The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  Campion is described to Abbershaw as ‘a lunatic’, but ‘quite inoffensive, just a silly ass’. Allingham portrays him as an eccentric resembling Wooster and Wimsey, but with a shady side. He moonlights as a conman whose aliases include Mornington Dodd and the Honourable Tootles Ash. When the book was reprinted, Allingham cut out a section describing his rascally conduct as Mornington Dodd, although Campion soon acquired a former burglar as a sidekick. Campion’s background is illustrious, but his precise pedigree remains a mystery. His real name is supposed to be Rudolph, but Allingham once said that he gave up detection when he was crowned King George VI.

  Allingham’s writing became increasingly inventive, although Police at the Funeral borrowed a plot device from the casebook of Sherlock Holmes. Alongside the novels published under her own name, she dashed off a trio of thrillers as Maxwell March, which began life as magazine serializations. Like her colleagues in the Detection Club, she needed to earn money. As she said privately, ‘Maxwell March is a first-class hack – he makes the cash. Margery Allingham thinks of her reputation.’

  Following Sayers’ lead, Allingham set up a long-running romance for Campion – Lady Amanda Fitton, who appeared as a precocious teenager in Sweet Danger and returned in The Fashion in Shrouds working as an aircraft engineer. Amanda’s career choice, and the fact that she proposes marriage to Campion, reflected Allingham’s embrace of Sayers’ feminist values.

  Like Anthony Gilbert, Mitchell, and Clemence Dane, Allingham was childless. She described occasional arguments with Pip on the subject of ‘kid v. car’, which always ended with a decision in favour of buying a new car or something else for the house. In later years at least, Pip reckoned that ‘sex was of minor importance’ in their relationship. Allingham was attractive, with good bone structure, but her weight ballooned as the result of an under-active thyroid, which was not diagnosed for some time. To camouflage her size, she wore tight corsets and loose, comfortable dresses, but unhappiness about her looks, as well as the effect of her thyroid condition and worries about Pip’s interest in other women, resulted in regular mood swings. Veering from exhaustingly energetic and jolly to nervous and depressed, she could become tongue-tied and self-conscious in the company of strangers. An early introduction to the great and the good of the literary world at a PEN Club dinner haunted her, as did her struggle to cope with questions such as: ‘Have you been painted by Augustus John?’

  Her first encounter with the Detection Club did not come at a good moment in her life. In stark contrast to Anthony Gilbert, she did not enjoy her initiation – probably because she’d made up her mind in advance that it would be an ordeal. Her private diary noted: ‘Cut out my dress for club party which I dread’, and ‘Learnt ritual for party (almost)’. The event itself was ‘awful’.

  A glance at a photograph of the members and their guests, assembled in their finery for the annual black-tie dinner, shows why she felt overwhelmed. Chesterton’s massive figure dominates the top table, with Sayers the epitome of calm magnificence at one end and Berkeley debonair and darkly handsome at the other. Allingham spotted Chesterton laughing as she swore her oath with a hand on Eric the Skull, but she did not get the joke, and she found Sayers terrifying.

  Even more intimidating, the BBC oversaw an international broadcast of her initiation, with John Rhode credited as Skullbearer, and Freeman Wills Crofts and Edward Punshon as Torchbearers. Chesterton and Berkeley introduced the show by talking about the Club’s origins. The broadcast was heard in the United States, enlivening the Sunday dinners of American listeners as well as an Englishman abroad, the thriller writer Valentine Williams, who was provoked to write from New York to The Times by the description of Soho as a ‘red light district’. Soho was the Detection Club’s home ground, but Williams deprecated ‘such centres of honest trade as … Old Compton Street, with its spaghetti shops and wine stores … being depicted in American eyes as the happy hunting grounds of the “madame”, the “louie”, the “trigger-man” and the “strong-arm squad”.’ Could not someone ‘who knows something of American conditions keep an eye on the script?’

