The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  Research undertaken long after her death suggests she was on the right lines. In 1980, radio presenter Roger Wilkes, building on research undertaken earlier by criminologist Jonathan Goodman, pointed the finger of guilt at Richard Gordon Parry, a young colleague of Wallace’s. The theory is that, having got Wallace out of the way, he burgled his house in the hope of stealing insurance money, only to be discovered by Julia, whom he then battered to death. But nothing is settled forever when it comes to classic cases of true crime, and in 2013, P. D. James argued that, although Parry made the telephone call as a prank, Wallace did kill Julia. Others suggest Wallace hired Parry as a contract killer, but struggle to come up with evidence of a motive.

  So was Wallace the decent and trustworthy man his fellow chess players thought they knew, and as much a victim as Julia? His stoical demeanour seemed like callousness, although after the trial he tried to explain himself in a newspaper article: ‘For forty years I had drilled myself in iron control and prided myself on never displaying an outward emotion in public … My griefs and joys can be as intense as those of any man, but my rule has always been to give them expression only in privacy.’ Wallace owed his destruction to an old-fashioned British insistence on maintaining a stiff upper lip.

  No one is named as editor of The Anatomy of Murder, but Helen Simpson took responsibility for organizing the contributions. Sayers sent her the Wallace essay (describing it as a ‘ghastly great tome’) and apologized for the delay in submitting it: ‘John Rhode and Anthony Berkeley were very fierce with me at the last meeting when you are not there to protect me!’

  Given the strength of Sayers’ personality, few people would imagine that, even in flippant mood, she might feel the need of protection, let alone contemplate looking to a younger woman to offer it. But Simpson was, in her elegant way, as forceful as Sayers. Even Berkeley and Rhode might have quailed at the prospect of confronting an Australian as forthright as she was good-looking. The reason Berkeley was infuriated by Sayers’ delay was that he had already written his essay for the book, and it risked being superseded by a semi-official account in the Notable British Trials series. Rhode simply expected others to match his own astounding productivity. But Sayers, as they well knew, was not idle. Her tardiness was simply due to her perfectionism and obsessive attention to detail. It is this relentless commitment to quality in everything she wrote that has helped her reputation as a writer to survive.

  After years of dinner meetings, the Club’s members knew each other well. Formality had given way to familiarity. Friendship groups and alliances were emerging, and people were no longer always on their best behaviour, especially when the drink flowed. Sayers was finding Berkeley’s provocative nature tiresome, and was displeased when he gave Gaudy Night a mixed (but not unfair) review. She also seems to have thought that he was responsible for a clerihew actually written by Bentley in a book of parodies to which Berkeley contributed a teasing skit of Hugh Walpole. In ‘Greedy Night’, Bentley wrote:

  Lord Peter Wimsey

  May look a trifle flimsy.

  But he’s simply sublime

  When scenting out crime.

  She retaliated in a private letter to Helen Simpson (referring to an Oxford boulevard familiar to them both):

  Mr Iles

  Should be debagged in the middle

  Of St Giles

  For calling Peter Wimsey

  Flimsy.

  Simpson’s own essay focused on a nineteenth-century case, the killing of a Sydney bank teller called Henry Kinder, and Margaret Cole also wrote about a Victorian mystery, the case of Adelaide Bartlett. Adelaide’s husband died of chloroform poisoning after the couple had become involved in a ménage a trois with a vicar called George Dyson. She was charged with murder, but found not guilty. Margaret Cole’s account is more of a polemic than an investigation, sympathizing with Adelaide and scoffing at the judge’s prejudices against extramarital sex. The eminent surgeon Sir James Paget was more cynical, saying: ‘Now that she has been acquitted for murder and cannot be tried again, she should tell us in the interest of science how she did it.’ Instead, Adelaide disappeared permanently from sight, and so did the Reverend Dyson.

