The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  Sayers drew on her knowledge of life in her father’s parish in creating Fenchurch St Paul and its imposing church

  She also acknowledged the influence of J. Meade Falkner’s vivid melodrama The Nebuly Coat (1903), a book admired equally by A. N.Wilson. In ‘The Nebuly Coat’, The Daily Telegraph, 5 January 2004, Wilson says: ‘It would be much too heavy to read it as an allegory of England, its faith and its aristocracy on the verge of collapse. If not an allegory, however, it is certainly a mirror of these things.’

  a method he called ‘blood on a white bandage’

  Carr’s granddaughter Shelly Dickson Carr has recalled his use of this term on her website, www.ripped-book.com

  Ezra Pound wrote to her

  The poet and critic Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (1885–1972) was a detective story fan who collaborated with his mistress, the violinist Olga Rudge (1895–1996), on an unpublished and perhaps never completed detective story called The Blue Spill.

  Wilson’s rants about Golden Age fiction included the essay ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’

  The essay appeared in the 20 June 1945 issue of The New Yorker.

  17

  ‘Have You Heard of Sexual Perversions?’

  ‘Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force,’ remarks the lawyer Sir Impey Biggs in Sayers’ Clouds of Witness. In the same book, Mary Wimsey, Peter’s sister, demands, ‘Why should the one always be the breadwinner more than the other?’

  Sayers loathed being labelled a feminist, but that is what she was. Her conviction that women should not be subordinate to men resonates throughout her writing and the way she conducted her life. She believed women should have sexual freedom, and despised sex discrimination. There was certainly no controlling Harriet Vane. She became a model for the strong-minded, independent and sexually active young women commonplace in detective fiction today, but almost unthinkable before Sayers created her.

  Christie’s feminism was less demonstrative. She never experienced a torrid affair like Sayers’ with John Cournos, and her women protagonists are not as feisty as Harriet Vane. Nevertheless, Tuppence Beresford and Jane Marple are more than a match for any man. Writing detective novels had become an eminently suitable job for a woman, even those who occasionally disguised their identity by taking a masculine or gender-neutral pseudonym.

  With Sayers, Christie, Margaret Cole and Helen Simpson prominent, women were taking centre stage in the Detection Club. When Clair Price of the New York Times produced the first feature article about the Detection Club, she described the hunger for detective fiction as ‘colossal’. According to her estimate, there were five hundred British crime writers but only one in twenty met the rigorous standards imposed by Berkeley and Sayers.

  Price reported that Britain, the home of both Scotland Yard and Sherlock Holmes, was the only country in the world with a huge export trade in detective fiction and only a small import trade. As ever when supply struggles to meet demand, quality control was under threat. Price applauded the efforts of the Detection Club – ‘a small and permanent communion of the faithful’ – who wanted the detective story to be ‘the most strenuously exacting of all literary forms’.

  A candidate for membership needed two sponsors, and the founders were joined by three new members elected in 1933. E. R. Punshon and Anthony Gilbert were sponsored by Berkeley and Margaret Cole, and when the death of Victor Whitechurch in May created a vacancy, Berkeley and Helen Simpson put forward Gladys Mitchell. The following year saw the election of Margery Allingham. Mitchell had studied at University College, London, but the other three were not university-educated, and the elections diluted the Club’s Oxbridge bias. Allingham came from a literary family, but none of the newcomers were born with a silver spoon.

  Ernest Robertson Punshon had worked in a London office from the age of fourteen before heading for Canada and taking up farming without success. Penniless, he worked his way back to Britain on a cattle ship, and tried to make some money from writing. After winning one of the earliest literary prizes ever offered for open competition, he embarked on a long career as a novelist. He wrote mainly under his own name, but also as Robertson Halkett, whose Where Every Prospect Pleases is a thriller set in Monte Carlo and the Riviera which features a sadist with a taste for crucifixion and murder by whipping. Punshon’s first book appeared in 1907, but his best work belonged to the Golden Age. Before creating Police Constable Bobby Owen, he wrote about Sergeant Bell and Inspector Carter, a duo portrayed with a sardonic touch that seems ahead of its time. Bell is a smart detective, but his publicity-seeking boss likes to grab all the credit. Punshon’s fans included Bertie Wooster, who in The Code of the Woosters enjoys Mystery of Mr Jessop – another clue to Wodehouse’s love of whodunits.

