That dependable hate figure, the selfish financier, regularly crops up as a victim in Golden Age stories. In many other books, the corpse belongs to a blackmailer who had threatened victims with exposure and disgrace – a powerful motive for murder at a time when most people yearned for respectability. With the economic slump causing much suffering, any unpleasant old miser with a host of impoverished family members was unlikely to survive long in a crime novel, and anyone who called in their solicitor to change their will was signing their own death warrant. An unappealing victim was an easy way of supplying plenty of suspects. It also prompted questions about the nature of right and wrong. Connington agreed with Berkeley that the conventional legal system sometimes failed to deliver true justice. His answer was to create a detective who sometimes operated above the law, and sometimes allowed murderers to escape punishment for their crimes. But this man was not a private detective, like Holmes, or a journalist like Sheringham. He was a Chief Constable.
By 1927, T. S. Eliot reckoned that Connington had joined ‘the front rank of detective story writers’. That year saw the first appearance of Sir Clinton Driffield, a surprisingly youthful Chief Constable, and his friend, ‘Squire’ Wendover, in Murder in the Maze. Connington’s publishers proclaimed the book as ‘one of the half-dozen masterpieces’ of the genre. Two brothers are found murdered in the maze, poisoned by darts tipped with curare. Despite his official position, Driffield arranges for poisoned gas to be pumped into the maze when the killer is trapped inside it. Conversely, he allows a happy ending to a character who commits theft and forgery in a ‘not a penny more, not a penny less’ retribution against a swindler prefiguring the plot gimmick of Jeffrey Archer’s debut novel.
Driffield proves equally uncompromising in Mystery at Lynden Sands, where he and Wendover find their seaside holiday interrupted by the death of an elderly man, apparently of cerebral congestion. Connington exploits the beach, quicksand and curious rock formations of the resort – not to evoke atmosphere, but to provide crime scenes, clues from footprints in the sand, and a dramatic climax. When one villain, who has threatened to inject a young woman hostage with rabies, is trapped and facing an agonizing death, Driffield is in no hurry to rescue him: ‘This isn’t a case where my humanitarian instincts are roused in the slightest.’
The Case with Nine Solutions again demonstrates a harsh worldview. A scientist says to a doctor friend: ‘Still got the notion that human life’s valuable? The war knocked that on the head. Human life’s the cheapest thing there is.’ The doctor goes out in the fog to visit a patient, calls at the wrong house, and discovers a young man’s corpse. When he, Driffield, and Inspector Flamborough contemplate the crime scene, he reflects: ‘All three of them were experts in death, and among them there was no need to waste time in polite lamentations. None of them had ever set eyes on the victim before that night, and there was no object in becoming sentimental over him.’
The elaborate storyline boasts two separate killers and four murders, even before a climactic explosion leaves another character dead. One character makes use of hyoscine as a ‘date rape’ drug, in an attempt to have sex with a woman who would not remember what he had done to her. In real life, Dr Crippen may have tried something similar, and Connington explains how Crippen might have become confused over the dosage.
Premeditated rape is an astonishing plot element for a Golden Age mystery, but criminal psychology preoccupied Connington less than plot and playing fair by the reader. In The Eye in the Museum, he includes a ‘cluefinder’. Cluefinders reflected the notion of ‘fair play’. When the solution to the mystery was given, references were appended (in this book, by way of footnotes) to point out the pages where clues to the puzzle had been given. This device was borrowed by other British writers, notably Freeman Wills Crofts, Ronald Knox and Rupert Penny, and most flamboyantly by the American C. Daly King.
Sayers extolled Connington’s next book, The Two Tickets Puzzle, in her novel The Five Red Herrings, which elaborated upon his trick concerning a train ticket and an alibi. Perhaps her story grew out of a conversation with Connington at a dinner hosted by Berkeley. Her culprit, a detective fiction fan, has read Connington’s book, and hidden his copy from Lord Peter Wimsey to prevent discovery of his cunning scheme. Unfortunately for him, Wimsey had already read The Two Tickets Puzzle. This typifies the way Club members referenced each other in their fiction, and was reinforced by Milward Kennedy’s mention, in Death to the Rescue, of Sayers’ and Connington’s ‘tricky way with train tickets’.
