Norman Kendal had edited a practical textbook on criminal investigation, but his election seems partly to have been a publicity gimmick, and partly – as an inscription to him written by Punshon in a presentation copy of Death of a Beauty Queen indicates – a thankyou for his collaboration with the Gerrard Street break-in. Punshon was interested in punishment as well as crime, and Information Received, the debut of his policeman hero Bobby Owen, contains a powerful passage – quite irrelevant to the plot – condemning a legal clerk’s insistence that burglars should be deterred by ‘a good dose’ of the cat o’nine tails: ‘What really roused his enthusiasm … was a primeval love of cruelty lurking in his subconsciounesss … What moved him was the pleasure and excitement it gave him to think of a naked body, its flesh torn and bloody and scarred with the strokes of a whip.’
This book, which earned Sayers’ admiration, contradicts the glib assumptions of critics who claim that social comment is absent from Golden Age detective novels; innumerable other examples are to be found in Punshon’s work, and that of many of his colleagues.
The Club’s developing relationship with Scotland Yard led to an unorthodox collaborative book of detective fiction. According to the dust jacket of Six against the Yard, the instigator of the project was ‘lying idly in his bath’ one day, contemplating murder: there existed someone whom he wished dead, and it occurred to him that most people, however Christian, ‘knew of one of whom they harboured a similar wish’.
This sparked an idea. Six writers would be invited to write a story about a perfect murder, and then a senior police officer would review the scheme and judge whether it was really foolproof from a detective’s point of view. A recently retired superintendent, G. W. Cornish, had published his memoirs. Sayers praised the book in a review, and Cornish agreed to participate in the game.
Margery Allingham opened proceedings with ‘It Didn’t Work Out’, a strong story told by a music hall singer. Knox’s ‘The Fallen Idol’ blends topical political satire, classic detection and a word puzzle linked to psychometric testing. Berkeley’s ‘The Policeman Only Taps Once’ parodied the hardboiled American crime story.
Sayers wrote ‘Blood Sacrifice’, its theatrical background reflecting her current absorption in a stage play she was working on with Muriel St Claire Byrne. Her themes were ambitious: good and evil, innocence and guilt. Cornish was keen to show that, however neat the plan, the police would always make sure that justice was done, but Sayers, taking her work as seriously as ever, was irked by his comments. To research blood transfusions, integral to the plot, she had consulted Helen Simpson’s husband, the surgeon Denis Browne, and she refused to accept Cornish’s verdict that the killer’s plan was not watertight.
When her agent David Higham, prompted by the Daily Mail, had the temerity to wonder if she might revise what she’d written, she refused with a vehemence which would have impressed a strong-minded Somerville graduate of a later generation, Margaret Thatcher: ‘No, no! I will not alter a word …’ In psychological terms, Sayers regarded the story as one of the best she had written, and she said Cornish should speak to Denis Browne if he was not convinced.
Six against the Yard, a copy inscribed by the authors and presented by Dennis Wheatley to socialite and book collector Eileen Conn.
A few hours later, as if afraid she had not made herself clear, Sayers wrote a second letter to Higham, repeating her views and saying that she had told the Daily Mail to withdraw a pointless change to one of her character’s names. Nor was that all. Cornish’s comments were good-natured, if not insightful, and he mentioned that he had not had the chance to discuss the case with Lord Peter Wimsey. Sayers promptly drafted a letter in which, surprise, surprise, Wimsey endorsed her view that ‘Blood Sacrifice’ did tell the story of a perfect murder. Higham was told that the Daily Mail could publish Wimsey’s letter alongside Cornish’s critique.
The playfulness of the project – for all Sayers’ earnestness – appealed to readers. Six against the Yard is a unique book, a harmless piece of entertainment arising from one man’s urge to murder an enemy. Harmless that is, assuming the cautionary remarks of the retired superintendent deterred anyone genuinely harbouring murderous intentions from putting any of the story ideas into practice. But an idea about murdering someone he knew lingered at the back of Berkeley’s mind.
