The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  She gave herself as much of a hard time as Mac did, beginning a fictionalized autobiography which amounted to an exercise in self-flagellation. She never finished it, perhaps because her mood lifted once she decided where to go next with Wimsey and Harriet Vane. Working on her speech for the gaudy – where Somerville would celebrate the scholarship of a don she admired, Miss Mildred Pope, who was leaving Oxford for Manchester – she stumbled on the answer.

  Why not write about the intellectual integrity that for her was ‘the one great permanent value in an emotionally unstable world’? This provided a theme that would be integral to plot and character, and bring Peter and Harriet together at last. She might have struggled to find love in her adult life, but her novel would celebrate love. Love of learning, love for the city that inspired her, and love between her detective and the woman he adored.

  Sayers’ scholarly leanings were shared by Detection Club colleagues, several of whom taught at school or university. Some were loyal establishment figures, others were sceptics who mocked the status quo. The close-knit communities found in private schools and Oxbridge colleges, very familiar to most writers of the time, made ideal settings for ‘closed circle’ whodunits, and the Golden Age saw a host of mysteries set in the world of education. The books were mostly read by people who had attended neither Eton nor Oxford – and that was the point. The glimpses offered by Sayers and others into privileged lives disrupted by murder provided as much entertaining escapism as mysteries set on the Nile or on the Orient Express.

  Leading the subversives were two men who, like Sayers, had abandoned teaching as soon as they could. As a form of catharsis, they set their debut novels in a school. Ralph Carter Woodthorpe, one of the Detection Club’s most elusive figures, was the former English master of Margery Allingham’s husband, Philip Youngman Carter. A chess-playing Glaswegian, Woodthorpe joined the staff of Christ’s Hospital in West Sussex, and set about improving the boys’ cultural education. A shy, gawky man, he was described by Pip as ‘a raven with awkwardly clipped wings. He had no gift for discipline and could therefore teach only the sycophantic or eager few. But he could inspire.’

  Woodthorpe used Christ’s Hospital as the model for Polchester in The Public School Murder. ‘Think of the great work he is doing with his drills and parades and marches,’ says one teacher sarcastically of his colleague in charge of the Officer Training Corps, ‘sowing a hatred of militarism in our Polchester children at an impressionable age. The O.T.C. does more for the cause of peace than the League of Nations and all the anti-war movements rolled into one.’ Events are seen from the perspective of Smith, a likeable history master, who routinely solves Torquemada’s crosswords. When the culprit is identified, he obligingly jumps off the side of a steamer. As a result, Polchester’s reputation is not besmirched. The murderer had, Smith says with bitter irony, ‘played the game at the end. A plucky thing to do. A sporting thing … He put the School first and played the game.’

  Nicholas Blake’s first book boasted the added ingredients of gleeful adultery and sexual repression as a motive for murder. Blake was the pen name of Cecil Day-Lewis, an Irishman who went on to become Poet Laureate. His first collection of poetry was privately published in 1925, and two years later he met W. H. Auden, who was addicted to whodunits. Auden wrote a poem called ‘Detective Story’ as well as a post-war essay, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, which helped to embed the notion of classic detective fiction as a sort of mythic Quest for the Grail. Auden found Day-Lewis a teaching job which enabled him to pay the bills, and in the years that followed, they wrote political and polemical verse reflecting dismay at the economic malaise of the Thirties and the rise of fascism in Europe.

  Day-Lewis was widely admired. At a country house party that would have made an excellent setting for a detective story, Winston Churchill bumped into T. E. Lawrence and bemoaned the lack of great men in the country, ‘present company excepted’. If a gossip column story in the London Evening Standard is to be believed, Lawrence of Arabia replied, ‘There is one great man in this country and his name is Cecil Day-Lewis.’

  At around this time, Day-Lewis joined the Communist Party. His ‘communistic leanings’ were mentioned by Sayers when he was mooted as a candidate for election to the Detection Club, but did not deter her from supporting his membership or enjoying his company. Tall, fair, and slender, he was described by Rebecca West as ‘a Greek Apollo’, and his good looks and charm were inherited in due course by his Academy Award-winning son, Daniel Day-Lewis.

