The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  Simpson named her daughter Clemence, in tribute to Dane. The pair shared a publisher, and a plot idea donated to them by C. S. Evans, their editor, led them to write Enter Sir John, featuring actor and theatre manager Sir John Samaurez (born Johnny Simmonds) as amateur detective. Samaurez marries the woman he has saved from the gallows. Although he resumed his detecting career, it proved short-lived.

  After they had written three novels together, Dane’s interest in detective fiction waned, but Simpson’s grew. Tall and pale, with thick dark wavy hair, Helen de Guerry Simpson was an astonishingly high achiever, who seemed to dedicate her life to proving that a woman could have it all. Convent-educated, she was a keen snuff-taker with a love of fencing and witchcraft. She played the piano and the flute, and was a keen horsewoman, as well as a gifted cook who enjoyed making home-made wine according to ancient recipes. After broadcasting a series of talks about cooking on the BBC, she was deluged with fan mail, and her popularity led to lecture tours in Australia and the United States, where she spoke on subjects ranging from literary impostors to how cheesecakes were made in the time of Samuel Pepys. When she stood for Parliament as Liberal candidate for the Isle of Wight, for a general election that never took place because of the war, she campaigned by travelling around in a donkey-cart.

  Sydney-born, Simpson was the daughter of a solicitor and granddaughter of a French marquis. After her parents separated, she moved with her mother to France, and then to England, where she decoded messages in foreign languages for the Admiralty. She studied music at Oxford, but her love of drama brought mixed fortunes. She helped found the Oxford Women’s Dramatic Society, but was sent down for breaking the ban on male and female students acting together. Undaunted, she threw herself into a literary career, publishing poetry, plays, translations and short stories as well as novels, starting with Acquittal, written in five weeks to win a bet. She contributed dialogue to Hitchcock’s Sabotage, and married fellow Australian Denis Browne, a surgeon.

  A journalist interviewed her at her London home whilst she was in the midst of writing three books at the same time as bringing up her young daughter, Simpson confessed to a secret passion for a good cigar. ‘I love going to the gasometer-shaped reading room of the British Museum and digging out history,’ she said. Each day she wrote a thousand words in pencil, usually while the nursery wireless was at full blast in the next room. The journalist was struck by her determination not to waste time. During the interview, she kept stitching a chair cover.

  Sayers and she became close friends – although she was not told about John Anthony’s existence – and Sayers borrowed from Enter Sir John to create the storyline of Strong Poison. But not even Helen Simpson could have it all forever. She died young, leaving Sayers, never a woman to gush, to say: ‘I have never met anybody who equalled her in vivid personality and in the intense interest she brought into her contacts with people and things’.

  Notes to Chapter 15

  Frank Vosper … adapted Christie’s short story ‘Philomel Cottage’

  To be precise, Vosper adapted The Stranger, Christie’s unperformed stage version of her story.

  Emlyn Williams … described her as ‘an outsize author with a handsome generous face topped by hair as overflowing as her talent’

  The description comes from Williams’ memoir Emlyn (London, Bodley Head, 1973). Williams (1905–87) was an actor and playwright whose work occasionally touched on crime. He also wrote a semi-fictionalized book about the Moors murders committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.

  Helen de Guerry Simpson was an astonishingly high achiever

  See Philip L. Scowcroft, ‘Detection, History and Australia: The Literary Experience of Helen Simpson’, CADS 16, May 1991, and Liz Gilbey, ‘To Hitchcock and Beyond: Australian Author Helen Simpson’, CADS 58, June 2010, which suggests that Simpson’s short story ‘Mr Right’ influenced Sayers’ Strong Poison.

  She contributed dialogue to Hitchcock’s Sabotage, and married fellow Australian Denis Browne

  Browne’s uncle wrote the nineteenth-century classic Robbery under Arms using the pen name Rolf Boldrewood. Denis Browne later became an eminent paediatric surgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital and earned a knighthood.