  Punshon’s novels were occasionally punctuated by dark and macabre scenes, but in person he was bald, affable, and popular with his colleagues, who invited him to become Honorary Secretary of the Club. In his early sixties, he was the odd man out in the quartet of new members. The other three were women aged under thirty-five. If, as Sayers joked in an unpublished essay, ‘there is no profession so freely open to men and women … as that of murder,’ it is also true that reading detective fiction is an equal-opportunities occupation. Women readers borrowed detective novels in large quantities from libraries, whereas men often preferred to read or write thrillers. Even the great male detectives, Wimsey, Poirot, and Father Brown, were not remotely macho compared to John Buchan’s Richard Hannay and to crude action men such as Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond and Sydney Horler’s Tiger Standish. For all the innovations of Berkeley, Wade and Kennedy, for all the industry of Rhode, Connington and Punshon, the Thirties would eventually be remembered as the decade of the Crime Queen.

  Anthony Gilbert was the main writing name of Lucy Beatrice Malleson, whose actor cousin Miles Malleson played the hangman with a taste for poetry in Kind Hearts and Coronets. She was born in London, although when explaining her careful attitude to money she described her origins as ‘Yorkshire, with a dash of Scotch’. The real reason for her prudence was the financial hardship her family suffered after her stockbroker father lost his job. She took up shorthand typing to earn a living, and started publishing poetry.

  Gilbert never married, and seems not to have had a long-term intimate relationship. She was very sociable – perhaps too much so, because even her friends thought she talked too much. Behind her cheerful chattiness lurked a deeply felt anguish: ‘When you know what loneliness is like, you cease to laugh at the solitary women who make gods of their pets … when you find them writing letters to themselves or even posting boxes of violets to their own address in time for Valentine’s Day. They’re not mad or even peculiar. They are desperately lonely people trying to keep sane.’

  During the Twenties, she was afraid of sexism blighting her career. Her first two books appeared under the sexless nom de plume of J. Kilmeny Keith, and she submitted the third under the name of Anthony Gilbert, in the belief that ‘there were still plenty of people who didn’t believe in women as writers of crime stories’. When she was asked for publicity material, she invented a phoney biography and had her photograph taken disguised as an old man with a beard. The snapshot disconcerted her agents, as her publishers thought they had signed up ‘a new, vigorous young author’ and that ‘to present them with an elderly gentleman with one toe feeling precariously for the rim of the tomb might have unfortunate effects on future contracts’.

  Collins conjured up publicity by dropping hints to the Press that the name ‘Anthony Gilbert’ concealed the identity of someone in the public eye – possibly ‘a well-known amateur airman … who has played a fairly prominent part in the political world for many years’. Even after the next Gilbert book appeared, Collins remained ignorant of her sex. One commentator thought the nom de plume might belong to Hugh Walpole.

  The slump led to Gilbert losing her American publishing contract and she r
ejected her agent’s suggestion that she should write about Young Love: ‘I had no experience of young love, and the love that you learn after thirty is quite a different kind, and certainly not suitable for bestsellers. Anyway, love stories must have a conventionally happy ending.’ This is as much as she gave away about her love life in her autobiography. Christianna Brand, who disliked her, later claimed that Gilbert lusted after John Dickson Carr, but Brand was an unreliable gossip. Years later, Gilbert wrote sensitively about abortion in two short stories, but there is no evidence that she based them on her own experience.

  She became confident enough to adopt a female pen name, Anne Meredith, for a book marking a major departure. Dostoevsky was her model, although Berkeley’s influence was also in play. Portrait of a Murderer opens as strikingly as the first two Francis Iles books, although the bleakness of the opening paragraph is not relieved by wit or irony: ‘Adrian Gray was born in May 1862 and met his death through violence, at the hands of one of his own children, at Christmas, 1931. The crime was instantaneous and unpremeditated, and the murderer was left staring from the weapon on the table to the dead man in the shadow of the tapestry curtains, not apprehensive, not yet afraid, but incredulous and dumb.’

