The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  On leaving the army, Wade set about building a new life. A cricketing all-rounder talented enough to play regularly for Buckinghamshire, he became a Justice of the Peace, County Alderman, and High Sheriff. When he published A History of the Foot Guards to 1856, he listed his recreations, with tongue in cheek, as ‘hunting, shooting and fishing’. Perhaps it is because he was a card-carrying member of the Establishment that the excellence of his crime fiction has often been overlooked. But his work reveals a keen awareness of the responsibilities that accompany the privilege of leadership, within the police or anywhere else, and his storylines were sometimes poignant, and often strikingly original.

  At first, his writing was influenced by Freeman Wills Crofts – but Wade had one crucial advantage over Crofts, as a result of holding public office, which gave him a close personal understanding of how professional detectives worked. He was not the first insider to write police stories. Sir Basil Thomson, a former Head of CID at Scotland Yard whose eventful career also included spells as assistant prime minister of Tonga and governor of Dartmoor and Wormwood Scrubs, wrote several mystery stories, including a series charting the rise through the ranks of a policeman called Richardson. Thomson worked with the intelligence service during the war, conducting an interrogation of Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer and spy subsequently executed by a French firing squad. In his mid-sixties, Thomson gained first-hand experience of the criminal justice system when he was charged with an act of indecency in Hyde Park with a woman who gave the name of Miss Thelma de Lava. Thomson claimed he was talking to her for the purpose of researching vice in London, prior to meeting a confidential source in the Communist Party at Speaker’s Corner. His defence was not helped by the fact that Miss de Lava was a prostitute, or by his having misled a police constable about his identity. Thomson was a controversial figure, and it is conceivable that he was ‘fitted up’ by enemies in the police or political classes, but he was found guilty and fined five pounds.

  Wade, a more accomplished writer than Thomson, became the first major crime novelist to blend police procedure and strong plots with exploration of the relationships and, sometimes, rivalries between police officers of all ranks. Far from being a backward-looking reactionary, he developed into one of the Golden Age’s most ambitious innovators. The quality of his work has been underestimated, in part because of its variety, and perhaps also because Julian Symons, whose rare lapses of critical judgment were not quite so rare when it came to the Golden Age, ranked him alongside Freeman Wills Crofts and the Coles as a ‘humdrum’. At his best, Wade was anything but.

  Speaking very broadly, detective stories fall into one or more of five categories: puzzle, psychological, police/legal, playful/ironic and medical/scientific. The Verdict of You All contained all these elements, with an early example of courtroom drama at its heart. The victim, as in Trent’s Last Case, is a financier. Sir John Smethurst seems amiable, but proves to have been a bully. Wade believed in the status quo and class hierarchies, but his books display a fierce contempt for people who misuse their money and power. Sexual betrayal and the consequences of the war contribute to a conspicuously unsentimental story. Just like Berkeley, this pillar of the establishment showed cynicism about the machinery of justice, dedicating his novel ‘in all sympathy to the innocent and still more to the guilty’.

  Another financier dies in Wade’s third novel, The Duke of York’s Steps, when his aneurysm bursts after an assailant bumps into him. The aneurysm is a helpful condition for detective novelists seeking unpredictable ways to kill off their characters, as Anthony Berkeley later demonstrated in Trial and Error. In Wade’s story the investigation is led by Inspector John Poole, first of a series of ‘gentleman cops’ created by Detection Club members. They include E. R. Punshon’s Bobby Owen (who graduates from Oxford with a pass degree and finds that the only available job during the ‘economic blizzard’ of the slump is as a police constable, though he soon rises through the ranks), Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn, John Rhode’s Jimmy Waghorn, Michael Innes’s John Appleby, and, decades later, P. D. James’ Adam Dalgleish. Wade is at ease in describing the atmosphere of London’s gentlemen’s clubs, and charts the effects of war on a wide range of characters, including a German Jew, embittered by the persecution he suffered during the conflict.

  Corruption in local government has a timeless quality, and it provides the backdrop of The Dying Alderman. The book also boasts a ‘dying message’ clue, of the kind often found in Golden Age fiction. A murder victim on the point of death gives a tantalizing hint about the killer’s identity. Dying messages soon became clichéd, but Wade’s is neatly contrived, its meaning revealed in the very last line of the book.