  16

  A Severed Head in a Fish-Bag

  Detection Club members were escapists, just as much as their readers. The Twenties and Thirties supplied plenty of reasons for people to yearn for a break from their everyday lives. Playing a part, on stage or off it, was one solution, and so was going to the theatre or watching a film. Travelling around, at home or abroad, was another way of getting away from it all. For writers, holidays provided fresh backgrounds for their novels. For readers, the chance to read a mystery set somewhere unfamiliar added to the pleasure of discovering whodunit.

  Douglas and Margaret Cole enjoyed walking holidays. One fine summer’s day in Lyme Regis, Margaret was striding ahead of her husband when she caught sight of a vast and unmistakable figure seated on the steps outside a Georgian hotel. It was G. K. Chesteron. He and his wife liked the Three Cups Hotel – a favourite of Jane Austen, Tennyson and Tolkien – so much that they had become close friends of the landlord. The Coles were delighted by the unexpected encounter with the Detection Club President. Chesterton’s views often chimed with theirs, and they regarded his poem ‘The Song of the Wheels’, ferocious in its denunciation of the exploitation of labour, as the best ever written in defence of striking workers. The Coles spent the evening captivated by the cheeriness of this huge yet somehow child-like man, who fidgeted with his fingers and had a squeaky, gurgling laugh. His latest hobby horse was the difficulty of capturing the nuances of his writing when translating it into foreign languages. ‘How,’ he demanded, ‘would you put the phrase “the child she-bear so beloved of hymnologists” into idiomatic and intelligible French?’

  That day proved memorable for a much less happy reason. During their walk, Douglas fell behind Margaret, instead of outpacing her as usual. He simply had no energy. They put it down to a touch of the sun, but a few months later they went walking in Kent, and again Douglas could not keep up. He abandoned his plan to stand for Parliament – and so avoided becoming one more statistic in the rout of the Labour Party at the next general election. Margaret fell dangerously ill with pneumonia, and completed her convalescence with a month as a guest of a doctor friend at a villa on an island off Portofino. For her, it was ‘an enchanted April’ in the sun, although when Victor Gollancz came to stay, he kept on his city suit, and spent most of his time indoors, playing billiards in a stuffy room with Douglas.

  As Margaret recovered, Douglas found himself plagued by drowsiness and a raging thirst. Diabetes was diagnosed, and an attempt to treat him without recourse to insulin turned him into a living skeleton, while the Coles’ house stank with the stench of ‘biscuits’ made from seaweed which were intended, along with ‘a revolting kind of aerated cottonwool’ to replace bread in a brutally restricted diet. Eventually he was put on insulin and his condition improved. But he was never the same man again, and attacks of hypoglycaemia affected him mentally as well as physically. This resulted in what Margaret described as a ‘heightened nervous tension’. He was more feverishly prolific than ever, but became deaf to constructive criticism.

  Clumsiness weakened their detective novels, and this did not go unnoticed by colleagues in the Detection Club. Nicholas Blake, whose politics were close to the Coles’, praised the dialogue and setting of Scandal at School, but felt the plot resembled ‘a clockwork mouse: erratic in direction, and requiring too frequent winding-up’. Berkeley liked the Coles, but was disappointed by Death of a Star, which had a solution so painfully obvious that the police’s delay in discovering it caused him to lose patience. At least he enjoyed ‘the admirable opening’, in which the severed head of a popular and glamorous film star is discovered in a fish-bag on the Embankment.

  Douglas Coles’ poor health seemed like a metaphor for the damaged state of the country. The National Gov
ernment, re-elected with a resounding majority to the Coles’ despair, presided over a sick economy. The medicine of job losses, means testing and higher income tax was harsh, and recovery a long time coming. For people with little or no money, borrowing detective novels from libraries offered respite for an hour or two. The better-off were forced to make economies, and Detection Club members felt strong commercial pressure to write what their readers wanted most.

  In the Hungry Thirties, men often walked long distances in search of work. The romance of the road quickly faded, and the ‘passing tramp’ became a scapegoat for many a fictional murder, although the real culprit invariably proved to be someone else. Walking was cheap, and ‘the right to roam’ became a hot topic. The formation of the Ramblers’ Association was followed by a mass trespass on Kinder Scout in Derbyshire in 1932, a protest echoed three years later in Death in a Little Town by R. C. Woodthorpe. Local people take ‘direct action’ to tear down a fence blocking a public right-of-way, and soon the unpleasant landowner responsible is found dead, but Woodthorpe’s narrative offers a leisurely ramble rather than a brisk march to the solution of the mystery.

