The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  the police called Bernard Spilsbury

  The books about Spilsbury mentioned in the Select Bibliography range from the admiring (Browne and Tullett) to the sceptical (Rose). The variations reflect changing attitudes to the role of the expert witness. Spilsbury’s evidence helped to hang Patrick Mahon, but that was not enough for him. After the execution, he conducted the post-mortem himself, perhaps hoping to find evidence of criminal abnormality in Mahon’s brain tissue. He was becoming notorious for displays of forensic showmanship, and the Home Office turned down his request to remove parts of Mahon’s fractured vertebrae, fearing he would use them for anatomical demonstrations. But sensitivities change as time passes. Sixty years after Emily Kaye’s death, a radio broadcast about her murder by the true crime expert and occasional novelist Edgar Lustgarten was sampled by the Australian band Severed Heads in their song ‘Dead Eyes Opened’. It became their first chart hit.

  Part Three

  Looking to Escape

  The Anatomy of Murder, the third Detection Club book, published by The Bodley Head in 1936.

  13

  ‘Human Life’s the Cheapest Thing There Is’

  Science and technological advance dominated crime detection long before anyone dreamed of genetic fingerprinting and CCTV surveillance. Dorothy Sayers applied that ‘terrific vitality’ to studying what we now loosely call ‘forensics’. She admired the expertise of Bernard Spilsbury, name-checking him in Clouds of Witness, and prided herself on accurate depiction of scientific homicide investigation. One of her strongest Wimsey short stories was inspired by a murder on Guy Fawkes Night in 1930.

  Two cousins returning home in the early hours after a Bonfire Night Dance in Northampton were walking along a country lane in bright moonlight when they saw a bizarre apparition. A smartly dressed but hatless man was clambering out of a ditch. Moments later, the men saw in the distance a bright red glow. ‘Someone must be having a bonfire!’ the stranger called, and went on his way. The cousins headed for the scene of the blaze. As they drew near, they saw a Morris Minor motor car had gone up in flames. The police were called, and put out the fire. Inside the vehicle, they found a charred corpse.

  The car was traced to Alfred Arthur Rouse, and the cousins identified Rouse as the man from the ditch. Like murderer Patrick Mahon, whose crime inspired The Scoop, Rouse was a salesman and compulsive philanderer. After he made a casual and very unwise reference to his personal ‘harem’, the police investigated his private life, and discovered that it was in such a tangled state that he had a strong incentive to fake his own death and start again. The body in the car was so badly burned that it was only identified as male thanks to the discovery of a fragment of prostate gland. Spilsbury examined the minimal burned remains carefully to establish the cause of death with his customary authority, while a vehicle expert testified that someone had tampered with the car’s carburettor. Rouse was found guilty and confessed to the crime shortly before being hanged. He had given a lift to a man who remains unidentified to this day, killed him, and set fire to the car in the hope of starting a new life. His scheme had only careered out of control because he climbed out of the ditch at precisely the wrong moment. And there was a clue in his appearance: in 1930, a smart man’s failure to wear a hat was a sure sign that something was amiss.

  Sayers adapted the Rouse scenario for ‘In the Teeth of the Evidence’, exploring forensic dentistry in the case of a criminal who has ‘studied Rouse’ but still fails to outsmart Wimsey. Supposedly unindentifiable corpses found in blazing cars enjoyed a vogue both in fact – Rouse’s cunning plan was similar to ones carried out by two German murderers around the same time – and in fiction. The best ‘blazing car’ novel was probably J. J. Connington’s The Four Defences, a complex puzzle involving forensic analysis and ‘rail fence ciphers’ untangled by Mark Brand, a radio columnist with a taste for detection. Brand was Connington’s attempt to update the amateur sleuth, but not until Eddie Shoestring arrived on the television screens in the 1970s did the idea of a radio presenter as gumshoe find popular success in Britain.

  Sayers and Connington admired the meticulous scientific detective stories of an older Detection Club member, Richard Austin Freeman, although Sayers complained when Freeman spiced up his stories with ‘love interest’. This paradox should have aroused her detective instincts, especially since one of his finest mysteries stressed the paramount importance of sex. Preoccupied with keeping her own life private, she never guessed that the sub-plot of Freeman’s finest novel presented a fictional version of a real-life secret passion.

