The story is introduced by an exchange of letters composed by John Rhode and Milward Kennedy. Rhode sets the scene by recounting the authorities’ reaction to the murder of Lord Comstock at Hursley Lodge, a map of which is, of course, supplied. The death of Comstock, whose newspapers claim ‘to be the real arbiters of the nation’s destiny at home and abroad’ is ‘an event of worldwide importance’.
Rhode’s characterization of the dead man is unusually compelling. Wealthy and influential newspaper magnates were as feared and unloved in the Golden Age as are some media tycoons of the modern age. Shortly before Ask a Policeman was written, Viscount Rothermere, of the Daily Mail, and Lord Beaverbrook, of the Daily Express, had turned their fire on Stanley Baldwin, whose brand of Conservatism was not to their liking, and tried to use their muscle to remove him as Prime Minister. Baldwin poured scorn on his tormentors in a memorable speech that turned the tide in his favour: ‘What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.’ This killer line, dreamed up by his cousin, Rudyard Kipling, resonated with the general public, and parliamentary democracy prevailed over propaganda. At least Rothermere and Beaverbrook lived to fight another day, unlike the fictional Comstock.
Rhode handed the baton to Helen Simpson, who portrayed Mrs Bradley with typical verve. Mitchell shared Sayers’ admiration for the ‘brilliant, witty, charming and highly intellectual’ Simpson, and even allowed Simpson to bestow a second forename, Adela, upon her detective. Mitchell did a competent job with her parody of Sir John Samaurez, before leaving the story in the hands of the two stars of the show.
To parody Sayers’ hero required chutzpah. Needless to say, Berkeley volunteered. His contribution captured Wimsey brilliantly, in one of the finest of all parodies of Golden Age detective fiction, while offering a clever solution to the problem posed by Rhode. As for Sayers, she rendered Sheringham effectively, with a neat joke when he overhears two employees of the late Lord Comstock being rude about him. Yet her solution is less compelling than Berkeley’s. By now she was more concerned with the people she wrote about than the puzzle.
This time it was Kennedy’s turn to clear up the mess. His solution does not ‘play fair’ with the reader, but Ask a Policeman oozes with period charm. John Rhode captured the genial mood of the enterprise when he inscribed a copy of the book to an unnamed recipient, possibly Kennedy, ‘in memory of our violent onslaught on the Detection Club’.
Gladys Mitchell recalled in old age that ‘Anthony’s manipulation of Lord Peter Wimsey caused the massive lady anything but pleasure’. It seems odd that Sayers failed to appreciate the flair of Berkeley’s rendering, for she did not lack either a sense of humour or the ability to make fun of herself. Yet shortly afterwards, when discussing potential contributors to a volume of Sherlockian pastiches to be edited by the American scholar Harold Bell, she dismissed Berkeley as ‘too rough a parodist’. She spoke more highly of Simpson, Kennedy and A. A. Milne, as well as Bentley, by now a close friend.
This reflects a cooling of her friendship with Berkeley that had little to do with his parody of Wimsey or his portrayal of her as Isobel Sedbusk in Before the Fact, but was probably due to his desertion of his wife Peggy for Helen Peters. As Sayers came to know him and his writing better, she became aware of failings as well as strengths, and when she reviewed Jumping Jenny and Panic Party her admiration for his cleverness was tinged with distaste for his cynicism about humanity.
Baker Street Studies appeared with authors including Sayers and Simpson, as well as Knox, but no Berkeley. Sayers had warned Harold Bell that Knox was ‘dreadfully slipshod’, but admitted that with his track record in Sherlockian scholarship he was well qualified to contribute. When she expressed private doubts about whether Crofts and Rhode were talented enough writers, much as she liked them personally, Bell took the hint and did not include them.
Sayers became a founder member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, whose inaugural dinner was held, naturally, in Baker Street, at Canuto’s Restaurant on Derby Day in 1934. As usual, Sayers had plenty to say. If Peter Pan could be honoured with a statue, why not Holmes and Watson – and, come to that, why not Mrs Hudson, ‘the Happy Warrior of below-stairs’? Sayers’ enthusiasm for Sherlockiana persisted, and she later took part in a one-act play for Detection Club members, written by John Dickson Carr and called The French Ambassador’s Trousers. John Rhode made a suitably bluff Dr Watson, and the barrister Cyril Hare’s profile proved a perfect match for Holmes’s, while Carr played the Gallic ambassador. Sayers could scarcely have played the glamorous Irene, but she made an unforgettable Mrs Hudson, dressed in a billowing red flannel nightgown.