  The wintry economic climate, and a deteriorating exchange rate, meant that people became desperate to get away from it all, though even those who could afford a holiday mostly stayed in Britain. A generation earlier, Chesterton had rhapsodized about the detective story reflecting ‘the romance of the city’, but during the Golden Age, hundreds of mysteries were set in country villages.

  Mac Fleming, a keen fisherman and artist, was fond of south-west Scotland. He loved speeding at eighty miles an hour along the Kirkcudbright-to-Gatehouse road, much to the horror of his wife, trapped in the passenger seat. Their Scottish holidays prompted Sayers to set a novel in an artistic community in Galloway, where Wimsey stumbles across a murder during a fishing trip. The Five Red Herrings was a ‘pure puzzle story’, not Sayers’ strong suit, but at least Gollancz equipped it with a better map than Freeman Wills Crofts was allowed for Sir John Magill’s Last Journey. Sayers thundered that Collins had supplied her luckless friend with ‘the most mean, miserable, potty, small, undecipherable and useless map, scrimshanking, feeble and unworthy to the last degree’.

  She combined writing her own detective stories with supervising the round-robin mysteries and compiling anthologies. Frenetic activity took her mind off domestic worries: tax demands, Mac’s poor health, and his continuing lethargy about fulfilling his promise to adopt her illegitimate son John Anthony. She took over from Berkeley as Honorary Secretary of the Detection Club, and returned to form in Have His Carcase.

  The story opens with Harriet Vane on a walking tour around the south-west coast of England. On such a holiday, the Coles had bumped into Chesterton, but Harriet encounters a corpse on a rock known as the Devil’s Flat-Iron. The dead man’s throat has been cut from ear to ear, and the wound bleeds on to her. Harriet sets about breaking a seemingly impregnable alibi, and describes to Wimsey how different fictional sleuths solve elaborate puzzles, name-checking Inspector French, Dr Thorndyke and Roger Sheringham.

  The victim, a Russian gigolo supposedly of noble birth, had worked at the Resplendent Hotel – ‘one of those monster seaside palaces which look as though they had been designed by a German manufacturer of children’s cardboard toys’ – dancing with guests like the rich but lonely widow Mrs Weldon. Harriet is scathing about men who expect women to be submissive, and women who are content to depend on men. She had become a mouthpiece for Sayers.

  Like The Five Red Herrings, the book owed a debt to the Detection Club. Sayers picked Robert Eustace’s brains about a means of causing confusion about the time of death, and also consulted Crofts and John Rhode. Rhode thought the codes typically used in detective fiction were too easily broken and therefore unsatisfactory. He made this point to Sayers, and encouraged her to use a much trickier cipher by sending her an explanation (running to five pages) of how to encode and decode a Playfair cipher, together with a sample message for encoding. In a prefatory note, she acknowledged Rhode’s help with ‘the hard bits’, and during the novel Wimsey mentions Rhode’s Peril at Cranbury Hall, which devotes a whole chapter to explaining how to decode the cipher. Unravelling the cipher in Have His Carcase also requires pages of yawn-inducing explanation. Obsessive accuracy of detail was a strength of Sayers (unlike the Coles, who in Last Will and Testament had a character mauled by a tiger in Africa) but once in a while it caused her to become as dull as Douglas Cole on a bad day.

  Sayers and Henry Wade both loved the atmospheric East Anglian landscape, and rendered it superbly as a setting for murder. The small fishing community at Bryde-by-the-Sea in Wade’s Mist on the Saltings is a world away from the thatched cottage and village green stereotype associated with Golden Age novels by people who seldom read them. Bryde is nominally a harbour, but separated from the North Sea by ‘a wide expanse of weed-grown mud, intersected by a maze of channels which at high tide are full to the brim of salt water and at low are mere trenches of black and treacherous ooze’. The dreary and desolate Saltings obsess the troubled war veteran and artist John Pansel, while his wife’s loyalty is tested by Dallas Fiennes, a lecherous novelist camped in a hut on the sand dunes. In the taproom of the local pub, a sick and unemployed singer and an out-of-work engineer join Pansel in bemoaning the state of the nation – ‘We encourage enemy aliens and put our own heroes on the dole’ – and worry about whether Mussolini will provoke another war. Pansel concludes, ‘We may not be too proud to fight, but we’re too damn poor.’