  Freeman’s precise literary style, like his calligraphic handwriting, suggests a dry, painstaking man, more comfortable with microscope and test tube than the ebb and flow of human emotions. In fact, he was a romantic whom women found highly attractive, but his personable manner concealed a streak of ruthlessness. Like Robert Eustace, Sayers’ collaborator in The Documents in the Case, Freeman exploited his technical know-how in his fiction, inspiring writers who were fascinated by the potential of scientific progress, if occasionally appalled by the dangers it posed.

  Eugenics, one of Freeman’s hobby horses, provoked fierce debate. Detection Club members had strong opinions on every subject under the sun, and had deeply held, and conflicting, views about whether eugenics represented a threat to humanity. Eugenicists advocated improving the population’s genetic composition. In practice, this meant identifying ‘fit’ members of the community and separating them from the ‘unfit’. The ‘fit’ would be encouraged to reproduce, but not the ‘unfit’. There was nothing new about this – Plato favoured secret state control of human reproduction – but in the early twentieth century the eugenics movement gained strong support from figures as diverse as John Maynard Keynes (a director of the British Eugenics Society), George Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, and Marie Stopes. Among the most vocal was Dean Inge of St Paul’s Cathedral; he was called ‘the gloomy Dean’ because of his dire warnings about the dangers of over-population, but he and his wife cheered themselves up a little by reading detective stories.

  G. K. Chesterton hated eugenics, but Freeman was prominent in the opposite camp. In Social Decay and Regeneration, Freeman argued that eugenic reform was necessary if human life were to continue to progress. Unlike some fellow eugenicists, he rejected compulsory sterilisation and restrictions on marriage, but advocated the voluntary segregation of the ‘fit’ in a League from which ‘defectives’ were excluded. League members would pursue a utopian existence whose members concentrated on farming and skilled craftsmanship. The renowned sexologist Havelock Ellis, another enthusiastic eugenicist, contributed a foreword rhapsodizing about Freeman’s vigorous mind and penetrating judgement.

  Pages from Richard Austin Freeman’s coded diary (by permission of David Chapman).

  Freeman found few kindred spirits in the Detection Club, even though its members wrote hundreds of books about the disposal of unattractive people. His fellow scientist J. J. Connington had some sympathy for eugenics, but writers with strong Christian beliefs were hostile. In Gaudy Night, Sayers makes fun of the American Sadie Schuster-Slatt, a leading figure in the League for the Encouragement of Matrimonial Fitness, while a scientist asking what would happen if only intelligent people were allowed to breed provokes Hercule Poirot’s scorn in Dead Man’s Folly: ‘A very large increase of patients in the psychiatric wards, perhaps.’ Ronald Knox mocked a family doctor in Still Dead with a passion seldom found in his fiction: ‘He was all for sterilization and for lethal chambers; not only the feeble-minded, by his way of it, but the cripples, the topers and the idlers would be all the better for a swift end and a home in the ugly cemetery on the hill-side.’

  Freeman was prouder of Social Decay and Regeneration than any of his mysteries, a wild misjudgement but not untypical. Detection Club members presumed their crime fiction would soon be forgotten. They could be as dismissive of their own mysteries as their snootiest critics, and just as wrong.

  Freeman’s hi
dden depths were hinted at by his ‘dark, mesmeric eyes’. This phrase was Dorothy Bishop’s. She was the daughter of Alice Bishop, who before the First World War typed Freeman’s manuscripts and helped to check his proofs. Freeman and Alice were both married to other people, but there is a hidden picture of their relationship in one of his finest books. According to her daughter, Alice believed Freeman was a man of destiny: ‘My conviction is that almost from the beginning she saw him as an extraordinary man, someone at whose feet she could sit, yet someone she could direct and dominate.’