  The victim was a half-crazed campaigner against all forms of immorality, and the culprit manages to throw suspicion upon Eustace Moore. Eustace, a shady financier, is Jewish, but is characterized with subtlety and a degree of sympathy. This was in sharp contrast to the grasping Jewish moneylender who is so often a depressing stereotype in Golden Age novels. Gilbert skilfully maintains suspense over whether there will be a miscarriage of justice, and as the story unfolds she offers biting social comment to accompany her account of the consequences of crime.

  Portrait of a Murderer failed to transform Gilbert’s fortunes, and was quickly – if undeservedly – forgotten. Yet it earned praise from Sayers and an American publishing deal. Gilbert said: ‘It was clear that the effects of the slump were unlikely to be permanently offset by books modelled, be it ever so faintly, on the works of Russian genius, but on the whole it was as well that I had decided not to proceed with my original idea of writing thrillers, for, before Portrait of a Murderer was published, I had received an invitation to become a member of the Detection Club … Everything snobbish in my system acclaimed this opportunity to hobnob with the Great … I hold no particular brief for the aristocracy, but it is pleasant to be counted, once in a while, among their number.’

  Gilbert trembled with excitement as she arrived for her first Club dinner in a Northumberland Avenue hotel, dressed in her best green georgette. She had fantasized about Sayers as ‘slender and aloof – willowy’ and was startled to find a ‘massive and majestic lady’ swimming towards her. Another shock swiftly followed. She pictured John Rhode as ‘one of those young dark sardonic men with a black lock falling over his nose. Infinitely superior’ – only to discover he was older than her and weighed seventeen stone. Chesterton, a magnificent giant in a flowing black gown, presided over her initiation, putting the questions ‘in a voice that might have come from the abyss’.

  ‘Hang your head a little, can’t you?’ Margaret Cole whispered fiercely during the ritual, ‘You are only a neophyte.’ Gilbert’s green georgette was the only splash of colour in the darkness until Eric the Skull’s red eyes lit up. She had not been given advance warning of the dress code. For Gilbert, ‘It was a glorious experience; I felt as though I were marching to my wedding in the condemned cell.’

  The instant the ceremony was over, everyone rushed to the bar, and Rhode came over to put her at ease. Genial and kind, he became a close friend, and she dedicated her autobiography to him. The title, Three-A-Penny, came from Sayers, who in her usual brisk way announced: ‘You must remember, Anthony Gilbert, that although authors are three-a-penny to us, they are quite exciting to other people.’

  Christie and Gilbert also became friends, and as a Detection Club in-joke Christie gave the name Anne Meredith to a woman in Cards on the Table who has committed murder and got away with it. Chatty and companionable, Gilbert loved the meetings, and soon became one of the Detection Club’s stalwarts. So did Gladys Mitchell.

  Mitchell was known to her close friends as ‘Mike’. Although in old age she claimed she had only academic knowledge of romance or sex, she wrote unpublished Sapphic poetry and lived with another woman, Winifred Blazey. Christianna Brand, frank to the point of rudeness, thought Mitchell’s appearance remarkably plain, but appreciated her engaging personality. She grew up in Brentford – where in her novel The Rising of the Moon a killer runs amok – and started teaching at St Paul’s School a few years after Margaret Cole left to pursue socialism and her future husband.

  Victor Gollancz, the great talent-spotter of the Golden Age, took on Mitchell as a first-time novelist when she was still in her twenties. Speedy Death opens in familiar Golden Age territory, with a country house party at Chayning Court, where Mrs Bradley is a guest. A corpse is discovered in a bath, as in Whose Body? But the body is that of a woman who has been masquerading as a man – a famous explorer called Mountjoy. Mountjoy had been engaged to be married to the daughter of the house, and sexual repressions are central to the murderer’s psychology.

  Mrs Bradley is introduced by a fellow guest as ‘Little, old, shrivelled, clever, sarcastic … Would have been smelt out as a witch in a less tolerant age.’ In fact, she is aged fifty-seven and has already buried two husbands (the number rose mysteriously to three in later books). A strong believer in ‘applied psychology’, she discusses the murder with the splendidly named Inspector Boring, and his Chief Constable, and offers copies of her Small Handbook of Psycho-Analysis to the police at half price, post free. A typical Mitchell touch, just like the way she pokes fun at sexual prudishness.

