The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

Sayers’ judgement was compromised by friendship, as well as by an increasing irritation with Berkeley, whose best writing was far superior to that of Crofts and Rhode. Trent’s Own Case was striking only in its ordinariness. The story concerns the shooting of a sadistic philanthropist whose portrait Trent has been painting, and falters after a sound start. For all Sayers’ attempts to bolster his morale, Bentley was haunted by a sense of failure, as if he had never quite fulfilled the brilliant creative promise of his younger days. This apparently aloof, complicated man never made a parade of his feelings, but a growing sense of frustration and inadequacy caused him to take refuge in alcohol. As a crime novelist, he was a one-hit wonder. Trent’s Own Case, like his final novel, an unexciting thriller about amnesia called Elephant’s Work, was all too forgettable.

  The most notable absentee from the Trent Dinner was Bentley’s boyhood friend G. K. Chesterton. Overweight and hopelessly unfit, the Detection Club’s President suffered from assorted ailments for years although he continued to work hard and was a popular broadcaster on the BBC, taking book reviews as a starting point for digressions into whatever topics caught his fancy. His opinions remained as strong and idiosyncratic as ever, and his hostility towards imperialism strengthened his reservations about Fascism after Mussolini invaded Abyssinia.

  As a writer, he fell into the same trap as Douglas Cole, sacrificing quality for quantity. The Scandal of Father Brown, the fifth and final collection of short stories about the little priest, received a muted reception. The old magic had gone and to prove it, when Chesterton wrote another Father Brown story, it was turned down by the Storyteller magazine, although his secretary managed to hide this from him.

  Yet he had not lost all the old flair, as he showed in a radio debate with Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, on ‘Who Should Bring up Our Children?’ Russell said that poor parents could not give their children the food, clothing and space they needed, while rich parents spoiled their offspring. The progressive solution was for children to be cared for by doctors, nurses and teachers, in institutions. Chesterton regarded this as drivel. Parents were fitted by nature to bring up their children, and money would be better spent on improving living conditions for the poor. On the evening of the broadcast, Berkeley wrote from Linton Hills, ‘with no human being within a couple of miles but with a glass at my elbow’, to congratulate Chesterton on wiping the floor with Russell.

  At the time of the Trent Dinner, Chesterton was coming to the end of a motoring tour of France, accompanied by his wife and secretary. He visited Lourdes, hoping his health might somehow recover. But he was now a sick man. There was to be no miracle cure.

  Sayers and Mac were leading separate lives. The front room on the first floor of their house in Witham, Essex, was Sayers’ library and study. Mac had a small room downstairs where he wrote or painted. They met for lunch and dinner, but seldom went out together. Mac – unlike Christie’s husband Max Mallowan, or Clarice Dickson Carr – avoided meetings of the Detection Club and remained a mysterious figure to most of her friends. Sayers’ agent, David Higham, thought Mac ‘completely idle and comfortable on the bottles she earned for him’, but the couple established a modus vivendi. Sayers was an owl, getting up late and working into the small hours, so they spent less and less time with each other.

  Mac preferred the company at the Red Lion, an eighteenth-century pub just along Newland Street, although when someone referred to him as ‘Dorothy Sayers’ husband’, he stubbed out his cigarette and marched out in fury. He produced a book called The Craft of the Short Story, but the text ran to a paltry eighty-eight pages, perhaps because he had no track record of short story writing. Among words of wisdom offered to budding writers was the advice never to use ‘a nom de plume … an author is well-advised to use his or her name fearlessly’. This makes it all the more peculiar that he published the book under the name of Donald Maconochie.

  Mac finally agreed to John Anthony’s adoption, and although Sayers found it difficult to discuss her son with her husband, the lawyers sorted things out. John Anthony was duly told he had been adopted by Cousin Dorothy and Cousin Mac. He could now call himself John Anthony Fleming. He continued to live with Ivy, who made sure that he kept quiet about his connection with Dorothy L. Sayers. Sayers remained terrified by the thought that the Press might get wind of the story and that the truth about his parentage would come out.