Detection Club members seized almost any opportunity to socialize together and with professional crime investigators. Even Christie, the supposed recluse, turned out to support a Foyle’s literary lunch devoted to crime writing, with Freeman Wills Crofts, John Rhode and the reviewer Torquemada among the speakers. Rubbing shoulders with the novelists were pathologist Bernard Spilsbury, now an established celebrity of the crime scene, and several of Scotland Yard’s finest.
Gerrard Street remained the hub. Three photographs taken there appeared in a breezy and irreverent magazine called Weekly Illustrated under the heading ‘Sleuths on the Scent’, which was akin to John Le Carré and Ruth Rendell posing for Hello. The snaps were squeezed in beside a shot of Mussolini’s grandson playing on an Italian beach, and beneath a picture of Baroness Platen, who was reputed to spend three thousand pounds a year on hats. Advertisements warned male readers not to spoil with rough, red hands the caresses that should be velvet-soft, and to make good use of snow fire glycerine jelly, while a promotion for a book called The Hygiene of Life insisted that ‘knowledge of yourself is essential to married happiness’.
Punshon, Ianthe Jerrold and Anthony Gilbert, the latter pair looking as though in recovery from a good night out, were pictured as a seated group of ‘eager sleuths’. E. C. Bentley, looming over Milward Kennedy’s head, was described as ‘investigating the mystery’ of his colleague’s ‘bodyless head’. A wonderful shot showed Helen Simpson, dark, lean and elegant and wearing a pearl necklace, standing behind the seated figure of Sayers, resplendent in a wide-sleeved silk jacket embroidered with flowers. Each woman was lifting a tankard of beer. Sayers was gleeful, declaring it the best photograph she’d ever had taken. Simpson’s expression of eager enjoyment was, she said, the thirstiest thing she’d seen for a long time.
‘Sleuths on the Scent’ feature in Weekly Illustrated.
Notes to Chapter 18
Meyrick’s downfall came when she was jailed for bribing a policeman called Goddard who ran a protection racket
A corrupt police force was seen in some quarters as the legacy of the hapless and unpopular Sir William Horwood, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner nicknamed ‘the Chocolate Soldier’ after his narrow escape from death by poisoned chocolate. Horwood supposedly retired on grounds of age, but his successor, Lord Byng, was six years older. Byng launched a clear-up operation, and Goddard and Kate Meyrick fell foul of it. Henry Wade’s awareness of the realities of police work post-Horwood is illustrated in Constable, Guard Thyself!, where Inspector Poole reminds Sergeant Gower, ‘They’ve cut us very close on our expenses since ’31.’
Ianthe Jerrold often turned up
Ianthe Jerrold was the daughter of William Jerrold, a writer and deputy editor of The Observer. She dabbled intermittently in fictional crime, sometimes under the name Geraldine Bridgman, long after her election to the Detection Club. In ‘Some Thoughts on the Least-Known Member of the Detection Club’, CADS 10, July 1989, Doug Greene points out, that in combining a wealthy amateur sleuth (rejoicing in the name John Christmas) with a plodding professional policeman, Jerrold was adopting a method used by Sayers, albeit with less success.
the Irishwoman Jessie Rickard
Jessie Louisa Rickard, who usually published as Mrs Victor
Rickard, was a prolific popular novelist, but her contribution to the detective genre was modest. Her most noteworthy crime novel, Not Sufficient Evidence, published four years before the Detection Club’s foundation, was based on the Bravo case.
One puzzle is why this pair became members, whereas several more gifted and interesting writers, including Philip Macdonald and Josephine Tey, did not.
Not everyone invited to join the Detection Club over the years has accepted. For example, Georgette Heyer (1902–74), renowned for historical romances but also a detective novelist, declined to join, perhaps because her mysteries were largely plotted by her husband, the barrister Ronald Rougier.
