The Fenland backdrop, lovingly depicted, gives the book depth. On New Year’s Eve, Wimsey is stranded when his car breaks down at the village of Fenchurch St Paul, and before long he finds himself acting as a substitute when one of the church’s bell-ringers falls ill. Next morning the local squire’s wife dies, and when her husband expires the following Easter, the family grave is opened and a mutilated body discovered. The cause of death, brilliantly integrated into the storyline, was as original as those in Unnatural Death and The Documents in the Case, and equally controversial. Sayers drew on her knowledge of life in her father’s parish in creating Fenchurch St Paul and its imposing church, and the closing pages show Sayers’ powers of description as she conveys the drama of a flood with fatal consequences for a character who, like Wade’s killer in Mist on the Saltings, is tormented by a guilty conscience.
Christie’s love of travel meant Hercule Poirot spent a good deal of his time holidaying at home and abroad, although his attempts to get away from it all were constantly interrupted by cunningly contrived murders. Peril at End House is set in St Loo, ‘the Queen of Watering Places’, which like Loomouth in Three-Act Tragedy is a thinly-disguised Torquay. Despite all her gallivanting in the Middle East, Christie’s love for Devon was undimmed. The Art Deco hotel on Burgh Island, which is cut off from the mainland at high tide, was a favourite retreat, and the potential for a ‘closed circle’ murder mystery were not lost on her. She fictionalized Burgh in Evil under the Sun, although it is too easily accessed to justify claims that it was also the inspiration for the island on which a group of disparate characters find themselves trapped in And Then There Were None.
For readers who could not afford holidays, detective novels featuring foreign travel held the appeal of a magic carpet. On a trip back to England for Christmas, bad weather led to a series of mishaps when Christie was on the Orient Express together with an extraordinary assortment of passengers, including the soon-to-be-assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia, his wife and a swarm of detectives. Others included an elderly American woman, an archaeology enthusiast from Smyrna, a large Italian, and a bald German. Christie was disconcerted by a Turk who wore an orange suit and gold chains and who spent the night trying to open the door between their two compartments, possibly in the mistaken belief that it led to a bathroom. At Sofia, three feet of snow had fallen, and the passengers found themselves marooned. Christie arrived home two days late, but the whole bizarre experience gave her a marvellous backdrop, along with several characters, for one of her most famous novels. To these ingredients she added a plot derived from the most notorious kidnapping of the age.
On 1 March 1932, the twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr, son of the famous hero of aviation and his wife Annie Morrow Lindbergh, was abducted from his nursery on the second floor of the family’s luxurious mansion in New Jersey. An illiterate note was found on the nursery windowsill demanding a ransom of $50,000. The kidnapping caused a sensation, and President Hoover said he would ‘move Heaven and earth’ to recover the child. The legendary gangster Al Capone said he would help if he were released from prison, but this proved to be an offer the authorities were happy to refuse.
An elaborate game of cat-and-mouse between the family and police on one side, and the kidnappers on the other, led to complicated negotiations and a host of further ransom demands. A go-between eventually handed over the money, and was told that the child could be found in a boat called Nellie near Martha’s Vineyard. After an unsuccessful search, the child’s body was found by accident, partly buried and badly decomposed, less than five miles from the Lindbergh’s house. The head was crushed, there was a hole in the skull, and some parts of the body were missing.
The FBI suspected an ‘inside job’, and among those questioned was Violet Sharp, a British woman who worked for the Lindberghs as a servant. Due to be questioned for a fourth time, Violet killed herself by swallowing a silver polish that contained potassium cyanide. Eventually, the police arrested a German immigrant called Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was tried for extortion and murder. He never wavered in protesting his innocence, but the weight of circumstantial evidence against him led to his conviction. Still refusing all inducements to confess, on 3 April 1936 he was executed in ‘Old Smokey’, the electric chair at the New Jersey State Prison. Controversy still rages over whether he was guilty.