  Fiennes is found dead in the mud of the Saltings. Did he lose his footing in the fog, or did someone kill him? In the final scene, a small boat rocks on the sea, its occupant lost in the water, a suitably bleak conclusion to a book closer in spirit to the modern crime novel than almost anything previously written by members of the Detection Club. Sayers praised the originality of Mist on the Saltings, but teased Wade about his depiction of the novel-writing Casanova: Fiennes, she said, ‘plans a seduction like Napoleon – and executes it like the famous Duke of York’. Perhaps this served Wade right after his complaint two years earlier that Harriet Vane was ‘the least real of your characters. At times she is a rather common tom-boy, at others she is ravishing Wimsey.’ However, Sayers admired the characterization of John Pansel, noting that his sullen behaviour was ‘convincingly true to life’. Perhaps she was thinking of Mac.

  Reviewing attracted her because in those days newspaper and magazine editors allowed plenty of space to consider the form seriously. Torquemada was the most renowned crime fiction critic, but Berkeley, Margaret Cole, E. R. Punshon, Nicholas Blake and Milward Kennedy all tried their hands. So did T. S. Eliot and other poets such as Herbert Read, Edward Shanks and Dylan Thomas. Thomas’s fascination with the Detection Club influenced an abortive mystery novel of his own that was never published in his lifetime, partly for fear of libel actions by the fellow poets whom he satirized, partly because the story was feeble. Other notable Golden Age reviewers included Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard, Arthur Ransome (under the pseudonym William Blunt), and the feminist writer Rose Macaulay. Charles Williams, a friend of Sayers, was one of the ‘Inklings’, the Oxford literary group led by C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and also an enthusiastic critic of crime whose own novels occasionally veered towards detective fiction.

  Nobody brought more energy and expertise to criticism of detective novels than Sayers. For more than two years she reviewed three books each week, reading – but possibly not always finishing – at a rate of more than one book each day. She singled out Punshon for high praise, but her commitment to intellectual integrity meant that not all her Detection Club colleagues were so lucky. She was as dismissive of the Coles’ The Affair at Aliquid as she was generous to the early novels of other writers with radical sympathies such as R. C. Woodthorpe, Nicholas Blake and Christopher St John Sprigg. Occasionally, she added a postscript to her column, featuring ‘The Week’s Worst English’. Sayers being Sayers, one pos
tscript was devoted to ‘The Week’s Worst Latin’.

  She also covered books by American novelists, but readers, and therefore publishers, showed limited interest in crime fiction from further afield. This was the nature of the times; as Bertolt Brecht said: ‘The crime novel, like the world itself, is ruled by the English.’ Yet during the Golden Age, writers who enjoyed and wrote detective fiction were as diverse, and as geographically scattered, as Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, New Zealander Miles Franklin, Australia’s Paul McGuire and Arthur Upfield (an Englishman who emigrated at the age of twenty), and Europeans such as Karel Čapek, Friedrich Glauser, Stanislas-André Steeman, and the creator of Maigret, Georges Simenon. Brecht planned to co-author crime novels with another fan, the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. The rise of Hitler halted their project, depriving us of detective fiction written by two German Marxists entranced by the possibility of playing games with the genre. Nazis saw little need for the self-indulgence of literary escapism.

  At Benson’s advertising agency, Sayers learned about offering added value, and she realized the worth of an atmospheric context for a murder mystery. Having popularized the workplace-based mystery with Murder Must Advertise, she wrote a book combining a memorable setting with esoteric background information. Today, a blend of fact and fiction is a key part of the appeal of novels by writers as diverse as Dick (and now Felix) Francis and Patricia Cornwell, but the pattern was set by Sayers. The Nine Tailors told readers everything they needed to know about campanology but were afraid to ask. Bell-ringing even supplies an unusual cryptogram, the key to which is a specific peal written out in change-ringing notation.