  While writing poems and espousing revolution, he taught the offspring of the privileged. At one point he demonstrated his credentials as a common man by dropping the hyphen from his surname, although he soon repented of his daring and reinstated the controversial bit of punctuation. Supposedly to pay for the repair to a leaking roof in his Gloucestershire cottage, he produced his first detective novel pseudonymously, using his mother’s maiden name, Blake, and a first name picked at random.

  Julian Symons later described his shock, when he had first read Nicholas Blake’s debut, at finding a quotation from T. S. Eliot on the second page: ‘In those years before the war, the detective-story writers in the ascendant gave the impression that although they might have heard Eliot’s name they would not have cared to be found reading his poems.’ But Symons did his predecessors an injustice. Many admired Eliot, as Eliot admired them, and Agatha Christie took the title of her Mary Westmacott novel The Rose and the Yew Tree from a line in ‘Little Gidding’, the final poem of Eliot’s Four Quartets. Misjudgements like this by critics as renowned as Symons (and many who are much less distinguished) have fostered misunderstandings and prejudices about Golden Age fiction that endure to this day.

  The first part of A Question of Proof is seen from the viewpoint of Blake’s alter ego, the left-wing English master Michael Evans. He is having an affair with Hero Vale, the gorgeous wife of the head of a preparatory school. Evans cavorts with Hero in a hay-rick before the start of sports day, but their timing proves catastrophic. The body of an unpopular pupil is found in the same hay-rick shortly afterwards. The Reverend Percival Vale, ‘a great stickler for the more flashy manifestations of discipline’, blames the crime on a vagrant, and attributes ‘the wave of violence which has lately been sweeping the country to the disastrous policy of the late Labour Government’. Inevitably, the cuckolded Vale becomes the second victim, murdered during the course of a cricket match. The police suspect Michael and Hero, and Nigel Strangeways is brought in to look after the school’s interests.

  Strangeways, ‘after a brief stay in Oxford, in the course of which he had neglected Demosthenes in favour of Freud’ is a successful private investigator. He benefits from having an uncle who is Assistant-Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard, and bears a distinct resemblance to Auden, with one or two additional quirks such as an excessive fondness for drinking tea. He duly unmasks a culprit unwise enough to keep a candid diary revealing his sexual hang-ups. As a solution, it is scarcely conventional Golden Age.

  The storyline panicked Lord Lee, chairman of the governors at Cheltenham College, where Day-Lewis taught. Lee raised his concern with Dick Roseveare, the Canadian headmaster, who duly called in Day-Lewis. Lee was afraid that A Question of Proof provided a clue that Day-Lewis was having an affair with Mrs Roseveare. Fortunately for his short-term career prospects, the Roseveares were an amiable couple with a sense of humour. Day-Lewis, a man intensely attractive to women, certainly had a wandering eye, but when it did wander, it wandered in other directions.

  A classic Oxford mystery predating Gaudy Night was An Oxford Tragedy by J. C. Masterman in which the Senior Tutor at St. Thomas’s College acts as Watson to an engaging amateur sleuth, the Viennese lawyer Ernest Brendel. After the crime is solved, order is restored in the form of an argument between dons over the redecoration of the college rooms left unoccupied by killer and victim. Masterman took twenty-four years to write a follow-up, even though he was far from indolent. He represented England
at lawn tennis and hockey, toured Canada with the Marylebone Cricket Club, and later became Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and earned a knighthood. During the Second World War he worked for the intelligence service, chairing the Twenty Committee which supervized the day-to-day operation of double agents and which took its name from the Roman numeral XX – that is, ‘double cross’.

  John Cecil Masterman joined the Detection Club after the Second World War, as did the much more prolific Michael Innes, the Oxford academic John Innes Mackintosh Stewart writing under a pen name, responsible for urbane detective stories published over a span of half a century. The first Innes novel, Death at the President’s Lodging, renamed Seven Suspects in the US to forestall connotations of foul play in the White House, introduces Inspector John Appleby, whose lengthy murder-solving career eventually sees him knighted. But the definitive detective novel set in academe had already been published.

  This was Gaudy Night, Sayers’ magnum opus.