Christie was struck by the collateral damage inflicted by the crime on people in the Lindberghs’ circle, notably Violet Sharp, who had an alibi for the kidnapping but was worn down by police questioning and feared the loss of her job. Christie came up with a plot in which an American gangster suspected of a similar kidnapping and murder is found stabbed to death on board the Orient Express. With the train halted by a snowstorm, Poirot has to find out who was responsible. Ultimately, he comes up with two competing theories, one orthodox, the other bizarre but (and this is Christie’s skill) logical. The reader is left in no doubt that Christie thought justice best served by allowing the murder to go unpunished. Raymond Chandler hated the solution, saying, ‘only a half wit could guess it’. In other words, he failed to pick up the clues. Sayers, like most people, admired the daring of the plot. Christie said Max Mallowan gave her the idea, but Anthony Berkeley deserves credit too. He tossed out the same notion in a line that surely lingered in Christie’s subconscious.
Trains and boats and planes carried Christie’s characters around throughout the Thirties. Readers with no chance of experiencing first-class international travel for themselves relished the picture of life on a luxurious cruise presented in Death on the Nile. But as always, what mattered with Christie was the mystery, and she came up with an ingenious form of alibi. Torquemada and E.R. Punshon wrote glowing reviews, and the book became a genre classic. In contrast, when Freeman Wills Crofts used a Mediterranean cruise as the setting for Found Floating, published in the same year as Death on the Nile, he drifted into travelogue mode, even including a chapter devoted to a description of the ship. Until old age caught up with her, Christie never allowed herself such self-indulgence.
In Death in the Clouds, another ‘closed circle’ puzzle, a blackmailer is killed while flying on the airliner Prometheus from Paris to Croydon. Among the suspects is Lady Horbury, a glamorous former chorus girl, whose tastes run not just to collegian hats and fashionable fox furs, but also to gambling and cocaine. Christie hides a clue in plain sight, within a lengthy list of contents of passengers’ luggage. Detection Club members found countless ways to distract readers’ attention from vital plot information. John Dickson Carr’s favourite technique was to plant a clue and then follow it immediately with something graphic – a method he called ‘blood on a white bandage’. Sayers agreed that, as readers pictured the vivid image, they forgot the clue. In The Five Red Herrings, the absence of an item that should have been present at the scene of the crime alerts Wimsey to the fact that an artist did not die in an accident but was murdered.
One of the passengers on the Prometheus, Daniel Clancy, writes detective fiction featuring a popular sleuth who ‘bites his nails and eats a lot of bananas’. Poirot points out to him the benefits of crime writing as therapy: ‘You can relieve your feelings by the expedient of the printed word. You have the power of the pen over your enemies.’ This seemingly throwaway remark suggests an idea taking shape in Christie’s mind. It supplies a clue to the mystery surrounding a first-edition copy of Murder in Mesopotamia, which Christie inscribed enigmatically to an unnamed friend: ‘With love from one who may have done crimes unsuspected, not detected!?’
The Nine Tailors sold nearly one hundred thousand copies in seven weeks, and Sayers’ fame kept growing. Ezra Pound wrote to her, inviting her to turn her attention to the larger crimes in the world of economics and government. She replied that she did not think they offered enough mystery. Interviewed by the Daily Express ‘in her comfortable book-lined flat in Bloomsbury’, she smoked innumerable cigarettes through a long holder, and informed the journalist she was a scholar gone wro
ng. For the BBC programme Seven Days, she was the only woman speaker in a group of contributors including Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and George Bernard Shaw.
The more success a writer enjoys, the fiercer the criticism he or she attracts. Sayers’ writing provoked hostility as well as admiration. The American critic Edmund Wilson could not imagine why readers might be interested in the detail of bell-ringing. He found Margery Allingham ‘completely unreadable’, Ngaio Marsh’s books ‘unappetizing sawdust’, and Christie ‘impossible to read’, although he was marginally more sympathetic towards John Dickson Carr’s The Burning Court.
Wilson’s rants about Golden Age fiction included the essay ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ This was an excellent title, but a foolish question; Golden Age books had their faults, but when it came to popular fiction, Wilson’s judgments were on a par with Captain Hastings’ detective work. Not content with rubbishing detective novelists, he applied his critical genius to H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories, derided as ‘hackwork,’ and The Lord of the Rings, which he considered ‘juvenile trash’.