  ‘Did they become lovers in the usual sense?’ Dorothy wondered. ‘Or was sex overruled, sublimated to the making of a new writer? I am quite sure she saw him as famous long before Fame arrived. I am almost equally sure that underneath his magnetic personality was a cold and calculating mind. For in my mother’s hand was my father’s cheque book. A strange eternal triangle. And yet a partnership (let us acknowledge it) that enriched three lives, for in the end my father also basked in the reflected fame of Richard Freeman.’

  Richard Austin Freeman was born in London in 1862, the son of a tailor. Like slum-life author and fellow Detection Club member Arthur Morrison, he later became embarrassed by his humble background. Having qualified as a physician and surgeon, he married the daughter of a master plumber, and they had two sons. Unable to afford to buy a practice, he joined the Colonial Service. He served on the Gold Coast, and succumbed to blackwater fever. Invalided back to Britain, he tried to make a living out of medical practice. During that time he published a book about his travels in Ashanti, and began his relationship with Alice Bishop. He dedicated two books to her, including Social Decay and Regeneration, and one to her apparently complaisant husband, Bernard.

  Under the pen name Clifford Ashdown, and in collaboration with John James Pitcairn, a medic with whom he worked for a time at Holloway Prison, Freeman published two collections of short stories about Romney Pringle. Pringle is a villain who masquerades as a ‘literary agent’ – a concept which might strike a chord with some writers. Five years later, The Red Thumb Mark introduced the character who made Freeman’s name, Dr John Thorndyke. As Raymond Chandler (an unlikely fan of Freeman’s work) said, Freeman had produced ‘a story about a forged fingerprint ten years before police method realized such things could be done’.

  Failing health prompted Freeman to give up his medical practice and create his Great Detective. Handsome and brilliant, Thorndyke is not only a doctor but also a fully-trained lawyer. He has ‘a scientific imagination … the capacity to perceive the essential nature of a problem before the detailed evidence comes into sight’. Above all, his method ‘consists in the interrogation of things rather than persons’. Thorndyke seldom ventured out without his green travelling research case, packed with tiny reagent bottles, test tubes, spirit lamp, dwarf microscope and ‘assorted instruments on the same Lilliputian scale’. His chambers housed a laboratory and workshop occupied by his assistant Nathaniel Polton.

  Freeman prided himself on the integrity of the scientific methods he described. He even conducted his own laboratory experiments to validate his hero’s detective work, and as his biographer said, ‘collected and photographed marine shells and industrial dust; built see-behind spectacles and periscope walking-sticks, all so that his characters could engage in realistic activities’. This obsessive devotion to accurate detail set him head and shoulders above American contemporaries such as Arthur B. Reeve, creator of Professor Craig Kennedy, and the brothers-in-law William McHarg and Edwin Balmer, whose plot devices veered towards technology – such as the lie detectors which Chesterton despised.

  The Eye of Osiris, the second Thorndyke novel, mixed ingredients ranging from Egyptology to the appearance of fragments of a skeleton in a number of fish ponds and watercress beds, and a lecture on the life-cycle of the liver fluke. The narrator is a young physician who falls for Ruth Bellingham, niece of a missing man, just as Freeman had become entranced with Alice Bishop.

  ‘The one salient biological truth is the paramount importance of sex,’ Thorndyke insists. When he adds that ‘the love of a serious and honourable man for a woman who is worthy of him is the most momentous of human affairs,’ it is clear he is Freeman’s proxy, speaking to Alice.

  One researcher has suggested that Freeman was the father of Dorothy’s brother, Gerald. Certainly, for a time his wife Annie left him and moved to Broadstairs. She was a Catholic, and divorce was out of the question – a scenario providing a motive for murder in dozens of Golden Age novels. In the Freemans’ case, the answer was compromise. Freeman rejoined Annie, and eventually they moved to Gravesend, where the Bishop family lived.

  Freeman anticipated real-life events when writing The Cat’s Eye, which appeared in 1923 with a preface explaining that an episode in the story, in which a poisoned box of chocolates is sent to two characters (Thorndyke persuades them not to tuck in), was written before a similar incident in real life. Sir William Horwood, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, had made the extraordinary mistake of treating himself to chocolates from a mysterious parcel of walnut whips sent to him at New Scotland Yard. He thought they were a birthday present from his daughter, and decided they would be the ideal way to finish off a hearty lunch of pork and apple sauce, bread and butter pudding and Guinness.