The reasons for other surprising omissions from the membership list are debatable. Philip MacDonald (1900–80) may have been regarded as primarily a thriller writer. He wrote too much, too fast; even his friend Margery Allingham described The Crime Conductor as ‘the lazy work of a clever mind’. Yet his novels featuring Colonel Anthony Gethryn included such successful mysteries as Warrant for X and The List of Adrian Messenger. Oddly, although Macdonald became a highly successful screenwriter (whose credits included the classic films Rebecca and Forbidden Planet) he did not write the screenplay for the film of either of these books. Warrant for X was filmed as 23 Paces to Baker Street, with a script by Nigel Balchin (1908–70). Balchin was an accomplished mainstream novelist whose last published work, the television drama Better Dead, combined a Golden Age style storyline with a plot twist about transvestism; any plans he had to turn it into a series were ended by a fatal heart attack.
Josephine Tey was the principal pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1952), a highly accomplished writer whose A Shilling for Candles was transformed beyond recognition by Hitchcock when he filmed it as Young and Innocent. A biography of Tey by a member of her family, the present day Detection Club member Catherine Aird (a pen name of Kinn Mackintosh) has long been awaited, but is yet to be published.
Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse (1888–1958), great-niece of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote stories featuring Solange Fontaine, whose ‘delicate extra sense’ warns her of evil; as well as an outstanding fictionalised version of the Thompson–Bywaters case, A Pin to See the Peep-Show (1934). A beautiful but troubled woman, Jesse wrote a seminal book about motives for murder, and several introductions to Notable British Trials, as well as editing the English version of The Baffle Book by Lassiter Wren and Randall MacKay, a collection of detection-based parlour games. She worked as a war correspondent and playwright, but developed an addiction to morphia (following an accident which caused two of her fingers to be amputated) and alcohol. She had a more obvious claim to membership of the Detection Club than, say, Jessie Rickard. Perhaps she earned the disfavour of either Berkeley or Sayers.
Francis Beeding was the main pen name used by John Palmer (1885–1944) and Hilary St George Saunders (1898–1951), mainly for a long series of thrillers. Their occasional detective novels were, however, of high quality, and included The House of Dr Edwardes (1927), filmed by Hitchcock as Spellbound, Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931), one of the best Golden Age serial killer whodunits, and He Should Not Have Slipped (1931), a variant of the ‘altruistic crime’ novel so popular with thoughtful Golden Age writers. A neat gimmick in The Norwich Victims (1935) is the inclusion of photographs of the main characters that contain a clue to the culprit’s identity. Palmer and Saunders both worked for the League of Nations in Geneva; perhaps geography, rather than any other reason, made it impracticable for them to join the Detection Club.
the fourth collaborative mystery story produced in quick succession by Club members
The games played in The Floating Admiral and Ask a Policeman met with critical and financial success, and encouraged others to write round-robin mysteries. The first major American detective story of this kind was The President’s Mystery (1935), in which a puzzle was posed by no less a detective fiction fan than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. S. S. Van Dine was among the contributors, and the story began life as a serialization, was published in book form, and was then adapted as a film, with a screenplay co-written by Nathaniel West, best known for The Day of the Locust. In Britain, the Sunday Chronicle serialized another round-robin mystery, to which Sayers and Crofts wrote the opening instalments. The story, originally called Night of Secrets, became Double Death when published in book form in 1939. Despite the participation of two of its leading lights, this was not a Detection Club venture, and Sayers felt it suffered because the other writers were not of the highest calibre. The chaotic nature of the enterprise is illustrated by the fact that although the book version contains authors’ notes on the story, the contributors were not forewarned that these would be published. Their gloomy frankness is an entertainment in itself. F. Tennyson Jesse concluded that the two authors who followed her and had to make sense of the story should receive some kind of medal, while David Hume ended the book saying: ‘May heaven preserve me from such a fate in future!’ John Chancellor, whose serialized mystery had given Agatha Christie the chance to win a competition prize more than a decade earlier, was drafted in to give the story a better shape, and found that plenty of work was needed. Sayers did not give up entirely on round-robin mysteries, taking part in two later collaborations, one – No Flowers By Request (serialized in the Daily Sketch in 1953) – on behalf of the Detection Club.