  The serial killer Henri Landru was the subject of E. R. Punshon’s essay, while Freeman Wills Crofts chose the Lakey murder case on the North Island of New Zealand. The key elements of the story are worthy of Inspector French: ‘detective work of an extremely high order, involving persevering research, precise observation and deduction, magnificent team work and the use of the latest scientific methods’. As for Berkeley, twelve years after that the trial of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters a similar case caused a sensation, and provided him the chance to explore his obsession with murder provoked by adultery.

  The Bournemouth Daily Echo carried an advertisement in September 1934 for a ‘willing lad … Scout-trained preferred’ to do housework at a house known as the Villa Madeira. A fresh-faced eighteen-year-old called George Stoner applied for the job. He was not a Scout, but he was prepared to drive a car, and was recruited by Francis Mawson Rattenbury, a retired architect, and his wife Alma, as a chauffeur–handyman.

  Rattenbury, depressive and ill-tempered, occasionally talked about committing suicide. Alma was his second wife; he was her third husband. She was attractive and almost thirty years younger; he was impotent. She was a talented musician whose courage working for the ambulance service during the war had earned her the Croix de Guerre, but she also had a fragile, addictive personality. Their relationship had become sullen and unhappy. During their most serious quarrel, Rattenbury blacked Alma’s eye, and she bit his arm. The willing lad they hired proved to be a quick worker. Within a couple of months of his arrival at the Villa Madeira, he and Alma began an affair.

  Rattenbury, who slept on his own downstairs, turned a blind eye to Stoner’s nocturnal visits to Alma’s room, which she shared with her six-year-old son. The young man became increasingly possessive, and she took him to a London hotel, showering him with gifts including three pairs of crêpe de chine pyjamas and silk handkerchiefs. She bought them at Harrods with money her husband had given her because she had said she needed an operation. A couple of days after their return, she suggested to her husband that they go on a trip to Bridport to cheer him up. Did she want to make Stoner jealous? Berkeley thought so. The young man refused to drive the Rattenburys to Bridport and borrowed a wooden mallet from his grandparents, saying that he meant to put up a screen in the garden.

  That evening, Rattenbury was found, alive but badly beaten. He had been hit about the head with the mallet. Alma, who had drunk a lot of whisky, tried to kiss a police constable who came to the house, and said she had attacked her husband. Rattenbury died of his injuries, and both the lovers were charged with murder. They pleaded not guilty, and although Stoner was convicted and sentenced to death, Alma was acquitted. As she left the Old Bailey, a large crowd booed her.

  A few days later, she took a train to Christchurch, walked across the meadow until she came to a riverbank, then thrust a knife into her left breast five times before dropping into the water. The stab wounds punctured the heart she thought was already been broken beyond repair. Unable to face the prospect of living without Stoner, she died as impulsively as she had lived. Although Stoner’s appeal failed, his sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. Berkeley estimated that if his conduct was good, he would be ‘back among us’ in about fifteen years. In fact, Stoner was released after just seven years, and lived until 2000.

  Berkeley was spellbound by the Rattenbury and Stoner trial. Not, he insisted, because he was morbid, but because he was ‘a student of character’ with ‘a sneaking passion for the truth’. He admitted, however, to a touch of voyeurism: ‘Nothing outside fiction so effectually knocks down the front wall of a house and exposes its occupants in the details of their strange lives as does a trial for murder.’

  His long essay about the case turned into an extended rant about the hypocrisy and irrationality
of the English legal system, above all the presumption that a woman capable of committing adultery was capable of committing murder. He argued that Florence Maybrick had been sentenced to death for a single instance of adultery, coupled with suspicion (but not proof) that she had murdered her husband, while Edith Thompson had been ‘executed for adultery’. And he went further, pouring scorn on the conventional bourgeois mores of his time: ‘To say that respect cannot exist between a man and woman whose relations are legally improper is just as silly as to say that respect invariably exists between married couples.’