  Wade’s books reflect his pessimism about the state of Britain as it entered the Thirties. Questions of family dishonour and the decaying state of the ruling classes dominate books such as The Hanging Captain. Ferris Court, the Tudor home of twelve generations of Sterrons, is crumbling. Inside, the decor is faded, outside the shrubberies are overgrown. Sir Herbert Sterron, brought low by gambling and poor investments, has squandered his inheritance, and is now trying in vain to sell the family heirlooms to one of his guests. His younger wife Griselda is pursued by a former adventurer who has become the county’s High Sheriff, and also by an erratic priest who has taken to calling himself ‘Father’, just possibly a dig at Ronald Knox. Sterron’s sexual impotence (delicately hinted at when the police question his doctor) symbolizes the collapse of the old order.

  The Chief Constable in this book is a former soldier who ‘having no qualifications for civilian employment other than the somewhat vague phrase “experience and control of men” … naturally thought of the police’. Wade’s sarcasm was shrewdly targeted. In the aftermath of war, people on the left of politics had been afraid that the authorities had a covert plan to militarize the police, a fear fuelled by the recruitment strategy of Brigadier General Sir William Horwood, the police commissioner who survived eating poisoned walnut whips only to become known as ‘the Chocolate Soldier’. Horwood’s tenure had been marked by a series of calamities, including an alleged cover-up involving Sir Leo Money, the Italian-born economic theorist who had served as Lloyd George’s parliamentary private secretary (and had subsequently criticized Knox’s hoax broadcast for the BBC).

  In an echo of Sir Basil Thomson’s indiscretion, Money was accused of indecent behaviour with Miss Irene Savidge, a radio valve tester. Once again, the alleged misbehaviour took place in a leafy corner of Hyde Park. Money claimed he was merely offering Irene career advice, although what he knew about testing valves was not reported. The two of them were acquitted amidst complaints of a conspiracy to protect the establishment which led not only to a public inquiry but to a controversial five-hour interrogation of Irene by male officers. Their efforts to uncover the truth somehow led them to ask her to show them her pink petticoat. Police corruption and misbehaviour were all too common. The recruitment of university-educated detectives like John Poole was part of a drive to clean up the Metropolitan Police after a string of scandals, often involving officers bribed by bookmakers and brothel-keepers.

  Encouraged by Sayers and other Detection Club colleagues, Wade became adventurous, trying something new with almost every book. The war continued to haunt him, and a soldier’s act of cowardice formed the core of a bleak and effective novel published almost two decades after the Armistice. In The High Sheriff, a lengthy prologue conveys the grimness of life in the trenches, and explains why Robert D’Arcy, the High Sheriff of Brackenshire, has something to fear. A proud man, he once succumbed to a cowardly impulse when facing almost certain death, and dread of exposure has tormented him ever since.

  Wade’s experience as a high sheriff helped to ensure authenticity. Yet for all his preoccupation with the war, he later made a confession to a friend. ‘Unbelievably’, he groaned, he had overlooked a fundamental error in the dust jacket artwork. This shows D’Arcy presiding in court – but despite his wartime service, he is no
t wearing his medals.

  John Rhode’s life too was shaped by military service. A big, bluff heavyweight with an astonishing capacity for beer and an intensely practical cast of mind, he became a soldier before the outbreak of the war. After a spell as chief engineer of the Lyme Regis Electric Light and Power Company, he returned to the army and was promoted to the rank of major. His battery was often quiet, due to the need to conserve ammunition, and he relaxed by scribbling stories in his field message book. When his observation post was shelled, he woke up in the casualty clearing station to find the book had vanished.

  Wounded three times, he was awarded the Military Cross before another artillery strike left him unfit for active service. Since anything was preferable to being ‘relegated to some impossible camp, charged with the duty of teaching recruits the art of loading a howitzer without dropping the shell on their toes’, he moved to Military Intelligence and worked on press propaganda. ‘Our business was to glorify ourselves and our Allies, and to disparage our opponents by every means in our power … The patron saint of Propaganda was the Father of Lies.’

