‘Look! Look! The blood!’ cried Walpole as he ended his instalment with a melodramatic cliffhanger designed to make sure listeners tuned in the following week. In a single, short piece, he demonstrated the storytelling knack which had earned him success. He yearned to be one of the great and the good of the literary establishment, and an invitation to join the prestigious new Detection Club boosted his fragile ego. Yet throughout his life he remained an outsider.
Walpole was born in Auckland, New Zealand, where his father – later the Bishop of Edinburgh – was Canon of St Mary’s Cathedral. The family was British, and Walpole’s grandfather was the younger brother of the first Prime Minister. After they returned to England, he set his heart on establishing himself as a writer. His fierce ambition was not accompanied by a thick skin. He wanted everyone to love him, but in his drive to build a reputation and the right connections he sometimes trampled on the feelings of others. He even included a league table in his diary, ranking his friends in order. Yet he was easily bruised by criticism and incurably jealous. When Hilaire Belloc described P. G. Wodehouse as the best English writer of the day, Wodehouse thought it hilarious, but Walpole was hurt. His wealth provoked envy and he alienated people through trivial disagreements. One enemy wrote a vindictive anonymous obituary of him in The Times.
Walpole’s sensitivity was compounded by the intense social pressure he felt to remain discreet about his homosexuality. For him, unlike Douglas Cole, writing and the intellectual life was not enough. At the end of his first year as a student, he noted in his journal, ‘Meanwhile I still wait the ideal friend … I’d give a lot for the real right man.’ Suffering from loneliness during a holiday in Cornwall, he wrote in his diary that marriage ‘really seems the only thing’ and proposed to ‘a ripping girl’ from the house where he was staying. He wooed her by saying, ‘I’ve always thought of you more as a man than as a woman.’ She was not flattered, and turned him down.
His biographer, writing when homosexual acts were still illegal in Great Britain, made cryptic reference to visits to Turkish Baths which provided Walpole with ‘informal opportunities of meeting interesting strangers’. Walpole’s chief companion was Harold Cheevers, a married former constable in the Metropolitan Police and former police revolver champion of the British Isles. His role in Walpole’s life so far as the outside world was concerned was as his chauffeur. Walpole and the Cheevers moved to the Lake District, background for the Herries Chronicles, his series of popular historical novels. In his private journal, Walpole set out a self-portrait: ‘I adore to be in love but am bored if someone is much in love with me. I’m superficially both conceited and vain but at heart consider myself with a good deal of contempt.’ His sexual orientation was very different from Berkeley’s, but they were equally complex and contrary characters whose most personal work had a sado-masochistic flavour.
Julian Symons later contrasted the ‘saccharine sweet’ flavour of the Herries Chronicles with Walpole’s sporadic ventures into crime, such as Above the Dark Circus, which were ‘tart as damsons’. The dark emotions swirling in these novels suggest that Walpole – like other gay and lesbian novelists oppressed by the prejudices of the age – found an outlet through writing crime fiction that was denied to him in everyday life.
For readers, much of the pleasure of a round-robin story lies in the chance to appreciate the varied styles and approaches of the contributing authors. Collaborative stories which have not been planned out in advance lack the flow and structure of a book written by a single person. Seeing how each writer tackles the task of keeping the story coherent and appealing is at least as entertaining as the story itself.
So it was with Behind the Screen. With six short sections, it is no more than a novella, and scarcely a model of ‘fair play’. But the quintet of writers who followed Walpole enjoyed themselves. After the bleak opening section, which contained no dialogue at all, Christie played to her strength, moving the plot forward with an almost unbroken stream of light, lively conversation. Unlike Walpole, she had little talent for descriptive writing, but she knew her limitations, and was accomplished at skipping around them.
Sayers followed, then Berkeley and Bentley. Finally, Ronald Knox wrapped things up. His contribution began with the pious reflection that ‘there is kindliness even in the most warped natures’ and concluded with a solution out of left field. The result was a flagrant breach of the rules he’d laid down in his Decalogue. But breaking the rules was more fun than obeying them.