  Gaudy Night, like Sayers herself, divides opinion. Admirers are passionate, detractors merciless. As she said, presumably of a conversation at the Detection Club, ‘I was once challenged, in a circle of writers, to account for the sales of Gaudy Night. I had not the honesty to say that I thought it sold because it was a good book.’ When Muriel St Claire Byrne suggested the book was autobiographical, Sayers denied it fiercely. She was protesting too much; there is a good deal of her in Harriet. A key difference, though, is that Harriet’s scandalous involvement in a murder case is public knowledge; nobody at the gaudy dinner where she proposed the toast knew about Sayers’ secret, the existence of John Anthony.

  The book is long, yet the detective plot slight. Not a single murder is committed. Sayers was transforming the detective novel into a novel of manners. Harriet’s previous reluctance to return to Oxford resembles Sayers’ own unwillingness to attend a gaudy. Harriet’s feeling that her life has been tainted by being tried for the murder of her lover mirrors Sayers’ secret sense of shame about having sex outside marriage and giving birth to an illegitimate child. In the novel, as in Sayers’ life, the lure of Oxford eventually proves irresistible.

  Back at Shrewsbury College for a gaudy dinner, Harriet finds that despite the old scandal she is warmly welcomed. The Dean of Shrewsbury seeks her help; the College is awash with poison pen letters, and a manuscript that Miss Lydgate (based on Mildred Pope) was working on has been defaced. The vindictive campaign intensifies, and Harriet almost loses her life whilst trying to bring the culprit to justice. With the mystery solved, Wimsey and Harriet at last find themselves on equal terms. This being an Oxford novel written by Dorothy L. Sayers, the great detective’s proposal of marriage captures his acknowledgment of Harriet’s strength in their relationship whilst being couched in formal Latin.

  Sayers saw Gaudy Night as the pinnacle of her achievement as a novelist. Yet the conflicts lying at its heart are not those of a conventional whodunit, but clashes between principles and personal loyalties. Slender as the plot was, it did complement her characters and theme. Wimsey had evolved from a sleuthing Bertie Wooster into a three-dimensional character, but more convincing was Harriet’s journey towards self-confidence and self-respect as a scholar, writer and human being.

  Gaudy Night so powerfully reflects Sayers’ belief in equality between the sexes that the book is often called the first major feminist mystery novel. However, Julian Symons dismissed it as a ‘woman’s novel’, and Sayers is often patronizingly accused of ‘falling in love with her hero’. The truth is that Sayers’ unrelenting focus on female independence influenced many other women novelists, ranging from P. D. James to the American feminist and author of Reinventing Womanhood, Carolyn G. Heilbrun, who wrote detective fiction as Amanda Cross. Jessica Mann, a Secretary of the Detection Club in the Eighties, said she was one of many schoolgirls who have been inspired to apply for Oxford or Cambridge Universities ‘because of reading Gaudy Night at an impressionable age’.

  This is a legacy of which any writer could be proud, and Gaudy Night’s fans often cite Sayers’ erudition and literary style as particular strengths. Conversely, in an essay for Scrutiny, Q. D. Leavis, whose venom could be as dangerous as any poison unknown to science, said Sayers ‘performed the function of giving intellectual exercise to readers who would very much dislike that kind of exercise if it was actually presented to them’. Symons, although a more sympathetic judge of detective fiction than Leavis, complained that there was a ‘breathtaking gap’ between what Sayers intended and what she actually achieved.

  Agatha Christie was not an ivory-towered academic like Queenie Leavis, and she was no intellectual elitist either. Writing a novel of manners held no attraction for her. Given her unrelenting focus on entertainment, she remained sceptical about Sayers’ ambitions for the genre. Christie felt the best Wimsey books were the early ones, and regarded Harriet as tiresome. With rare brutality, she said: ‘Lord Peter remains an example of a good man spoilt.’ Fortunately for harmony within the Detection Club, she was wise enough to confine these opinions to an article written for readers in Russia, which was not published in English until long after both she and Sayers were dead.

  Notes to Chapter 20

  Ralph Carter Woodthorpe, one of the Detection Club’s most elusive figures

  Scant information is available about Woodthorpe, other than the remarks of Pip Youngman Carter in All I Did Was This, and the biographical note on the Penguin edition of The Public School Murder. The latter indicates that Woodthorpe’s favourite among his own books was London is a Fine Town, which is not a crime novel. Despite his success with detective fiction, and his friendship with Allingham and her husband, his heart seems not to have been in the genre.