one of the finest of all parodies of Golden Age detective fiction
The tropes of Golden Age mysteries have made them a perfect target for parodies, ranging from a sketch in Monty Python’s Flying Circus to Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound. Writers of the Thirties were equally aware of the parodic potential of detective fiction. Rupert Croft-Cooke (1903–79), began his long career as the detective novelist Leo Bruce with a parody, Case for Three Detectives (1936). Sayers’ publication of Gaudy Night was soon followed not only by E. C. Bentley’s story ‘Greedy Night’ but also by Gory Knight, written by Margaret Rivers Larminie and Jane Langslow and published by Gollancz; see Martin Edwards, ‘The Mystery of Gory Knight’, CADS 58, June 2010.
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What it Means to Be Stuck for Money
‘The Slump had spread like the plague,’ said Anthony Gilbert in her memoir of that time. By 1933, not only the labouring class was affected, but also ‘black-coated workers with years of experience and good references found themselves adrift through no fault of their own … The cry of Too Old at Forty was becoming Too Old at Thirty or anyhow thirty-five … No one had supposed an emergency like this.’
Money was desperately tight. One of the reasons Gilbert loved the escapism offered by Detection Club dinners was that she knew what it was like to struggle to earn a living. She decided to ‘write a novel about a man who had committed a murder … from the point of view of the criminal … Murderers were people like ourselves … My central character committed his murder by accident, and couldn’t feel himself a murderer on that account … I realized that here I was, writing the story of the man who was the victim of the slump.’ As she said, ‘Charles, the coward of the title, was everything I most dislike in men, yet he is the only character of mine with whom I have ever felt completely identified.’
The Coward, again published under the Anne Meredith pseudonym, is an example of a Golden Age novel tackling the effects of the slump. The cliché that detective novelists routinely ignored social and economic realities is a myth. The trouble was that many readers were not in the mood for realism. They wanted to be entertained by light-hearted films and plays, and novels set in fascinating places. The Coward was applauded by critics but failed to become a breakthrough book. Gilbert was disappointed. ‘Its sales remained obstinately under the two thousand mark. I was one of those authors who can please everyone except the public.’
Financial misery was everywhere, and people accustomed to having money were not exempt from the pain. Norman Urquhart, the solicitor in Sayers’ Strong Poison, is typical, facing ruin due to the crash of the Megatherium Trust. The
crushing effects of the slump on the middle classes are vividly presented at the start of Christopher Bush’s The Case of the Chinese Gong. Four cousins have fallen on hard times and in the opening chapter Tom Bypass, a former soldier in poor health, rescues the depressed and unemployed Martin Greeve – whose toy business has failed – from an attempt to commit suicide. Martin has no hope of a job, Romney Greeve, an artist, cannot sell his pictures, and Hugh Greeve is short of pupils for his private school. The four men have an unpleasant uncle who relishes the financial power he holds. Even the dullest reader can predict his fate.
In theory, nobody was better qualified to solve the nation’s financial woes than the brilliant economist Douglas Cole. Yet even his judgments were sometimes bewilderingly naïve. When ill-health forced him to pull out of a research trip to the Soviet Union, he was bitterly disappointed to lose a chance to see for himself how ‘the Socialist Sixth of the World’ had ‘abolished unemployment’. At home, the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda dissolved itself, but Douglas was undaunted by the latest collapse of a cause close to his heart. He was convinced that the slump proved that the ‘intellectual case against capitalism’ was very strong. Capitalism’s likely demise was linked, in his view, with a crisis in world civilization, and the mood of widespread despair was captured by Aldous Huxley’s frightening vision of the future in Brave New World. Although the Coles kept writing detective novels in which order was restored by good old Superintendent Wilson, everywhere Douglas looked he saw chaos. Naturally, this gave him an idea for another book.
He persuaded Victor Gollancz to publish The Intelligent Man’s Guide through World Chaos, which became known as ‘Coles’ Chaos’. Soon The Intelligent Man’s Review of Europe Today followed. Douglas also edited What Everybody Wants to Know about Money. Facetious reviewers expressed dismay that the latter book did not answer the most important question of all – how readers could make money.
The Golden Age of Murder Page 27