  Notes to Chapter 17

  According to her estimate, there were five hundred British crime writers

  Dabblers in the genre included C. P. Snow (1905–80) and T. H. White (1906–64) who both published their solitary detective novels in 1932 while in their mid-twenties, long before becoming famous for their respective novel sequences, Strangers and Brothers and The Once and Future King. In the late Fifties, Snow was a guest speaker at the Detection Club’s annual dinner. Mysteriously, a typewritten list of members from that period includes his name, but there is no other evidence that he was ever a member.

  John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1903–69), who achieved fame in science fiction as triffid creator John Wyndham, published one detective novel. This was an apprentice work, as were several early mysteries by Winston Graham (1908–2003), who later turned successfully to psychological suspense and a historical series set in Cornwall, televised as Poldark.

  More distinctive is Death by Request, published by the husband and wife team Romilly and Katherine John in 1933 while they were both still in their twenties.The story, a country house mystery with a Christie-style twist, is told with enough zest and humour to make it regrettable that the Johns deserted the genre. Romilly (1906–86) was the son of the artist Augustus John, and his most notable book was a memoir of his unconventional upbringing; Katherine later established a reputation as a translator of Scandinavian literature.

  the founders were joined by three new members elected in 1933

  I have gathered material about Gladys Mitchell from numerous sources, notably the Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site, www.gladysmitchell.com. The main sources of information about Anthony Gilbert were her memoir Three-a-Penny, written as by Anne Meredith, and the reminiscences of her family members, who retain a great affection for her. As yet, E. R. Punshon’s life and work have been subject to little research, although William A. S. Sarjeant’s Punshon’s Policemen is useful.

  The following year saw the election of Margery Allingham.

  Allingham’s life and work are celebrated by the Society that bears her name, and I have found its publications, the excellent biography by Julia Jones, and research undertaken by Barry Pike to be of considerable assistance.

  18

  Clearing Up the Mess

  Soho made a perfect setting for the Detection Club’s activities. Whatever Valentine Williams believed, the whiff of danger and excitement appealed to Club members. Sayers had longed for permanent meeting rooms in central London. Her idea was that she and her friends would go out for dinner and then return to their very own premises, and chat and drink in privacy all night long. These rooms would also house a reference library of books on criminology to assist members in their research. But where could they find the money? For writers, the answer was simple. Why not raise funds by producing a full-length round-robin novel?

  Writing is notoriously a solitary occupation, and this makes the repeated group efforts of the Detection Club especially unusual. Sayers was undeterred by the frustrations of dealing with Joe Ackerley at the BBC, or by the unenviable task of herding her fellow writers into line, and insisted: ‘There is no reason why a perfectly “correct” detective story should not be produced, even where the plot is not planned in collaboration at all.’

  In a trial run, she produced an extended version of her opening chapter for The Scoop. The typescript still exists, but it was never published. Soon, a fresh idea was floated. Rather than expand an existing story, a dozen members would combine to write a brand new book. The result was a murder mystery widely regarded as the most successful chain novel, and the most popular collaborative crime novel, ever published. The Floating Admiral is a Golden Age classic, complete with a map showing the scene of the crime.

  Sayers laid down two rules. Each writer must have a definite solution in mind, and must not add fresh complications without having any idea
of how to resolve them. And each writer was expected to tackle the challenges set by earlier instalments. Never a woman to under-sell a new project, Sayers claimed the results cast light on fundamentals of human nature: ‘Where one writer may have laid down a clue, thinking that it could point only in one obvious direction, succeeding writers have managed to make it point in a direction exactly opposite. And it is here, perhaps, that the game approximates most closely to real life … Preoccupied by our own private interpretations of the matter, we can see only the one possible motive behind the action, so that our solution may be quite coherent, quite plausible and quite wrong.’

  The scene was set by Canon Victor L. Whitechurch. Very early one morning, an elderly fisherman catches sight of the local vicar’s rowing boat, drifting on the River Whyn. Inside the boat is the body of Admiral Penistone. This evocative description proved to be the Canon’s last contribution to the activities of the Detection Club. He died shortly after writing his chapter.