  So John Anthony remained a secret she kept even from very close friends. When she sent a birthday present to Helen Simpson for her daughter Clemence, she made an elaborate fuss over becoming confused about the child’s name, saying that such lapses accounted for her ‘unpopularity with parents’. Simpson was trustworthy, but Sayers dared not risk the truth leaking out. In harping on her supposed childlessness, she was over-egging the pudding, but she got away with it. On other occasions she said that she disliked children, but this was part of a performance. She still burned with shame, and her tender feelings towards her son were overlaid with a characteristic briskness. Yet the businesslike tone of her letters to John Anthony did not imply that she only looked after him out of a sense of responsibility. It was a detective novelist’s strategy of deception, a technique for disguising her vulnerability.

  She compensated for feelings of guilt with an increasingly terrifying public demeanour. Her plainness and obesity were exaggerated by her outlandish taste in fashion. When she came to stay at Henry Wade’s country house Chiltons, one of his sons was thrilled to discover that she wore cuff-links in the form of a skull and crossbones. Her fondness for mannish clothes led some people to assume she was a lesbian. Sayers did not care, as long as they did not uncover her real secret. Ngaio Marsh’s taste for menswear may have been a clue to her sexual orientation, but with both women, androgynous dress was first and foremost a form of self-defence. Clothes became a disguise, assumed to create distance and preserve privacy.

  Just as Bentley hated the early film versions of Trent’s Last Case, so Sayers cringed when Lord Peter Wimsey appeared on the silver screen in The Silent Passenger. She hated the lack of creative control that is an author’s fate when screen rights are sold, and rejected a lucrative offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to film Murder Must Advertise. When the movie of Busman’s Honeymoon was screened at the Whitehall Cinema next door to her house in Newland Street, she refused to go and see it.

  The theatre appealed to her much more, but she worried about her lack of experience in writing drama, and asked Muriel St Clare Byrne to collaborate on a stage play featuring Wimsey. Sayers wanted the play to be a comedy, a break from the seriousness of Gaudy Night, and also a ‘fair play’ detective mystery. She devised a murder method and storyline, while Muriel helped with dialogue and sharpening the moments of drama. Much of 1936 was spent in search of financial backing for the play, which they called Busman’s Honeymoon. Eventually, the money was found, and the main parts cast, with Dennis Arundell playing Wimsey.

  When the play went on tour, she delighted in travelling with the company around the provinces. With evident pride, she wrote from Birmingham to John Anthony, describing life on the road. She would arrive at the theatre at eleven to watch rehearsals for a couple of hours, breaking for a snack before the afternoon’s work. After that, she had an endless list of things to do: discussing rewrites; advising a tailor or dressmaker on costumes; talking to the Press; telling the management how to write the advertisements; dining with members of the cast and boosting their egos by admiring the brilliance of their performances.

  The play finally reached London’s West End, opening at the Comedy Theatre. Reviews were good, and it ran for nine months. To celebrate the one hundredth performance, the theatre management invited a group of allegedly reformed criminals to attend as a publicity gimmick. During the second interval, a couple of skilful pickpockets managed to remove Dennis Arundell’s braces without his knowledge, adding an extra level of tension to his performance in the final act.

  The publishing business was in a state of flux (its usual state
, many writers might say). Readers had a huge appetite for detective fiction, but little money to spare for buying books. The present-day scarcity of many Golden Age first editions, and the sky-high values of books with dustjackets in excellent condition, is due to the fact that the main market for commercial fiction was the libraries. As well as public libraries, circulating libraries attached to chain stores such as Boot’s attracted many subscribers throughout the Golden Age. Roughly three-quarters of the borrowers were women, and women’s tastes and interests influenced detective novelists in their work. This helps to explain the distance that existed between Golden Age fiction and thrillers aimed at a masculine readership. During her disappearance, Christie borrowed books from the Harrogate branch of W.H. Smith’s library, while William and George Foyle added a chain of twopenny libraries to their bookselling business in Charing Cross Road. The challenge for publishers was how to turn demand into high sales and increased profits.

