. Their successors were left to use their wits to unravel the clues left by the first trio.

  Walpole was a celebrity. His fame, coupled with an excellent speaking voice, made him an obvious choice to take the lead, as writer and broadcaster. Sayers agreed to coordinate the project, liaising between her fellow authors and the BBC. The timescale for the project was strict. Each author was due to broadcast on a Saturday evening, with the 1,800-word script appearing in The Listener the next Wednesday.

  So far, so good. The trouble started when Walpole announced he was not willing to write out his story word for word. A natural with the microphone, he preferred the spontaneity of reading from notes. This meant that the BBC had to hire two parliamentary reporters more familiar with working on Hansard. They had to make a full note of his words for typing on Sunday, and posting to the magazine printers for half past seven on Monday morning. It was all alarmingly tight.

  The challenge for the writers – above all those like Christie, who were unused to broadcasting – was that, as the playwright and occasional crime writer Emlyn Williams said, ‘British radio was still a momentous force.’ To go live before an unseen audience of millions was terrifying, with the soundproof studio like a dungeon filled with microphones resembling a ‘regiment of robots’ with ‘each dead eye turned bright red and staring at its victims’.

  ‘Hate was the principal feeling in young Wilfred Hope’s mind as he walked hurriedly down Sunflower Lane one wet and stormy evening.’ Walpole’s opening to Behind the Screen had a bleak tone typical of his occasional forays into crime fiction. The Ellis family, into which Wilfred hopes to marry, has taken in a lodger called Dudden who has ‘acquired over all of them a most curious dominance’. When Wilfred calls at their home, he sees, behind a large, old-fashioned Japanese screen, the body of Dudden, ‘horribly dead’.