During the Golden Age, detective novelists usually kept their readers in the dark about the solution to the crime. The climax of the story was the revelation of whodunit, or occasionally how it was done. But there was another way to maintain suspense, and reader interest, a method similar to that in Six against the Yard. A writer could show readers the carrying out of an ingenious and apparently foolproof crime, and then describe how the detective solved the case – an ‘inverted’ detective story.
As well as leading the way with scientific detection, Richard Austin Freeman devised the ‘inverted’ story of crime. Four groundbreaking stories of this type were collected in The Singing Bone in 1911. Freeman was less interested in whodunit than ‘how was the discovery achieved?’ He was set thinking by Edgar Wallace’s offer of a prize to a reader who identified the criminal in his 1905 novel The Four Just Men, a scheme which proved financially ruinous because too many people hit on the right answer. Freeman wondered if he could write a detective story which took the reader into his confidence from the outset. The result was ‘The Case of Oscar Brodski’: ‘Here the usual conditions are reversed; the reader knows everything, the detective knows nothing, and the interest focuses on the unexpected significance of trivial circumstances.’ That first story was split into two parts: ‘The Mechanism of Crime’ and ‘The Mechanism of Detection’. A burglar murders a man in order to steal a packet of diamonds. His sole mistake is to leave his victim’s felt hat at home before carrying the body away to be left on a railway track. He burns the hat, but in vain; Dr Thorndyke is able to solve the crime.
Here, once again, was a groundbreaking detective story with its roots in real life. One Saturday in November 1866, a Nottinghamshire rent collector called Henry Raynor set out for a cottage he owned in the village of Carlton. He and John and Mary Watson, a couple who occupied part of the building, were engaged in a long-running dispute about who had the right to vegetable produce from the cottage garden, and Raynor meant to put a stop to their activities. But that night, his body was found on a nearby railway line. He had been battered with a poker, and his money and watch were missing, as well as his hat.
The eminent toxicologist Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor was called in, and spotted marks of dragging between the cottage and the railway line which corresponded with Raynor’s boots. A search of the cottage revealed a cindery substance on an iron rake which after heating and treatment with alcohol produced a shellac resin. This proved to be very similar to a substance obtained from a felt hat like Raynor’s. The Watsons claimed that bloodstains on their clothes came from killing a pig, and luckily for them Taylor was unable to prove otherwise. They were found not guilty, although Freeman’s fictional murderer was not so fortunate.
At first, inverted stories received scant attention. Freeman abandoned the form before the start of the First World War, which Sayers found regrettable. Berkeley’s approach in Malice Aforethought was different, as he presented the whole story from the murderer’s point of view rather than, in part, from the detective’s. Encouraged by Sayers, both the Coles and Freeman Wills Crofts wrote inverted detective novels, while Roy Vickers wrote excellent short inverted stories featuring Scotland Yard’s Department of Dead Ends. The appeal of the form has endured, and in the television age, the inverted stories in Columbo achieved enormous popularity.
The outstanding inverted crime novel was Heir Presumptive, by Henry Wade. Eustace Hendel is alerted by a newspaper item to the fact that he might be line for an inheritance that will solve all his financial problems. He sees a possible route to becoming the next Lord Barradys, but unfortunately some family members stand in his way. The storyline anticipates
aspects of the classic Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, which appeared more than a decade later.
George Orwell had no doubt: ‘Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr Palmer of Rugeley, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson.’
Was it mere coincidence that Orwell’s Golden Age of real life murder came to an end as the Golden Age of fictional murder was gathering steam? Orwell argued that, leaving aside the Ripper killings, the other eight cases had a good deal in common: six were poisoning cases, and all but two of the ten criminals came from the middle class. Sex provided a powerful motive in most of the cases, while ‘respectability’, such as the urge to avoid the scandal of divorce, was a recurrent factor in the culprit’s mindset.