  As usual, Berkeley’s views were double-edged. His sympathy for Alma Rattenbury was humane, more in keeping with modern social attitudes than those prevalent in the Thirties. Yet Berkeley was no feminist. He lashed out so often against women who torment their lovers that it is hard to resist the impression that, as in so many of his novels, he was venting his feelings about the way he had been treated by a woman he adored. A woman who, like Edith Thompson or Alma Rattenbury, ‘was incapable of seeing through the fog … to the real, selfish, petty core within’.

  The final contributor to The Anatomy of Murder was John Rhode, his subject Constance Kent, the sixteen-year-old whose young half-brother Saville was murdered at the Road House in Wiltshire in June 1860. The story is a classic of detection which has fascinated writers ranging from Wilkie Collins in the nineteenth century and Agatha Christie in the twentieth to Kate Summerscale in the twenty-first. Summerscale’s book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, became a bestseller which sparked a television series.

  Rhode had previously been responsible for The Case of Constance Kent, an entry in the Notable British Trials series. Five years after her brother’s body was found, Constance confessed to the crime, and the trial resulted in her being sentenced to death. Given her age, and the fact that she had made a confession, the punishment was commuted to a sentence of penal servitude. She spent twenty years in prison, and after her release in 1885 she vanished from sight. At the time Rhode was writing, nobody knew what had happened to Constance.

  Months after the book appeared, Rhode received an anonymous letter from Sydney, Australia, challenging his views on the case. He believed it had been written by Constance, but a handwriting expert disagreed. Not until further research took place in the Seventies was Rhode’s theory vindicated. Constance had emigrated to Australia, where she worked as a nurse for many years. After retiring in 1932, she ultimately reached the age of one hundred, quite an achievement for someone condemned to the scaffold at the age of twenty-one. She was the author of the letter.

  ‘The Sydney document’ shaped Rhode’s essay, as he explored Constance’s ‘elusive personality’, showing greater interest in psychology than he did in his novels. He donated the original letter to the Detection Club’s library, although depressingly this unique item of criminal history, like the Club’s Minute Book, went astray during the Second World War, and has never turned up since.

  Sayers’ own fascination with the case dated back to her interest in Collins’s borrowing of elements from the story to fashion The Moonstone. She acquired a copy of Rhode’s book, and the trial transcript so intrigued her that she decided to do some investigating of her own. She pored over the evidence, and annotated the text of the book with thoughts on different aspects of the mystery. Her comments range from analysis of the evidence given at the trial to corrections of printing errors. Although she was writing only for her own entertainment, her remarks are fascinating.

  The psychology of the characters, above all the culprit, enthralled her. When Rhode discussed the ‘nerve’ of the murderer, she compared the sang froid of the killer in the case that inspired The Scoop: Patrick Mahon had not only invited a woman back to the bungalow where he had killed his duped lover Emily Kaye the night before, but had sex with her there while his victim’s corpse lay in the next room.

  Sayers tackled the forensic evidence in the Constance Kent case with the zeal of a born detective. Several blank pages at the back of the book are crammed with carefully reasoned observations in her neat hand under the heading ‘Notes on the blood-stained shift’, divided into sections with headings such as ‘Why was the shift put in the boiler-hole?’ Her notes, totalling more than seventeen hundred words, are characteristically incisive. She was aiming to use her analytical skills to clarify aspects of the case which remained unclear. She mused over points such as the ownership of the garment, its precise nature – was it a nightdress or not? – and whether the blood that stained it was menstrual (she concluded that it was). As in the Wallace essay, her meticulous reasoning and close attention to detail make it a shame that she did not apply her gifts to more unsolved mysteries.

  Sayers’ interest in true crime was strong as Berkeley’s. She explored real-life puzzles with such zeal and energy that Wimsey would have applauded. Had she not abandoned true crime for her other passions, she would surely have established herself as the outstanding true-crime writer of the twentieth century.