  Victor Gollancz, quick to recognise the hunger for cheaper books, set up a subsidiary called Mundanus which published paperbacks. Malice Aforethought was one of the first Mundanus titles, with a hardback edition produced for sale to circulating libraries, but the venture perished in the aftershocks of the Wall Street Crash. In Germany, a Hamburg publisher enjoyed success with Albatross paperbacks, produced for the mass market, and its marketing ideas were built upon in Britain by Penguin Books.

  Penguins were the brainchild of Allen Lane, whose uncle John was Agatha Christie’s first publisher. Allen met Christie when she called at the office to complain about the dustjacket of The Murder on the Links, having failed to realize that when a publisher asks an author’s opinion of a jacket, the response required is rapture. Despite this, and her subsequent defection to Collins, she and Allen Lane became good friends, and he invented Penguin books after paying a weekend visit to her home in Devon. Finding himself at Exeter railway station with nothing worthwhile to read, he decided to set about selling well-produced paperback editions of popular books. They might cost sixpence, the price of a packet of cigarettes, and be sold from a vending machine.

  A ‘Penguincubator’ book-vending machine duly appeared in Charing Cross Road, but although this radical innovation did not stand the test of time, the broader commercial strategy did. Another key to the success of Penguins was their iconic design: three horizontal, colour-coded bands, green and white in the case of crime fiction. The first ten Penguin titles included two detective novels. Significantly, they were The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and The Mysterious Affair at Styles, both written by members of the Detection Club.

  The popularity of Christie’s books – after the war, Penguin sold one hundred thousand copies of each of ten of her titles within months – contributed to the success of the imprint from the outset. Lane was the first to acknowledge this. Penguin became a separate company in 1936, setting up premises in the Crypt of the Holy Trinity Church on Marylebone Road. A fairground slide was used to receive deliveries from the street above. Within twelve months, Penguin had sold three million paperbacks. Lane could afford to give financial support to Max Mallowan’s expeditions, and each year he sent the archaeologists a Stilton cheese.

  Gollancz had the right idea about paperbacks, but timing is everything. His next brainwave was timed to perfection.

  Julian Symons identified 1936 as ‘the heart of the Thirties dream. Consider: in this year, the Left Book Club was founded, the Spanish Civil War began, the Surrealist Exhibition was held, the Jarrow Crusade began … Fascism in Britain became strongly arrogant and obtrusive.’

  The Left Book Club sprang from a conversation between Victor Gollancz, Stafford Cripps (a future Chancellor of the Exchequer) and John Strachey, who subsequently popularized the concept of the ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction. The concept of a book club for like-minded left-wing members was inspired by the success of the Collins Crime Club. Each month a panel highlighted one book as a monthly choice. The break-even target was 2,500 members, but 40,000 were recruited in the first year. Success brought occasional setbacks. Douglas Cole was furious when The Condition of Britain, which he had written with Margaret, was denied the honour of being picked as a monthly Choice.

  With hindsight, Symons concluded that the Left Book Club’s chief function was ‘to serve as a propaganda machine for Communism’, although he admitted his friend Gollancz would have regarded this as an outrageous slur. A dozen of the first fifteen Choices were vetted and approved by the British Communist Party, and in Symons’ opinion, ‘the typical attitude of Left Book Club members … [was that] any criticism of the Soviet Union was in essence pro-Fascist’.

  The British Government kept out of the Spanish Civil War, but a couple of thousand Britons flocked to the Republican cause under the banner of the International Brigade. Among them was a talented poet and detective novelist called Christopher St John Sprigg. In contrast to the usual pattern among intellectuals, he wrote crime fiction under his real name, and more serious work under a pseudonym, Christopher Caudwell. In late 1936, he drove an ambulance to Spain, before training as a machine gunner. He was killed in action at ‘Suicide Hill’ on the first day of the battle of Jarama. Not yet thirty, he had already written seven detective novels. Symons’ bleak verdict was that those, like Sprigg, who died with their illusions about the cause unshattered were the lucky ones. Others who survived, like Stephen Spender, became disillusioned and ‘ashamed, shocked by the evidence of Communist ruthlessness around them’.