For many people, gambling offered escape from the drab everyday world, and the chance to dream of something better. Football pools, invented in the Twenties, were immensely popular, along with betting on horse- and dog-racing. Financial ruin suffered by gamblers who never knew when to stop was a common motive for murdering rich relatives in Golden Age mysteries. Crofts’ puritanical distaste for betting surfaces in Fatal Venture, which features a luxury floating casino sailing outside British territorial waters. Christie, herself a competition addict, made crafty use of the craze as a motive for murder in The Sittaford Mystery. And a betting syndicate was at the heart of Connington’s The Sweepstake Murders, which combines a clever puzzle with a sardonic glance at the changing face of rural England. Driffield’s sidekick Wendover, a traditionalist with ‘an inherited prejudice in favour of agriculture’, deplores ‘the new trades and factories which were springing up like mushrooms’, producing ‘flimsy articles’ ranging from fancy brands of enamel to toffee or office gadgets.
The Sweepstake Murders is an early ‘who will be next?’ whodunit featuring a rationally motivated serial killer. Nine men, including Wendover, decide to have a flutter in a coming sweepstake, and draw a horse which comes second in the Derby, making their ticket worth almost one quarter of a million pounds. One syndicate member dies in an air crash, and a court action by his estate delays the payout. The survivors agree to share the winnings between those who remain alive at the time of payment – an unwise deal promptly followed by the apparently accidental death of another syndicate member, who falls into a chasm known as Hell’s Gape.
Wendover’s fellow syndicate members ‘cared nothing for the countryside or the country people’, and their attitude to the sweepstake reflects their innate greed. They are such an odious bunch that critics reckoned it was a pleasure to see them gradually eliminated. Connington humanizes Wendover by saying that he saw victims and suspects as human beings, rather than chess pieces – but overall, most of his characters do resemble chess pieces. A striking example is Thomas Laxford, a supposed left-wing idealist, in The Ha-Ha Case. Laxford’s apparently well-meaning socialism makes an unconvincing contrast with his cynical deceptions. Connington had no time for ruthless businessmen, but he was equally contemptuous of idealists.
A tantalizing mystery of Victorian Scotland inspired The Ha-Ha Case. Alfred John Monson was hired as a private tutor to the Hambrough family, who owned the Ardlamont estate in Argyll. Monson, his friend Edward Scott and his wayward pupil Cecil Hambrough went out hunting one day in 1893, and after estate workers heard a shot, Cecil was found dead. Monson claimed the young man had accidentally shot himself in the head while climbing a fence. The death was regarded as a tragic accident until it emerged that Cecil had taken out life insurance policies in favour of Monson’s wife. It emerged that the day before his death, Cecil, a non-swimmer, had narrowly escaped drowning after taking a boat ride with Monson. When Monson was tried for murder, Dr Joseph Bell (whose deductive methods Conan Doyle borrowed for Sherlock Holmes) was a witness for the prosecution. Despite the weight of circumstantial evidence against Monson, a ‘not proven’ verdict was returned, and he walked free. He was jailed for insurance fraud, and also became involved in a matrimonial dispute with his wife, whom he accused of committing adultery with Cecil. When Madame Tussaud’s exhibited a waxwork of Monson, carrying a gun, outside the Chamber of Horrors, he sued for libel. But his luck with the law had run out. The jury humiliated him by awardi
ng only a farthing in damages.
The other ingredients of The Ha-Ha Case are pure Golden Age: a country house party, an obscure point of English inheritance law, a dash of medical science, and some tricky work with ballistics – illustrated by a diagram. Connington plays a trick on the reader through an unorthodox use of narrative viewpoint before Johnnie Brandon goes out in a rabbit-shooting party. The young man is duly found shot dead in a sunken ditch (or ‘ha-ha’), in a chapter with one of the most wonderful titles to be found in any Golden Age novel – ‘The Ha-Ha of Death’.