  Notes to Chapter 22

  a collection of essays re-examining real-life cases

  The previous year saw the publication of Great Unsolved Crimes, with a list of contributors dominated by present and future Detection Club members and their associates, including E. M. Delafield (discussing the Thompson–Bywaters case) and ex-Superintendant Cornish. Berkeley wrote two essays (one as Iles), while Margaret Cole, Crofts, Freeman, Val Gielgud, Kennedy, Helen Simpson and Wade were also in the line-up. Sayers’ essay, ‘The Murder of Julia Wallace’, was an early version of her contribution to The Anatomy of Murder and had originally appeared in the Evening Standard. The fashion for asking detective novelists to solve real-life puzzles spread to The Star in 1937, and Carr, Rhode and Punshon were among those played the sleuth for the newspaper; see Tony Medawar, ‘Serendip’s Detections XIII: Detective Writers’ Detection’, CADS 53 February 2008.

  a strong candidate for any award for Least Likely Title of a Murder Mystery

  Rival contenders include The Stoat (1940) by Lynn Brock and Twenty-Five Sanitary Inspectors (1935) by Roger East. The East pseudonym concealed the identity of Roger d’Este Burford (1904–81), a poet and diplomat who wrote film and television scripts as well as infrequent but interesting detective novels.

  in 2013, P. D. James argued that … Wallace did kill Julia

  See ‘P. D. James on Britain’s most compelling unsolved murder – and how she finally came to crack it’, The Sunday Times Magazine, 27 October 2013.

  the Notable British Trials series

  This, the first volume of which was published in 1905, developed into an extensive library of historical and criminal trials embracing the most famous British causes célèbres from the case of Mary, Queen of Scots onwards.

  She pored over the evidence, and annotated the text of the book with thoughts on different aspects of the mystery.

  Her unpublished annotations are to be found in a copy of the book in my possession.

  23

  Trent’s Very Last Case

  1936 was a pivotal year in British history, and also in the story of the Detection Club. On 21 May, Sayers was one of ten people who attended a private dinner to celebrate a landmark in detective fiction. This was the kind of scenario which in fiction provided irresistible opportunities for murder, especially behind locked doors. In the event, the steak was not garnished with strychnine, and there was no cyanide in the champagne. The occasion was ‘the Trent Dinner’, marking the long-awaited return in a novel of Philip Trent, whose ‘last case’ twenty-three years earlier was the catalyst for the Golden Age.

  The arrival of Trent’s Own Case was greeted with much fanfare. Constable had acquired the publishing rights, thanks to the enthusiasm of one of the company’s directors, Michael Sadleir, that old Oxford friend of Sayers and the Coles. But this was very different from Trent’s Last Case. E. C. Bentley lacked the stamina and commitment needed for the long haul of a novel, and the book was a joint effort with Herbert Warner Allen. An old friend, Warner A
llen had published detective novels featuring a wine merchant named, in Bentley’s honour, Mr Clerihew, but they were never strong enough to merit his election to the Detection Club.

  The Trent Dinner was attended by Henry Wade (who had established himself as Constable’s leading detective novelist), Milward Kennedy, Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, Nicholas Blake (Cecil Day-Lewis), Frank Swinnerton, and the two co-authors, together with Sadleir and his right-hand-woman at Constable, Martha Smith. This select gathering brought together most of Bentley’s closest literary friends. Berkeley was absent, though not due to any form of snub, given that he had recently attended a cocktail party hosted by Bentley. He had probably retreated to Linton Hills. Christie was, as usual, on her travels. All those present – including Martha Smith – autographed copies of the new book as a memento of the great occasion.

  A month earlier, Sayers had written to Bentley heaping praise on his new novel, and regretting that he had let two decades ‘flow between the banks of Trent’. She took a dig at her friends in the Detection Club, comparing Bentley favourably to ‘poor dear Berkeley and Crofts and Rhode’ who worked ‘so hard with their big machine-looms and make an intricate pattern, and then you come along and all your figures get cheerfully up and walk out of the tapestry and talk and eat and move about in three dimensions’.