Sayers kept in close touch with Berkeley about progress. At this point their relationship was strong, and she was frank in her comments about their colleagues. For Christie, back from the Middle East and contemplating a new life with Max Mallowan, the BBC project was not the top priority, and her delays drove Sayers to distraction. But she managed to persuade Christie to put the fatal wound in Dudden’s throat rather than his midriff, since it made the trickle of blood described by Walpole more likely.
Knox panicked her by suggesting that, with so much blood spilled, Dudden might have suffered from haemophilia. She was working on a plot involving haemophilia, and few things depress crime writers more than learning that their latest brainwave has been anticipated by a rival. She told Berkeley that, thankfully, she had managed to head Knox off. Decades later, post-war Detection Club member Michael Innes recorded Knox’s claim that Sayers heard haemophilia mentioned when the plot for Behind the Screen was being discussed, and ‘was observed to make an entry in her notebook’. Knox was simply making mischief. There was little love lost between him and Sayers.
Milward Kennedy approached the round-robin game with his usual zest. Having seen a synopsis of the first four episodes, but without knowing what was in the final instalment, he posed a series of questions for contestants. Fearing that Knox would pull a rabbit out of the hat, he backtracked on The Listener’s claim that enough clues would be given by the time readers reached the middle of the story to enable them to guess the solution. He argued that it was enough for the clues to be in place by the end of the penultimate instalment.
The BBC received 170 entries to the competition and Kennedy supplied a detailed assessment of the answers to his question. Nobody got every point right, and very few people identified the correct culprit, thanks to Knox’s unlikely solution. Two mistaken guesses did indeed involve haemophilia. Very few solutions linked the actual murderer to the crime – not surprisingly since the culprit was a minor character in the story, and the motive was concealed. Behind the Screen had an unexpected legacy, through a line Berkeley gave to the despairing Inspector Rice, who finishes his notes about the suspects with the question: ‘Are they all in it?’ Chance remarks often inspired Christie and perhaps this jokey, throwaway line lingered in her subconscious. She was to develop it into the stunning plot of one of her most celebrated novels.
The experiment was a triumph, although nerves frayed at the BBC because of the writers’ unpredictability. The Talks Department was keen to run a follow-up as soon as possible, and the Detection Club members, bitten by the broadcasting bug, were happy to oblige. But tensions persisted. The editor of The Listener told Sayers that they had not had ‘a very happy time in regard to publishing the previous story … owing to lack of prior collaboration’ and he wanted to avoid this the second time around. Sayers was again willing to act as supervisor of the exercise, but cautioned that Christie, whose name was a big draw, was at present unavailable because she was out of the country.
J. R. Ackerley of the Talks Department wanted to keep an ‘editorial eye’ on the project, but Sayers was having none of it. Relations between them began to disintegrate. When Ackerley warned Sayers he would die of heart failure if she delayed again in supplying a synopsis, she slapped him down. And when he rashly complained that frantic colleagues were raining telegrams upon him, she hit back at once, deploring the BBC’s extravagance in resorting so readily to telegrams.
Two strong and colourful characters, Sayers and Ackerley were never likely to b
e soulmates. Joe Ackerley was the illegitimate half-brother of the future Duchess of Westminster, and his fondness for sailors and guardsmen caused E. M. Forster to warn him to give up looking for ‘gold in coal mines’. Like Walpole, he spent a lifetime searching for his ‘ideal friend’, but never found him.
The new round-robin story had a Fleet Street background and was called The Scoop. The plan was for six authors each to write two instalments. Walpole and Knox stepped aside, and were replaced by a pair of very different writers, Freeman Wills Crofts and Clemence Dane. This time, the sextet fashioned their story from elements of a grisly real-life crime.
In May 1924, the police called Bernard Spilsbury (who had been knighted the previous year) out to a remote beach house on the Crumbles, a shingle beach in Sussex. He arrived, immaculate as usual in morning dress, black tailcoat, grey spats and black silk top hat, to encounter the most gruesome crime scene of his career. A human being had been burned, boiled, chopped up, and pulverised. Body parts were found in parcels and a hat-box, but the head was missing. Bits of human bone were mixed with ashes in the fireplace. More than nine hundred fragments needed to be sifted through and identified, along with other remains. Taking off his tailcoat (but not his spats), Spilsbury put on a large apron and a pair of rubber gloves and got to work. Comparing his painstaking task to work on a jig-saw puzzle, he concluded that the deceased was ‘an adult female of big build and fair hair’. Milk could be squeezed from the breasts, and he concluded that the dead woman was between three and four months pregnant.