Notes to Chapter 13
blazing cars enjoyed a vogue … in fiction
Forgotten blazing car novels include Francis Everton’s intriguing The Young Vanish (1932), in which one character announces that ‘it is the first occasion on which metallurgical and spectographic analysis has been called in the aid of the Law’. Everton was the pseudonym of Francis William Stokes (1883–1956), whose technical expertise matched that of Crofts and Rhode, but who had too much flair to be classed as humdrum. A note in Murder May Pass Unpunished (1936) describes him as a ‘distinguished engineer who has been largely responsible for the development of the special process for making castings under centrifugal pressure’.
he and his wife cheered themselves up a little by reading detective novels
When Inge’s wife sent Freeman Wills Crofts a complimentary postcard, he responded with his customary good manners, and she preserved his letter in a copy of his village mystery, Enemy Unseen.
his personable manner concealed a streak of ruthlessness
The research of Norman Donaldson and Oliver Mayo has helped to develop my understanding of Freeman’s life and work, and I am especially indebted to two Freeman enthusiasts, David Chapman and Mark Sutcliffe, for information about his life and work.
The rest of the diary is written in his unique shorthand
David Chapman has been kind enough to show me extracts from the diary, and I share his hope that one day Freeman’s code can be cracked.
Alfred Walter Stewart, alias J.J. Connington.
The most detailed account of Connington’s life and work is to be found in Curtis Evans’ Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery.
That dependable hate figure, the selfish financier, regularly crops up as a victim in Golden Age stories.
Examples include Death of a Banker (1934), an ‘impossible crime’ story by Anthony Wynne. Wynne was the pseudonym of Robert McNair Wilson (1882–1963), a doctor with an interest in economics and a friend of Ezra Pound. In the same year, McNair Wilson published Promise to Pay: An Inquiry into the Principles and Practice of that Latter-Day Magic Sometimes Called High Finance. Wynne’s detective Dr Eustace Hailey, the snuff-taking ‘Giant of Harley Street’, often investigated locked room mysteries, perhaps the most ingenious being Murder of a Lady (1931).
notably Freeman Wills Crofts, Ronald Knox and Rupert Penny, and most flamboyantly by the American C. Daly King
For examples, see Crofts’ The Hog’s Back Mystery (which Sayers mistakenly said in a review of King’s novel was the first book to feature a cluefinder), Knox’s The Body in the Silo, Penny’s She Had to Have Gas, and King’s Obelists Fly High. Rupert Penny was the pen name of Ernest Basil Charles Thornett (1909–70), who wrote eight ingenious whodunits in a short space of time at the tail end of the Golden Age. Thornett, like many other detective novelists, undertook intelligence work during the war, as well as writing a thriller under the name Martin Tanner. He never returned to the genre, and was best known in later years as a doyen of the British Iris Society, and editor of its yearbook.
A tantalizing mystery of Victorian Scotland
Discussed, for example, in Francis Grierson, “The Ardlamont Mystery” in Great Unsolved Crimes, and in “The Ardlamont Mystery: Tragic Mistake or Calculated Evil?”, The Scotsman, 9 December 2005.
14
Echoes of War
Connington’s cynicism in The Case with Nine Solutions was understandable – human life did seem all too cheap, especially during the war. Sayers’ husband Mac Fleming knew this better than most. As the first battle of the Somme raged, Mac had been posted to France. His brother was killed in action, and the conditions Mac faced as a member of the Army Service Corps haunted him: ‘Roads vanished under a sea of mud, guns got bogged down … ammunition lorries got stuck … what about the poor devils who – many times – worked forty-eight hours on end, at least half the time under shell-fire, plunging and wallowing in and out of shell-holes … no lights, and very often no food, and not the slightest protection … when the road was under fire.’
Nobody can understand the Detection Club without understanding how the war affected its members. Shadows cast by the conflict darkened Sayers’ life with Mac, and the lives of most of her colleagues. To his dying day, Berkeley suffered from the effects of the Germans’ use of chemical weapons of mass destruction. Ronald Gorell and Henry Wade were wounded in action, as were Agatha Christie’s brother and Gorell’s. Jessie Rickard’s second husband was killed in the battle of Aubers Ridge, while Ned Bristed, the only man for whom Ngaio Marsh seems to have entertained romantic feelings, died fighting in Belgium. Marsh treasured the ruby ring he gave her for the rest of her life.