Crucially, as Orwell pointed out in ‘The Decline of the English Murder’, the context of almost all the classic cases ‘was essentially domestic; of twelve victims, seven were either wife or husband of the murderer.’ The Thompson–Bywaters trial, and the other cases Orwell highlighted, inspired Detection Club members and other Golden Age writers to produce much of their finest work. But it was a case that dominated the headlines for weeks in 1931 that gave Sayers the chance to display her own skills as a detective.
Notes to Chapter 21
Six against the Yard is a unique book
Opinions vary as to whether it is accurately described as a product of the Detection Club. Its originality is characteristic of Club members, but the Club was not named on the first edition. Five of the six crime writers were members of the Club. The exception was Russell Thorndike (1885–1972), brother of the actor Sybil Thorndike. He wrote popular novels featuring Doctor Syn of Romney Marsh, and has occasionally been described as a member of the Club, although that can only be the case if (as is not impossible) all trace of his membership has vanished.
classic Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets
The film was based on a superbly ironic and inexplicably neglected 1907 novel, Roy Horniman’s Israel Rank, a masterpiece of murder subtitled The Autobiography of a Criminal.
22
Why was the Shift Put in the Boiler-Hole?
At 8.45 pm, on a dark January evening in 1931, the Johnsons, a couple who lived in Anfield, Liverpool, heard someone knocking at their neighbours’ back door. Going outside to see what was the matter, they encountered William Wallace, who lived next door. ‘Have you heard anything unusual tonight?’ he asked. When they said no, Wallace said, ‘I have been round to the front door and also to the back, and they are both fastened against me.’ He tried the back door again, and it opened quite easily. While the Johnsons waited, he went inside. They heard him call out twice before he came hurrying back.
‘Come and see,’ he said. ‘She has been killed.’
The body of his wife Julia lay in the parlour, stretched out on the hearth rug, with her feet close to the gas fire. Her skull had been smashed with such fury that her brains had spilled out. Blood spattered the room, on the carpet, the wall, an armchair and on Wallace’s violin case. She had been beaten to death with a poker.
William Herbert Wallace, an insurance agent working for the Prudential Assurance Company, moved to Liverpool with his wife Julia a year after their marriage in March 1914. In his youth, Wallace worked as a salesman in India and China, but a kidney illness forced him to return to England, and he became the Liberal Party’s election agent in Ripon, Yorkshire. There he met Julia, a former governess, whom he later described as ‘dark haired, dark eyed, full of energy and vivaciousness’. He claimed to be devoted to her, while acquaintances described him as placid, honest, and ‘an absolute gentleman in every respect’.
To all appearances, the Wallaces were a typical bourgeois couple of their time. Julia was a capable pianist, and Wallace learned the violin, so he could accompany her when they hosted musical evenings at their modest home in Anfield. They nursed a secret that never came out during their lifetimes. On their marriage certificate, Wallace was said to be aged thirty-six, and Julia a year older. In fact, she was fifty-three, and had falsified information about her date of birth and origins in answering questions on the census four years before the wedding. But there was nothing so unusual in outwardly respectable people lying about their age, their background and other aspects of their private lives. Several members of the Detection Club did the same. Respectability, as scores of Golden Age novels demonstrated, was often only skin deep.
Wallace helped to found the Central Liverpool Chess Club, which met in the basement of Cottle’s City Cafe, in North John Street, and he played there each Monday night. On the evening of Monday 19 January, 1931, Wallace was on his way to the Club for a tournament game when a telephone call was put through to a waitress in the cafe. The caller wanted to speak to Wallace, and she handed the phone to the Club captain. The caller gave his name as R. M. Qualtrough, and said he particularly wanted to see Wallace at 7.30 p.m. the next day to discuss taking out some insurance as a present for his daughter. He gave his address as 25 Menlove Gardens East, Mossley Hill. The message was passed to Wallace, although he said he was not familiar with either Qualtrough or that address.