  The Coles wrote the second chapter, and were followed by Henry Wade (the first contributor to come up with a solution), Christie, John Rhode, and Milward Kennedy. The lack of advance planning showed when the latter pair’s chapters were respectively entitled ‘Inspector Rudge Forms a Theory’ and ‘Inspector Rudge Thinks Better of It’. By the time Sayers took up the baton, her four predecessors had come up with four different explanations for the mystery. Resisting any temptation to despair, she set about putting The Floating Admiral on an even keel, introducing new, vivid characters: a pushy journalist, a strong-minded working woman and a precise lawyer.

  Knox’s contribution, ‘Thirty-Nine Articles of Doubt’, sees Inspector Rudge list all the areas of uncertainty thrown up by the investigation. Knox was followed by Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson (the brevity of whose contribution suggests that he struggled to cope with the challenge), and Clemence Dane. In a long concluding chapter pointedly called ‘Clearing up the Mess’, Berkeley showed great dexterity in resolving the tangled plot. After the book was complete, Chesterton wrote the Prologue, set in Hong Kong. It added nothing to the story, but his connection with the book made for good publicity.

  Although several contributors got themselves into deep water, somehow The Floating Admiral managed not to sink. The book was well received by critics, and its period charm meant that a reissue almost eighty years later was equally successful. Sales were so healthy that the Club’s coffers received a huge boost, just as Sayers had hoped.

  But what happened to the cash? The Floating Admiral has been reprinted and translated several times over the years, and in an introduction to an American edition of 1979 Christianna Brand (reminiscing about her own membership of the Detection Club) claimed: ‘The agent involved, having negotiated a most satisfactory deal – I’m almost absolutely certain that this was the book involved – then scarpered with the proceeds.’ She also states that a majority of members, led by the relentlessly decent Freeman Wills Crofts, voted to take no action against the woman concerned, because of the financial distress that had led her to embezzle the money. This was at best hearsay, and as that almost suggests, Brand’s entertaining anecdotes need to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. She was not elected until long after The Floating Admiral’s publication, and she was, above all, a storyteller.

  John Rhode was either more discreet (not difficult in comparison to Brand) or more accurate when he said that the Club was able to establish and maintain its own premises because of the money it made from British and American sales of this book and its successor, Ask a Policeman. A different anecdote has surfaced over the years, that the Club premises were burgled shortly after they were acquired, and that the combined detective skills of the members failed to pinpoint the culprit.

  The two small rooms rented by the Club were at 31 Gerrard Street in Soho. This was indeed in the heart of the red light district, a stone’s throw from the most legendary nightclub of the Roaring Twenties, at 43 Gerrard Street. The 43 Club was run by Kate Meyrick, ‘Queen of the Nightclubs’, and had its own literary connections. It occupied premises once home to John Dryden, while Meyrick was the model for Ma Mayfield of the Old Hundredth in Brideshead Revisited.

  A suffragette turned entrepreneur, and supposedly the first Irishwoman to ride a bicycle, Meyrick was a prominent target for sporadic police crackdowns on the vice trade. At the 43, she catered to the whims of a dazzling roster of celebrity clients, including Tallulah Bankhead, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin and Joseph Conrad. Politicians from all parties attended, along with assorted gangsters, as well as peers of the realm, the Crown Prince of Sweden, and the King of Romania. Meyrick’s downfall came when she was jailed for bribing a policeman called Goddard who ran a protection racket, and her health was weakened by poor conditions inside Holloway Prison as well as in her clubs. She died at fifty-seven, shortly after publication of her memoirs was banned, and at around the time the Detection Club was moving in just down the road from her legendary club, by then renamed the Bunch of Keys.