  This was an excellent training ground for a writer of fiction, and after a couple of wartime memoirs and other factual books, in 1924 he published a thriller under the name of John Rhode. By the end of the decade, he had established himself as a prime candidate for founder-membership of the Detection Club. His engineering skills enabled him to wire up Eric the Skull, so that in his role as Skullbearer, he could switch on the batteries lighting Eric’s red eyes at just the right moment during initiation rituals. Sayers admired his ingenuity, as well as the fact that he was ‘a perfect elephant for work’.

  Rhode helped Sayers with Have His Carcase, but like her, he had reason to keep his personal life private. He was popular among his peers, and Lucy Beatrice Malleson, writing as Anthony Gilbert, dedicated her autobiography to him. Yet one anonymous obituarist (probably his Detection Club colleague Edmund Crispin) said that ‘he was not an easy man to know’. The American Howard Haycraft regarded Rhode as one of the most secretive detective novelists – in a very competitive field.

  His real name was Cecil John Charles Street, and he was born in Gibraltar. His father, a general in the British Army, was serving on the Rock, but the family soon moved back to England. Although Rhode had already reached the age of forty by the time of his debut as a crime writer, he went on to produce a staggering 143 novels. After two thrillers, he turned to detective fiction with The Paddington Mystery, which introduced his Great Detective, Dr Lancelot Priestley.

  E. R. Punshon, a Detection Club colleague and crime fiction reviewer, helpfully described Rhode as ‘Public Brain-Tester No. 1’ and Collins Crime Club happily blazoned that slogan in publicizing Rhode’s books. He possessed enough scientific, medical and practical know-how to set in motion an almost never-ending conveyor belt of ingenious methods for committing murder. Occasionally, they were inspired by real-life cases; remembering the death of the nineteenth-century chemist Adolph Gehlen helped Priesley to solve an ingenious puzzle in The Corpse in the Car. Rhode’s most outlandish M.O. was, however, unlikely to have been employed in practice: it involved homicidal use of the spines of a hedgehog painted green.

  Rhode’s early books touched on interesting ideas – an altruistic murder in The Davidson Case, and the murderer’s deliverance from justice in Shot at Dawn, for instance – that Berkeley and others developed in greater depth. But he lacked a gift for characterization, and it takes a reader with stamina to piece together Priestley’s life story. A tetchy, cerebral mathematician, the doctor is a widower, with a daughter called April. In his first case, he clears April’s husband-to-be, Harold Merefield, of suspicion of murder, but April is hardly ever mentioned again. Families were an inconvenience to Golden Age detectives; in the same way, the wife of John Dickson Carr’s Dr Gideon Fell soon vanished from the accounts of her husband’s exploits.

  Harold, however, becomes a fixture as Priestley’s long-suffering secretary and right-hand man. In Shot at Dawn, a corpse is spotted one morning, sprawled across the top of a motor cruiser’s cabin. After studying the tidal stream in the estuary, Priestley tells Harold: ‘The best way of representing the observations will be by a graph. I have brought some squared paper with me and it will be a pleasant occupation for you to draw the curve after dinner.’ Harold dutifully converts ‘the velocities, as observed, into the probable velocities at spring tides. For this purpose he multiplied Dr Priestley’s figures by the factor four over three. Thus the velocity observed at eight-fifty, .42 knots, became .56 knots.’ When his task is completed, his employer calls it ‘quite a creditable piece of work’ – high praise by Priestley’s standards. Rhode thoughtfully reproduces the graph for the benefit of readers drowning in the flood of technical data.

  In 1928, the year Berkeley produced The Silk Stocking Murders, Rhode also published a detective novel featuring a serial killer. The Murders in Praed Street begins with a sequence of apparently motiveless murders. Each victim receives a bone counter bearing a Roman numeral shortly before his death. Only when six men have died, and a seventh has received a numbered bone counter, does Inspector Hanslet take over the investigation and call in Dr Priestley. The great man has cut himself off from the outside world while absorbed in writing Some Aspects of Modern Thought, ‘a book which was to enhance his already brilliant reputation … [and] to shatter the majority of the pet theories of orthodox science’.