According to Wallace, the next evening he went out to keep the appointment, but could not find the address he had been given. A police constable told him there was no such road as Menlove Gardens East, although there were several addresses with similar names. In the end he admitted defeat, and returned home to make his horrific discovery in the parlour.
Wallace, the prime suspect, insisted he was innocent. The case against him was purely circumstantial. Charged with murder, he stood trial at Liverpool Assizes. The case caused a sensation, and after an hour’s deliberation, the jury found him guilty. He was sentenced to death, but the Court of Criminal Appeal took the unprecedented step of ruling that the verdict was ‘not supported by the weight of the evidence’ and set him free. The disasters that had befallen Wallace were not over. After his release, he was dogged by a hostile whispering campaign, and found it impossible to return to work selling insurance. His kidney problems returned, and he died only a couple of years after his wife’s brutal killing. Nobody else was ever charged with the crime.
The Wallace mystery has tantalized generations of true crime experts, along with novelists ranging from Sayers and Raymond Chandler to P. D. James. Margery Allingham wrote an essay about the private mock trial of Wallace by his peers, ‘The Compassionate Machine’, but it was not published until long after her death. Agatha Christie toyed with a plot idea based on the case when planning Mrs McGinty’s Dead, while the story has supplied ingredients for several novels, including two written by John Rhode: Vegetable Duck and The Telephone Call, the former a strong candidate for any award for Least Likely Title of a Murder Mystery.
When members of the Detection Club cast around for a fresh idea for a fundraising book, Sayers, Berkeley and John Rhode favoured putting together a collection of essays re-examining real-life cases, and Helen Simpson agreed to take on the spade work. The cast of contributors was completed by Freeman Wills Crofts, Margaret Cole, and E.R. Punshon. With the Wallace case still fresh in people’s memories, Sayers decided to explore it in depth. The book became The Anatomy of Murder: Famous crimes critically considered by members of the Detection Club.
Sayers’ ‘The Murder of Julia Wallace’ is a masterpiece of armchair detection. Quoting the judge’s summing-up, she points out that the question in a murder trial is solely whether the accused committed the crime, whereas the detective novelist wants to know whodunit, whether or not it was the accused. She argues that the Wallace case was a perfect subject for a detective novelist to study: if he was guilty, ‘then he was the classic contriver and alibi-monger that adorns the pages of a thousand mystery novels; and if he was innocent, then the real murderer was still more typically the classic villain of fictio
n.’
At a time when Berkeley kept coming up with multiple solutions to fictional crimes, Sayers argued that such ingenuity was not as unrealistic as it seemed. In the Wallace mystery, there was ‘no single incident which is not susceptible of at least two interpretations, according to whether one considers that the prisoner was, in fact, an innocent man caught in a trap or a guilty man pretending to have been caught in a trap.’
Sayers speculated about the Wallaces’ relationship, noting how difficult it is ‘to be certain how far an appearance of married harmony may not conceal elements of disruption’. She probably had her own life with Mac in mind. The extent of the age difference between the Wallaces was not public knowledge, and Sayers wondered whether it was significant that there were no children. She also asked herself whether Wallace’s reference to his wife’s ‘aimless chatter’ implied that he found her companionship trying. When looking at his low-key diary entry recording their fifteenth wedding anniversary, she found it stoical rather than cheery, but not the work of a man so exasperated that he was driven to madness.
For Sayers, character and psychology were crucial, and she felt there was a psychological stumbling-block in the case against Wallace. The killing could not have resulted from a ‘momentary frenzy’, because the evidence suggested careful planning, and the ferocity of the attack was probably due to panic. She felt Wallace’s character was incompatible with his having committed the murder: ‘One can only say that, if he was a guilty man, he kept up the pretence of innocence to himself with an extraordinary assiduity and appearance of sincerity.’ Although she described the mystery as ‘insoluble’, one correspondent impressed her by saying that if Wallace had been guilty, it would have made more sense for him to arrange a genuine appointment on the night of the killing rather than a bogus one.
The Golden Age of Murder Page 30