Sayers’ next collection of short stories, Hangman’s Holiday, featured a cheery travelling salesman in wines and spirits. Montague Egg was a far cry from Wimsey. He didn’t wear a monocle or fall in love, and when he dropped quotations they weren’t from the classics but from The Salesman’s Handbook. Gollancz liked Monty Egg, but readers were lukewarm, and he never appeared in a novel.
Sayers also created a female sleuth, contradicting complaints about her snobbery. Jane Eurydice Judkin, a parlourmaid, appeared in ‘The Travelling Rug’, a story intended to lead into a series. Sayers wrote from the point of view of a working-class woman who moves from job to job, from ‘situation’ to ‘situation’. It was an interesting idea, and Judkin was another polar opposite of Wimsey, but neither plot nor concept was strong enough. ‘The Travelling Rug’ was not published until almost half a century after Sayers’ death.
Her married life, meanwhile, was falling apart. Mac had given up regular journalism, but he liked writing about food and drink. He published an illustrated Gourmet’s Book of Food and Drink and dedicated it to his wife, ‘who can make an Omelette’. The text also complimented her on her tripe and onions. His over-indulgence in whisky, his jealousy of her success and his continued unwillingness to adopt her son were undermining their relationship. Each of them was getting on the other’s nerves. The strain became too much for Sayers, and her doctor advised three weeks of complete rest.
Where to go to get away from it all? No cross-Continental train trip for Sayers, no exotic cruise, no flying off to the sun. Instead, she embarked on a motoring holiday in the English shires with an old friend from Somerville, Muriel St Claire Byrne. At one point they stopped at Ivy Shrimpton’s cottage in Oxfordshire, and Muriel met John Anthony. When they left the cottage, Sayers was crying. Muriel was bewildered, but Sayers did not reveal that she was the boy’s mother, and Muriel only discovered the truth after her old friend died. Trying to be a good mother in secret and from a distance was not the only pressure bearing down on Sayers. As she and Muriel roamed around rural England, she wrestled with the dilemma of whether to walk out on her husband.
Notes to Chapter 16
how to encode and decode a Playfair cipher
The Playfair cipher was devised by Charles Wheatstone (who also invented the Wheatstone bridge, which measures electrical resistance) and was named after Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair of St Andrews, whom Wheatstone introduced to the technique in 1850. Put simply, the Playfair cipher encrypts pairs of letters (digraphs) rather than single letters, as in the more straightforward ‘substitution ciphers’ favoured by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and other crime writers. For a detailed account of the help Rhode supplied to Sayers, see Peter Ibbotson, ‘Sayers and Ciphers’, Cryptologia 25 (April 2001).
other poets such as … Edward Shanks
Edward Shanks (1892–1953), first winner of the Hawthornden Prize, earned acclaim as a war poet, literary critic and journalist. He wrote a biography of Poe, and occasionally veered towards an unorthodox brand of mystery in his fiction, notably with Old King Cole (1936).
an abortive mystery novel of his own that was never published in his lifetime
The Death of the King’s Canary, co-written with John Davenport, eventually appeared in 1977. Thomas wanted the book to be ‘the detective story to end detective stories, introducing blatantly every character and situation – an inevitable Chinaman, secret passages, etc. – that no respectable writer would dare use now’.
Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard
The Woolfs ran the Hogarth Press, and occasionally published novels of crime and detection, including The Case is Altered (1932), the most memorable book by William Plomer (1903–73). Plomer based the story upon a wife-murder committed in a London boarding house where he happened to be living. As well as writing novels and poetry, Plomer was a literary editor, and Ian Fleming dedicated Goldfinger to him. The Woolfs also published Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin (1895–1973), a barrister, stockbroker, pianist, bridge and chess player, rare book collector, greyhound owner, and gambler with a private fortune. Kitchin’s early work attracted comparisons with Aldous Huxley, but today he remains known mainly for his mysteries; like Chesterton and the Coles, he would never have anticipated such a fate. His finest novel in the genre is, arguably, the unaccountably neglected Birthday Party (1938), and he was considered for considered for membership of the Detection Club shortly after war broke out. Kitchin’s Crime at Christmas (1934) ends with a ‘Short Catechism’ in which the stockbroker sleuth Malcolm Warren says: ‘The excuse for a detective story is two-fold. First, it presents a problem to be solved and shares, in a humble way, the charm of the acrostic and the crossword puzzle. But secondly – and this, to my mind, is its real justification – it provides one with a narrow but intensive view of ordinary life, the steady flow of which is felt more keenly through the very violence of its interruption.’