The deceased proved to be a pleasant, hearty shorthand typist in her late thirties called Emily Kaye, and her murderer a Liverpool-born commercial traveller. Patrick Mahon was handsome and persuasive, but forever short of money, a gambler and womanizer whose conquests included the wife of the literary editor of the Daily Express. He seduced Emily and raided her savings, but her pregnancy was an unwanted complication. Having bought her an engagement ring with her own money, as part of a ‘love experiment’ he invited her to the bungalow at the Crumbles. She wrote to her sister, saying, ‘Don’t worry, old sausage. I know I shall be very happy,’ and set off to join him.
Mahon killed her and dismembered the corpse over a period of days, during which he had sex in an adjoining room with a woman called Ethel Duncan. Presumably Ethel lacked a strong sense of smell, but Mahon had unwisely left at his home a ticket to a railway left-luggage office. This aroused his wife’s suspicions, and she hired a private detective. The ticket led the detective to Waterloo, and discovery of a Gladstone bag containing bloodstained clothing, a cook’s knife, and a tennis racquet cover bearing Emily Kaye’s initials.
There was no question of the Detection Club delving into the horrific detail of the Crumbles murder in The Scoop. Public taste simply would not have tolerated it. But the story Sayers’ team concocted is lively and entertaining, as the Morning Star’s journalists investigate the stabbing of a young woman in a lonely bungalow at the ‘Jumbles’ in Sussex.
Given her hatred of putting herself in the public eye after the disaster of her disappearance, Christie’s willingness to make a live radio broadcast reading her part of the story was unexpected and brave. It was equally an act of courage to expose herself to relentless correspondence from Sayers. Never afraid to badger people when the need arose, Sayers was an irresistible force. However, as the weeks passed, Christie proved adept at keeping out of her way. She flitted between houses and even countries, always seemingly one step ahead.
Sayers was more than a match for Ackerley, and her other colleagues offered strong support. Bentley was reliable, while Crofts, a thoroughly decent man with strong spiritual values, was always eager and industrious. Sayers described Berkeley as ‘his own bright self as usual’, which contradicts the widespread view that dealing with him was always hard work. Ackerley and the BBC, on the other hand, infuriated her. She was driven to distraction by errors in the illustrations that appeared in The Listener. At one point, a character was pictured out of doors in November without a hat or coat and ‘apparently wearing a chemise’. Skirts were now longer, Sayers protested. Later she asked the ‘crazy artist’ to draw the death scene as ‘an exercise in perspective’.
Quite apart from these irritations, she had to contend with the structural challenges of a jointly written story. At one point during the plotting process, Freeman Wills Crofts telephoned her to warn about a problem with a crucial alibi concerning a train journey. The soft Irish voice trembled with dismay. ‘I’m afraid the 9.48 may have to get in late,’ he confessed: a former railwayman’s worst nightmare.
For her part, Sayers feared the alibi problem might ruin a scene in the newspaper office. The answer was to arrange a lunch meeting of the collaborators, in the hope of pulling the threads together. Unfortunately, the arrangements were confused by a mix-up about the precise time they were due to get together. Given this level of ineptitude, it is as well that the authors never tried to carry out in real life any of the ingenious and elaborate schemes favoured by their villains.
Christie fled to Switzerland with daughter Rosalind, chased by a frantic letter from Ackerley. In an early example of the mismatch of expectations between broadcasters and authors, he was unsympathetic to the demands of a classic whodunit, and kept worrying that listeners would lose the plot. Alarmed by the number of characters who appeared in the first two instalments, he warned: ‘It has to be written almost as if for children.’
Sayers broadcast the first instalment of The Scoop on 10 January 1931, with Christie to follow a week later. At this point, the second half of the story still had not been written. Suffering from a cold, Christie asked the BBC to allow her to record the episode from Devonshire. Full of foreboding, Ackerley agreed, but begged her not to overrun her allotted time.