  In fact, the sender was Walter Tatam, an insane horticulturalist from Balham. He had laced the chocolates with arsenic, and Horwood became so ill that he was lucky to survive. Tatam said voices coming from the hedges in his garden had urged him to send poisoned chocolates – mostly chocolate eclairs – to senior police officers. The Horwood case, and Freeman’s story, created a fashion in fictional homicide. The arrival of a mysterious box of chocolates became a recurrent hazard in the lives of Golden Age characters, but the concept of talking hedges was too strange for fiction.

  Freeman’s relationship with Alice Bishop cooled, and he became involved with an accomplished watercolourist called Bertha Fowle. Bertha was more than thirty years his junior, which suggests that, whatever else he lacked, it was neither charm nor stamina. Despite her husband’s waywardness, the long-suffering Annie was willing to keep the marriage going. She and Freeman continued to live together in Gravesend until his death.

  Freeman wrote a story for Isaac Pitman, ‘The Man with the Nailed Shoes’, in Pitman’s shorthand, and this prompted him to invent a shorthand system of his own. He kept a diary, which contained a few commonplace entries in longhand, mainly about his tax return, a subject always apt to vex authors. The rest of the diary is written in his unique shorthand, and in effect encrypted. It does not take a Thorndyke to deduce that Freeman was trying to ensure that nothing he wrote would destroy his marriage if Annie laid her hands on the diary. Was Alice Bishop the subject of his private musings, or Bertha Fowle, or both? Lord Peter Wimsey would have relished the challenge of cracking Freeman’s ingenious code. So far it has defeated the attempts of lesser mortals to break it.

  Freeman dedicated his 1931 novel Pontifex, Son and Thorndyke enigmatically to Bertha ‘in commemoration of many industries and pleasant labours’. In the same year, Sayers wrote seeking permission to include one of his stories in her new anthology. He thanked her for asking about his health, ‘which is slowly improving and may, if I live long enough, return nearly to normal. Some day I hope to turn up at a “Detection Club” dinner and give myself the pleasure of making the acquaintance of some of my fellow sleuths. The club seems to be a triumphant success and promises to develop into a really important institution. It does very great credit to the organizing power and initiative of those who, like yourself and Mr Cox, saw it through its perilous infancy.’

  With a humility that gives a clue to a self-deprecating charm, he expressed gratitude for Sayers’ kind words about his books: ‘The quality of your own work makes a compliment from you specially gratifying and encouraging; particularly to an aged Victorian who is none too confident of his powers to maintain a respectable standard of achievement.’ Despite his ailmen
ts and advancing years, the aged Victorian continued to write, and eventually the oldest member made it to the Detection Club’s dinners.

  Sayers interest in chemistry is illustrated by the repeated appearances of Sir James Lubbock in her books. Lubbock is the Home Office Analyst, and his prowess is reminiscent of both John Thorndyke and Bernard Spilsbury. The Detection Club boasted its own eminent chemist in Alfred Walter Stewart, alias J. J. Connington. A Scot, he studied chemistry at Glasgow University, and his publications included a successful textbook, Recent Advances in Organic Chemistry.

  Connington became engaged in his mid-twenties, but his wife-to-be ‘died suddenly, after the wedding presents had come in’. Although eventually he did marry and had a much-loved daughter, the trauma of bereavement may have hardened his attitudes. Scorn for softness and sentimentality is a recurrent theme in his books, and his Great Detective is the most ruthless of all. Not for nothing was the American edition of one of his novels entitled Grim Vengeance.

  A small and unassuming man, Connington had a biting sense of humour. Never starry-eyed about scientific fame, he wrote in The Boat-House Riddle: ‘In science, an international reputation implies merely that an author’s papers are read by a handful of specialists, half of whom probably disagree with the conclusion.’ After enjoying success with a successful dystopian ‘pseudo-scientific thriller’, Nordenholt’s Million, he was inspired by Freeman’s example to tackle the challenges of detective fiction.