  Sleazy but seductive, Soho fascinated the younger members of the Detection Club. The cosmopolitan ambience offered rich pickings for a detective novelist, when nobody could tell what perils might lurk around the next corner. The dinginess of the neighbourhood during daylight hours vanished when darkness fell, and bright lights from the restaurants broke up the shadows between the gas lamps. Black jazz trumpeters and clarinettists played alongside Jewish dance musicians in claustrophobic basements beneath French and Italian cafés, hedonists of all kinds danced and drank the night away at ‘bottle parties’ flouting the licensing laws, and as the small hours beckoned, dope addicts and cross-dressers came out to play.

  Despite relishing their close encounters with the demi-monde, the Club members were too respectable (or too timid) to be seduced. Sayers’ portrayal of ‘the de Momerie crowd’ of revellers in Murder Must Advertise is an outsider’s view. In Kate Meyrick’s time, the 43 was reputed to be the centre for drug dealing in London, but Sayers kept a safe distance from the underworld. As she admitted to Victor Gollancz, the portrayal of drug-trafficking lacks realism because she ‘didn’t know dope’. What she did know was that idle rich good-for-nothings ought to get their just deserts. Dian de Momerie ends up with her throat cut.

  The rooms were furnished with shabby chairs and tables that members no longer wanted, while prints on the walls displayed a suitably criminal preoccupation: John Thurtell’s murder of William Weare, a portrait of William Corder, the Red Barn murderer, and a scene from the story of the killing of Lord Russell by his valet. The premises were handy for L’Escargot Bienvenu, a favourite restaurant of Sayers’ in Greek Street, which offered exclusive use of an upstairs room for Detection Club members. For years, the price of a good dinner never varied from eleven shillings: five for the meal, five more for the alcohol, and a shilling for the waiter. Alcohol flowed freely: Sayers enjoyed a drink, although late in life she confessed to Michael Gilbert that, unlike Lord Peter Wimsey, she could not tell the difference between burgundy and claret.

  The regular attendees were younger writers. Sayers, Berkeley, and Christie were usually there, along with Rhode, Kennedy, Wade, Crofts, Margaret Cole, Lord Gorell, Mitchell, Anthony Gilbert, and Punshon. Ronald Knox came along from time to time and so, after they were elected, did Margery Allingham and John Dickson Carr. Despite devoting little time to crime writing, Ianthe Jerrold often turned up, though Berkeley used to chide her for literary inactivity. Jerrold wrote a couple of detective novels featuring a Wimsey-lite sleuth, John Christmas, but she and the Irishwoman Jessie Rickard were the least renowned of the founder members. One puzzle is why this pair became members, whereas several more gifted and interesting writers, including Philip MacDonald and Josephine Tey, did not. MacDonald left Britain for Hollywood in the Thirties, which may explain his omission. Tey was a painfully shy single woman who only visited London twice a year, to see her sister by way of a break from caring for her elderly father at home in Inverness.

  The hazard
s of life in Soho at night created an inevitable challenge for Detection Club members. When they were on their way back to the meeting rooms, staggering through the narrow streets after plenty to eat and drink, the women kept close to their male colleagues – Sayers and Margaret Cole forming a formidable guard of honour, determined to protect the men from the patrolling prostitutes whose favourite question was: ‘Are you on your own, dear?’

  Ask a Policeman followed a year after The Floating Admiral, the fourth collaborative mystery story produced in quick succession by Club members. The question was how to match the success of The Floating Admiral. The answer was to borrow a classic trope of detective fiction – members would impersonate each other. In other words, they agreed to exchange detectives. The gimmick gave them the chance to poke fun at the quirks of their colleagues’ sleuths, and they seized it with relish.

  The original dust jacket blurb captured the playful mood of Ask a Policeman: ‘Here is something delightfully new in “thrills” – a story which combines the interest of detection with the fun of parody. A problem is propounded; ingenious, and, for the solvers, malicious, and in itself a parody of a thousand and one detective stories. A great newspaper proprietor dies in his study, and suspicion falls upon an Archbishop, a Secretary, a Police Commissioner, and the Chief Whip of the political party in power. There is, too, a Mysterious Lady. What, then, can the Home Secretary do but call in the Amateur Experts? There are four of them; each takes a hand and each produces a different solution.’