Max was digging away in Ur, but he promised not to miss his new wife’s broadcast. The challenge was to find a radio with a sufficiently strong signal. Riding a horse for the first time in his life, he galloped across the desert to Nasriyah, so that he could listen to her on a wireless belonging to a major who was the political officer based there. He was delighted with Agatha’s efforts, but his letter of congratulations took weeks to reach home.
Back in London in February, Christie completed her part in the project and wrote to Sayers of her joy at having finished it. She praised Sayers for taming the BBC, and invited her round for tea at Cresswell Place. A natural diplomat, she made a habit of dodging any hint of controversy. If she was annoyed that Sayers had taken such a close interest in her disappearance in 1926, she never showed it. Similarly, she seems never to have had a cross word with Berkeley – quite an achievement, given his provocative nature.
The Scoop is a stronger story than Behind the Screen, showing the benefit of better planning as well as the powerful raw material supplied by the Mahon case. Again, the varied styles of the different chapters are part of the charm. Clemence Dane focuses on the character of the attractive secretary Beryl Blackwood whereas Freeman Wills Crofts ignores life in the newspaper office, a background vividly established by Sayers in the first chapter, and keeps to his comfort zone, focusing on the investigations conducted by Scotland Yard. Christie, Berkeley and Bentley write with their usual lightness and deftness of touch, while Sayers finishes what she started.
This time, rather than run a competition, Ackerley conducted a survey to seek audience feedback – one more example of the project being ahead of its time. He received nearly 1,500 appreciations and only 60 criticisms. For all its flaws, the programmes proved a triumph. Unfortunately, the stress of the collaboration with the BBC deterred Sayers and her friends from repeating the experiment. Ackerley tried to tempt Christie into writing original stories for broadcast and subsequent publication. On Edmund Cork’s advice, she declined. It paid better to publish in print first.
Christie was Ackerley’s favourite detective novelist. He regarded her persistent lateness in delivering her contributions as tiresome, but found her ‘surprisingly good-looking
’. Yet he did not rate her highly as a broadcaster. Nerves caused her to gallop through her instalment almost as fast as Max had ridden across the desert. But anyone, Ackerley admitted, ‘would have seemed feeble against the terrific vitality, bullying and bounce of that dreadful woman Dorothy L. Sayers’.
Notes to Chapter 12
An early scandal embroiled Ronald Knox
I have drawn on many sources, including the biographies of Knox and the BBC website, for my account of the broadcast
the Talks Department decided to risk a serialized detective story written by a team of writers
See Alexis Weedon, ‘“Behind the Screen” and “The Scoop”: a cross-media experiment in publishing and broadcasting crime fiction in the early 1930s’, Media History, vol. xiii, no. 1, 2007; Greene, Doug, ‘Murder by Committee’, CADS 1, July 1985, and Reynolds, William, ‘Collaborative Detective Publications in Britain, 1931–39’, Clues, vol. 9.1, Spring/Summer 1988, as well as contemporary correspondence now held in the Marion E. Wade Center and by various collectors and dealers.
Walpole’s sporadic ventures into crime … were ‘tart as damsons’
Walpole relished macabre fiction on the borderline of the crime and mystery genre. He and Dane admired the work of Claude Houghton, real name Claude Houghton Oldfield (1889–1961), author of novels such as I Am Jonathan Scrivener (1930). They were responsible for Claude Houghton: Appreciations by Hugh Walpole and Clemence Dane with a Bibliography (London, Heinemann, 1935).
The BBC received 170 entries to the competition and Kennedy supplied a detailed assessment of the answers to his question
Competition stories have continued to appear from time to time, an interesting example being Kingsley Amis’ The Crime of the Century, which was first published in the Sunday Times in 1975, as a serial in six episodes. After the publication of the fifth part, readers were invited to send in their own solutions to the murder mystery, and the winning entry was published alongside Amis’ own (and quite different) solution. Amis was like his friends, detective novelist Edmund Crispin and poet Philip Larkin, an admirer of Golden Age fiction. His 1973 novel, The Riverside Villas Murder, pays homage to the Golden Age, and even contains Amis’ variation on the theme of the cluefinder.
The Golden Age of Murder Page 18