  Priestley rapidly identifies the motive for the crimes. The connecting link between the victims became such a cliché in detective fiction that Julian Symons bemoaned its dreary familiarity, so it is easy to forget that Rhode was breaking fresh ground. The killer’s murder methods exploit Rhode’s technical know-how. One crime involves the use of ‘a remarkably virulent synthetic alkaloid’, and another sees a man lured into a cellar and killed by prussic acid, released into the atmosphere by an electric current. An even more ingenious weapon is a metallic potassium bullet tipped with the broken end of a hypodermic needle and fired from an air gun. Priestley is the killer’s final designated victim. To a modern reader, the whodunit twists are obvious, and Priestley is so slow to see through a villainous disguise that his negligence is almost criminal. At the time, however, the book represented something fresh in detective fiction.

  The historic backdrop to the crimes is a mercy killing, but Rhode ignored the ethical implications. Christie, at her best, integrated the concept of justice into her plots, while Berkeley played ironic games to demonstrate the fallibility of justice. Rhode’s interest lay in the mechanics of murder, not the moral questions it prompts. In one book, remarkably, a child-killer is allowed not only to get away with his crime, but to inherit a fortune. This was Heir to Lucifer, written as by Miles Burton, published in 1947 but bearing the hallmarks of traditional inter-war Golden Age fiction. The novel is a country house murder mystery, complete with amateur detective, Desmond Merrion, but the outcome is far from conventional. Merrion finds himself unable to prove the murderer’s guilt, and dismisses out of hand his wife’s despairing suggestion that the culprit will at least be troubled by a guilty conscience: ‘The death of one small boy is not likely to disturb the philosophic calm of a student of Lucretius.’ Merrion even goes so far as to maintain, ‘Really, taking the broad view, things haven’t turned out too badly.’ The killer’s psychology is not explored, and his extreme callousness is hard to reconcile with the way in which he is presented earlier in the story. Intriguingly, he shared a forename with the author.

  Like Henry Wade, Rhode made sure that his work reflected changing times within the police service. Hendon Police College was established in May 1934 to train a new breed of ‘officer class’ cadets, and the following year Rhode published Hendon’s First Case, a clever and topical whodunit which contrasted the traditional working methods of Superintendent Hanslet with the more imaginative approach of Hendon (and Cambridge) man Jimmy Waghorn. Despite this nod to up-to-the minute authenticity, however, both men continue to con
sult Dr Priestley when faced with the trickiest murder puzzles. Rhode remained unpretentious about his writing. ‘What could be more soul-destroying than re-reading one’s own tripe?’ he once asked Sayers.

  The origins of the modern serial killer whodunit, a sub-genre impossible to avoid nowadays, seem to date back to 1928. That year saw the appearance of the books by Rhode and Berkeley, and S. S. Van Dine’s The Bishop Murder Case. Earlier, Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger, inspired by the Jack the Ripper killings and filmed by Hitchcock, had emphasised suspense rather than detection. After Berkeley, Rhode and Van Dine led the way, other Golden Age serial killer mysteries soon followed, most famously Christie’s The ABC Murders.

  Like Berkeley and Christie, Rhode ran into marital difficulties. He and his wife separated and he started living with Eileen Waller, although they did not marry until 1949, shortly after he became a widower. By the standards of middle-class respectability this was an unconventional personal life, and no doubt accounted for the secretiveness mentioned by Howard Haycraft, but Rhode was a generous and broad-minded companion. His closest friends in the Detection Club, Anthony Gilbert and John Dickson Carr, were significantly younger than him. He and Eileen lived in the countryside, and shared Freeman Wills Crofts’ love of holiday cruises. Village pubs often feature in Rhode’s books, and a recurrent theme is the absurdity of restricted licensing hours. In The Charabanc Mystery, a Miles Burton book, a character remarks: ‘Wonderful how the smell of beer seems to pervade this case.’

  Even when personal tragedy struck, Rhode’s reaction was not to mope but to redouble his productivity. As with Sayers and others, writing and involvement in the Detection Club offered a brief escape from misery - in his case, grief over the death of his daughter Verena. The bereavement probably explains why he abandoned April Priestley – he simply could not bear to write about his detective’s daughter any more.