Close encounters with death so far outside the experience of present day novelists as to be almost unimaginable left many people with mental as well as physical scars. Mac Fleming and Monty Miller, like Berkeley, were tough to live with, but for all their faults, they were not just survivors of war, but its victims.
The war impacted on detective fiction, at first in an unexpected way. Violent death is at the heart of a novel about murder, but Golden Age writers, and their readers, had no wish or need to wallow in gore. They had already encountered enough to last a lifetime. The bloodless game-playing of post-conflict detective stories is often derided by thoughtless commentators who forget that after so much slaughter on the field of battle the survivors were desperately in need of a change. For a decade or so, detective fiction offered not so much cosiness as a form of convalescence, until people were ready to write and read about terrible events on the field of battle.
Consequences of war drove Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Remembrance of those who died is crucial to a time-of-death puzzle after the body of General Fentiman is discovered on Armistice Day, while his officer grandson rages at the senseless of war: ‘A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income tax.’
Through Mac, Sayers gained a first-hand insight into the nightmarish world of the trenches, and her novel reflected the prevailing mood. The same period saw memoirs such as Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, as well as Journey’s End, R. C. Sheriff’s play set in an officers’ dug-out. Sheriff’s drama was rejected countless times by theatres who said the public hated to be reminded of the war and would not watch a play without a leading lady. When it finally reached the West End, with Laurence Olivier in the lead, it caught the moment, earning a long run, widespread translation and a film adaptation. The British public did not forget the ‘glorious dead’, but people were at last ready to face up to war’s horrors.
The former military man was a staple of everyday life and traditional detective fiction. This is why Colonel Mustard features in the Golden Age-inspired board game Cluedo. At first sight, Colonel Mustard had real life counterparts in the Detection Club, but there was more to the men in question than met the eye. Henry Wade, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy and Christopher Bush formed a quartet of former soldiers who turned successfully to detective fiction in the Twenties. Clever and hard-working, they published almost two hundred and fifty novels between them and enjoyed a good deal of success. One of the mysteries of the Golden Age is – why have they been airbrushed out of its history so completely that it is often seen as the exclusive territor
y of the ‘Queens of Crime’?
Wade seemed, at first glance, a Colonel Mustard lookalike. Tall, moustached, and with a commanding presence, he might have marched straight from a parade of the Grenadier Guards. His real name was Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, and he had served in the Grenadiers with distinction. Unlike his Detection Club colleagues, he was a member of the landed gentry, with an insider’s knowledge of life in an English country house. The family title dated back to the eighteenth century, and his father became fifth baronet, moving to Chilton House in Buckinghamshire. After Eton and Oxford, Wade joined the Grenadiers. Twice wounded during the war, he earned both the Distinguished Service Order and the Croix de Guerre.
Following the Armistice the Grenadiers had to march through Belgium towards Cologne, where British troops formed part of the force occupying Germany. On the way, at Fosses-la-Ville in Namur, Wade attended a talk on ‘Detective Fiction’ given by Valentine Williams, a former war correspondent who had been blown up while fighting at the Somme. Whilst recovering, Williams had begun a thriller, The Man with the Clubfoot, which launched a long career as a popular novelist. His talk stuck in Wade’s mind, and when Wade published his first detective novel, The Verdict of You All, he inscribed a copy of the book in memory of the talk, and presented it to Williams.
Wade, like Mac, could not scrub out of his mind the blood he had seen shed on the Front. A decade and a half after the Armistice, in Mist on the Saltings, he created the artist John Pansel, who was seriously wounded in battle: ‘Officially “cured” and pensionless, John Pansel’s digestion had been ruined by the jagged sliver of shell-case, the ripping knives, the draining tube, the cat-gut, and all the pains and paraphernalia of healing.’ When Wade says that ‘the years of merciless destruction had killed – so he thought – the power, even the desire, to create’, he was talking about himself. But once he adjusted to peacetime, and found fresh creative energy, he explored the lasting damage done to men by the war, and the way English society had changed forever.
The Golden Age of Murder Page 20