the feminist writer Rose Macaulay
Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay (1881–1950) enjoyed a distinguished literary career. Mystery at Geneva: An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings (1922) is a minor work set in the near future, and is as notable for its social commentary as the mystery element.
Charles Williams, a friend of Sayers
Charles Williams (1886–1945), a British novelist, not to be confused with an American thriller writer of the same name, was a poet and theologian. Although Many Dimensions (1931) was published in a green Penguin paperback edition, it was barely a ‘crime novel’. Williams’ sympathetic reviews of Golden Age fiction display his knowledge and love of the genre more obviously.
The Nine Tailors told readers everything they needed to know about campanology but were afraid to ask.
Professor B. J. Rahn’s ‘Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors: Detective Story or Christian Allegory or both?’ (written in 2014 but unpublished at the time of writing) argues that the book’s main underlying structure ‘is that of the poetic romance – with the conventions of detective fiction superimposed upon it – because of the reliance on religious allegory to resolve conflict’.
Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) wrote several detective stories, most famously ‘Death and the Compass’, first published in 1946. Chris Power says in ‘A brief survey of the short story part 27: Jorge Luis Borges’, The Guardian, 22 July 2010, that his key influences include ‘Poe, Kafka and, perhaps more surprisingly, Chesterton … The investigative element of Borges’s writing, which excites readers’ natural curiosity even as it withholds detective fiction’s customary satisfactions, instils a tension in his work that is rare in experimental literature.’
the New Zealander Miles Franklin
Miles Franklin (1874–1954) is now remembered for her novel My Brilliant Career, which was filmed in 1979. Bring the Monkey (1937) was a spoof mystery that enjoyed much less success.
Australia’s Pau
l McGuire and Arthur Upfield
Paul McGuire (1903–78), a prominent Catholic who served as Australian Ambassador to Italy, set most of his mysteries in England. Arthur Upfield (1890–1964) was a prolific writer whose series detective, DI Napoleon Bonaparte, has Aborigine origins.
Bertolt Brecht said: ‘The crime novel, like the world itself, is ruled by the English.’
See Brecht, ‘On the Popularity of the Crime Novel’ (trans. Martin Harvey and Aaron Kelly), The Irish Review, 1986, vol. xxxi, and Wizisla, Erdmut, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship (Yale: Yale University Press, 2009).
Europeans such as Karel Čapek, Friedrich Glauser, Stanislas-André Steeman
The Czech writer Karel Čapek (1890–1938), noted for his science fiction, and for popularizing the word robot, was also an early writer of and commentator about detective fiction. Friedrich Glauser (1896–1938) was a Swiss writer addicted to morphine and opium who spent much of his short life in psychiatric wards, mental hospitals and even (after being convicted for forging a prescription) prison. Nevertheless, his novels featuring Sergeant Studer have stood the test of time. Stanislas-André Steeman (1908–1973) was a prolific Belgian crime writer whose Six Dead Men (1931), like The Invisible Host (1930) by the American husband-and-wife team Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning, boasts plot elements anticipating aspects of Christie’s And Then There Were None.
the creator of Maigret, Georges Simenon
Georges Simenon (1903–89) occupies such a significant place in the history of the genre that Julian Symons devoted a whole chapter to his work in Bloody Murder. Simenon influenced numerous detective novelists writing in the English language, including Alan Hunter, W. J. Burley and Benjamin Black (the crime-writing alter ego of John Banville).
The Golden Age of Murder Page 24