  But that was the nature of the times. People on all points of the political spectrum found it hard to know what to do for the best. As Symons said, ‘Those who condemn readily, without considering the social pressures that made otherwise intelligent people write such things, can never understand the Thirties.’ This remains as true of Caudwell and Cole as it is of Connington and Crofts, Christie and Chesterton.

  On 14 June 1936, less than a month after the Trent Dinner, a chaotic and remarkable life came to an end when Chesterton died of congestive heart failure. He had been invested by Pope Pius XI as Knight Commander with Star of the Papal Order of St Gregory the Great, and a requiem mass was held in Westminster Cathedral. Ronald Knox, delivering the homily, said: ‘All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton’s influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton.’

  In the same vein, writing privately to Chesterton’s widow Frances, Sayers said that his books had formed a greater part of her mental make-up than those of any other writer. He had shown ‘how to dignify a kind of literature which had fallen on very bad ways by restoring to it that touch with the greater realities which it had almost entirely lost.’

  Chesterton’s death caused shock and dismay to another admirer. This young American novelist had just been elected to the Detection Club, and had dreamed that the great man would preside over his initiation. The American had already modelled a detective hero on Chesterton, and news of this had gratified the older man. They both shared a passion for ‘miracle problems’, although their work was very different. The American was a specialist in macabre atmospherics, and establishing himself as the master of the ‘locked room mystery’, a man at whose ingenuity Sayers, Berkeley and Christie marvelled. His name was John Dickson Carr.

  Notes to Chapter 23

  Among them was a talented poet and detective novelist called Christopher St John Sprigg.

  Christopher St John Sprigg (1907–37), a journalist who became a prominent Marxist thinker, ran an aeronautics publishing company, and his technical knowledge provided material for a textbook as well as a mystery, Death of an Airman (1934). Sayers gave that novel a rave review, and the pair corresponded briefly before Sprigg became consumed by political activism. A young Communist, Margot Miller (1912–80), earned brief celebrity during the Spanish Civil War; a volunteer nurse who drove an ambulance for the International Brigade, she was shot in the legs by machine gunners. More than a decade later, as Margot Bennett, she wrote six acclaimed mysteries. In 1958, her f
inal crime novel, Someone from the Past, pipped Margery Allingham’s Hide My Eyes for the Crossed Red Herring Award, now the CWA Gold Dagger, and earned her election to the Detection Club. Julian Symons, who wrote her obituary for The Times, compared her to Raymond Chandler, and said, ‘She remained a radical, at once disillusioned and optimistic.’ Script writing paid better, however, and she never wrote another crime novel, concentrating mainly on television series such as Maigret and the soap operas Emergency Ward 10 and Honey Lane.

  24

  A Coffin Entombed in a Crypt of Granite

  A chance encounter in the men’s barbershop during an Atlantic crossing changed John Dickson Carr’s life. It was the summer of 1930, a few days after the BBC broadcast the final instalment of Behind the Screen. Carr was twenty-three years old, and travelling back to New York on an ocean-going liner called Pennland after a visit to Europe. The trip was funded by earnings from his first detective novel, It Walks by Night, featuring a saturnine French detective, Henri Bencolin. The voyage took ten days and cost $125. Carr liked luxury, but he also liked spending money, and he had run too short of cash to be able to afford a more expensive passage on one of the modern ships that took less than a week to make the crossing.

  A young Englishwoman called Clarice Cleave was also on board; her trip to visit friends in America was a twenty-first birthday present from her parents. Small and attractive, with blonde hair and blue eyes, she possessed the same quiet charm, and unexpected taste for adventure, that had attracted Archie Christie to Agatha. She decided to have her hair bobbed, so that when the ship landed, she would have the fashionable coiffeur of the day. The women’s hairdresser was booked up, so she headed for the men’s salon to ask if she could have her hair cut short. Carr was there, reading while he waited his turn, and offered to let her go ahead of him. That night, he asked her for a dance. He was smart, good-looking and sociable, so she said yes.