  ‘Have you heard of sexual perversions?’ Mrs Bradley demands. The Chief Constable nods, and says gruffly, ‘Not a nice subject.’ Writers at this time were prevented by the obscenity laws, as well as the mores of the time, from writing explicitly about sex. D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, first printed privately in Italy in 1928, did not appear in full unexpurgated form in Britain until 1960 and the dawn of the Permissive Society. Yet despite the constraints of the law and the superficial prissiness of the times, Golden Age novelists repeatedly smuggled sexual references into their work. Berkeley, Connington, and Nicholas Blake all wrote novels with storylines involving kinky sex.

  Mrs Bradley suggests that Mountjoy had formed ‘a very real and … very strong attachment’ to a woman. In order to prevent further loss of life, the detective commits an altruistic murder and is defended on a murder charge, in breach of every professional rule, by her son, Ferdinand Lestrange KC. Although guilty, she is acquitted, in a manner of which Berkeley surely approved. He was increasingly fascinated by the idea of the well-intentioned murder as a means of putting right injustices beyond the reach of the law.

  Mitchell was as eccentric a novelist as Mrs Bradley was a detective. Nobody could have seemed more different from the glamorous and unquestionably heterosexual Helen Simpson, whom Mitchell extolled as ‘brilliant, witty, charming and highly intellectual’. The contradictions in Mitchell’s books mirrored those in her personal life. Her storylines were exuberant and packed with action, but often meandered far off track (even though she used the one-inch Ordnance Survey map as an aid to her writing). She admired Sigmund Freud and was addicted to the supernatural. A career teacher who spent a lifetime working in traditional schools, her interest in educational experiments was reflected in Death at the Opera. Her political instincts were conservative, and her passion for the traditions and folklore of all four corners of the British Isles are evident in dozens of her books, yet she loved to tilt against the establishment.

  Mitchell, like Gilbert, loved the Detection Club from the moment of her election. In Dead Men’s Morris, Mrs Bradley visits the Club rooms in Soho – she has been elected as an honorary member. The first victim in this book dies, apparently from natural c
auses, early on Christmas Day in rural Oxfordshire. Mitchell hurls disparate ingredients into the mix – pig farming (the second victim is savaged by a boar), Morris dancing, a secret passage, and a legend about a ghost. The verve with which she describes her cackling detective’s investigation is matched by the wildness of the plot, in which the sexual adventures of two young women play a part. Despite her claimed lack of sexual experience, Mitchell was no prude.

  Margery Allingham took longer to acclimatize to the convivial atmosphere of the Detection Club. She was a precocious literary talent whose first novel, the swashbuckling romance Blackerchief Dick, was published when she was a teenager. At the age of seventeen, she met Philip Youngman Carter, and they married six years later. A writer and illustrator, Pip designed many of Margery’s dust jackets, as well as those for other Golden Age novelists. His contribution to his wife’s books was greater than is often recognized, and they collaborated on The Crime at Black Dudley, in which her most famous detective, Albert Campion, made his debut. Allingham said: ‘We argued over every word. It took us three months of hilarious endeavour. Never was writing more fun.’ But Pip’s role was subordinate to his wife’s, and his name did not appear on the cover.

  The Crime at Black Dudley has a country house party setting, like the first books by Christie and Berkeley. In Ngaio Marsh’s debut, A Man Lay Dead, guests at the Frampton estate take part in a game of ‘Murder’, with the inevitable outcome that one of them finishes up stabbed through the heart by a Russian dagger. Similarly, when Allingham’s characters re-enact an ancient family ritual, murder is done. Her story is a romp rather than a ‘fair play’ whodunit. The detecting is done by a pathologist, George Abbershaw, but he allows the culprit, whom he sees as ‘both a murderer and a martyr’, to escape to a new life in a monastery in Spain. Like so many fictional sleuths, Abbershaw finds that ‘the old problem of Law and Order as opposed to Right and Wrong worried itself into the inextricable tangle which knows no unravelling.’ Long before the days of CSI, Allingham envisaged her pathologist as a series detective, but the publisher preferred Albert Campion. As a result Allingham did not become a Golden Age forerunner of Patricia Cornwell, but her idiosyncratic and atmospheric books won a loyal following.