  Blake was the pen name of Cecil Day-Lewis

  Peter Stanford’s biography is the principal source for my discussion of Blake’s life. See also Tony Medawar, ‘Serendip’s Detections 2: Mr Nigel Strangeways and the Detection Club’, CADS 9, July 1988.

  W. H. Auden, who was addicted to whodunits

  See Auden, ‘The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict’, Harpers, May 1948. When P. D. James, later a pillar of the Detection Club, was first published by Faber, a pleasing suggestion was made that Auden might write a few poems masquerading as the work of her detective, the police officer and poet Adam Dalgleish. Auden died before the plan came to fruition, but he enjoyed James’ books as he had enjoyed Golden Age mysteries: see Kate Kellaway, ‘Inside the Head of a Criminal Mastermind’, The Guardian, 15 July 2012.

  A classic Oxford mystery

  ‘Exbridge’, the setting of Victor L. Whitechurch’s Murder at the College (1932) is clearly Oxford. The Oxford Murders (1929) by Adam Broome also pre-dates Masterman’s book; Broome was the pseudonym of Godfrey Warden James (1888–1963), who worked in the Sierra Leone government and, unusually for the Golden Age, set several mysteries in Africa; so did Elspeth Huxley (1907–97), who remains better known for her memoir The Flame Trees of Thika. One of the finest Oxford detective novels was The Mummy Case Mystery (1933) by Dermot Morrah (1896–1974), a journalist who never returned to the genre but became Arundel Herald of Arms Extraordinary. He wrote a speech for Princess Elizabeth shortly before she ascended to the throne which moved her and Churchill to tears; see Tom Utley, ‘Grandad’s words made the Queen and Churchill cry’, Daily Mail, 8 June 2012.

  in an essay for Scrutiny

  See Q. D. Leavis, ‘The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers’, Scrutiny, December 1937.

  an article written for readers in Russia

  The article, ‘Detective Writers in England’, is now widely available as a result of its inclusion as an addendum to the republication of the Detection Club’s Ask a Policeman (London, HarperCollins, 2012).

  Part Four

  Taking on the Police

  Six Against the Yard, published by Selwyn & Blount in 1936.

  21

  Playing Games with Scotland Yard

  Crime detection in real life fascinate
d Sayers and her colleagues, and this led to a decision to offer membership, for the one and only time in the Club’s history, to someone who was not a writer, but the head of the CID at Scotland Yard. Norman Kendal was elected in 1935, and knighted two years later, perhaps because his part in a Detection Club escapade in Soho went unnoticed by the powers that be.

  Kendal risked professional embarrassment as a result of the practical incompetence so characteristic of many novelists. While everyone was gathering for the dinner at Grosvenor House and the initiation of R. C. Woodthorpe, it was discovered that part of the regalia used in the ritual had been left in the Club rooms at Gerrard Street. Every member had a key to the rooms, but frantic questioning revealed that nobody had brought their key along. Nobody had imagined that there would be any need to visit the Club premises that night, since many more guests had been invited than the Gerrard Street rooms could hold. The plan was to spend the whole evening at the hotel where the Dinner and ritual were to take place.

  A taxi was summoned, and three members jumped into it, together with an apprehensive Kendal, who was pressed into service for good reason. There was no option but to break in to the Club rooms. Yet there was a risk of a heightened police presence, since the building had recently been burgled and other rooms ransacked, although the Club’s premises were left mysteriously untouched. But the writers reckoned, as Gladys Mitchell put it, ‘that Sir Norman’s presence at the scene of the crime was essential in case any inquisitive copper came along at the wrong time and asked the unanswerable question: “What’s all this, then?”’ A constable could hardly arrest an Assistant Commissioner.

  The cunning plan worked, and nobody was arrested. Speaking at the dinner that night was Sir Austen Chamberlain, the former Foreign Secretary (and half-brother to Neville) who described himself as a ‘greedy, interested and passionate’ fan of detective fiction, despite the number of Golden Age novels in which politicians were murdered. After the excitement earlier in the evening, the mood was exuberant, and alcohol flowed freely. Berkeley presided in Chesterton’s absence, and Punshon made a jokey reference to a recent break-in at the Gerrard Street rooms. The amateur burglars had got away with it.