The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  ‘Do you like detective stories?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I’ve read a couple by Edgar Wallace.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Pretty poor stuff.’

  If he was disappointed by her lack of enthusiasm, he didn’t let it put him off. ‘Actually, I’ve got a detective story I’d like you to try. Let me get it from my cabin. I won’t be a minute.’

  He disappeared before she had the chance to insist that she really didn’t care for mysteries, and returned flourishing a copy of It Walks by Night, presenting it to her with a novice author’s pride. So began a classic shipboard romance, which was not harmed when Clarice assured him she had enjoyed reading his book. As is the way with writers of fiction, whose insecurity is matched by their fondness for making things up, Carr bolstered his ego when he told friends back home about Clarice by embellishing the story: ‘Guess what? When I met Clarice, one of the first things she said to me was that she’d just read this marvellous book called It Walks by Night.’

  The couple married and moved into an apartment in New York, but when Clarice found she was pregnant, she persuaded Carr to come back with her to England. Britain’s abandonment of the Gold Standard made it an attractive destination for people with American dollars, and they could live more cheaply there. Once they landed in London on Valentine’s Day 1933, Carr’s love affair with an Englishwoman became a love affair with England itself.

  Carr was the son of a lawyer and congressman from Pennsylvania. His father was a heavy drinker, and so was Carr. It is no coincidence that on the first appearance of Gideon Fell, Carr’s most memorable sleuth has been working for six years on The Drinking Customs of England, from the Earliest Days, and endlessly knocks back beer and whisky. Carr’s sixth novel, Hag’s Nook¸ introduced Fell as a Lincolnshire-based lexicographer with much the same physique and personality as Chesterton. Fell never actually bothers with dictionary-compilation; his real specialism is history. Like all the great detectives, he has a brain crammed with arcane knowledge that proves remarkably useful. He solves one case in part because he happens to know that Canadian taxidermists stuff moose heads with red sand.

  Hag’s Nook opens with a lyrical portrayal of England as seen through the eyes of a young American, Tad Rampole. Tad falls for a young Englishwoman, Dorothy Starberth, just as Carr had fallen for Clarice. Carr offers an ‘impossible’ problem, as well as a neatly conceived cryptogram, and cloaks his mystery with lashings of atmosphere, including a creepy prison that has stood abandoned for a century, and a legend that the Starberths die of broken necks – a fate duly suffered by Dorothy’s brother. Are supernatural forces at work, or is the family affected by inherited madness? Gideon Fell comes up with a rational solution, and gives the culprit the chance to escape the gallows by shooting himself once he has written a statement explaining his crimes. Although Inspector Jennings is present, he proves extraordinarily accommodating: ‘Our instructions from Sir William, sir, at the Yard, were to take orders from you.’ But this murderer – unlike so many killers in Golden Age fiction – cannot bring himself to commit suicide.

  The Hollow Man is a classic ‘impossible crime’ mystery, boasting a plan of the murder scene, a diagram of an illusion at the heart of one of the puzzles, and the famous ‘Locked Room Lecture’. Fell expounds on his favourite topic, breaking the fourth wall with extraordinary bravura right from the start: ‘We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not.’

  In his virtuoso analysis of how to commit murder in that apparently locked room, Fell highlighted the homicidal potential of quirky mechanical and scientific contraptions: ‘The gun mechanism concealed in the telephone-receiver … the pistol with a string to the trigger, which is pulled by the expansion of water as it freezes. We have the clock that fires a bullet when you wind it and … the ingenious grandfather clock which sets ringing a hideously clanging bell on its top, so that when you reach up to shut off the din, your own touch releases a blade that slashes open your stomach … There is death in every article of furniture, including a tea-urn.’

  Fell waxes lyrical about weapons made of ice and the suitability of snakes and insects for murderous purposes: ‘Snakes can be concealed not only in chests and safes, but also deftly hidden in flower-pots, books, chandeliers, and walking-sticks. I even remember one cheerful little item in which the amber stem of a pipe, grotesquely carven as a scorpion, comes to life a real scorpion as the victim is about to put it into his mouth.’

  Part of the appeal of the ‘locked room mystery’ for Carr and many of his readers lay in its exotic artificiality. In real life, very few people have the misfortune to be murdered in locked rooms, but The Hollow Man was a tour de force, making Carr’s election to membership of the Detection Club a formality. He was not quite thirty years old.

  Carr’s fascination with the occult resulted in a dazzling non-series novel, The Burning Court. Because his British publisher was worried that his love of grotesque settings and characters might alienate some readers, Carr came up with an unremarkable setting – a small town in Pennsylvania – and an apparently conventional set of characters. These ingredients he fashioned into an exotic mystery with a bizarre epilogue. An unofficial attempted exhumation in the dead of night reveals that the body of Miles Despard, a suspected victim of arsenic poisoning, has disappeared from its coffin, which had been entombed in a windowless crypt built of granite. A witness swears that she has seen a mysterious woman leaving the dead man’s room through a door that cannot be opened and leads nowhere.

  One suspect is a lookalike of a French woman poisoner who was guillotined long ago – has she returned to life and resumed her homicidal career? The detective is the elderly, eccentric and ugly Gaudan Cross, a murderer turned true-crime historian. His explanation of the mystery is rational and compelling, in keeping with Carr’s facility for showing that the apparently possible was in fact all too possible. Then the kaleidoscope shifts in an extraordinary coda. The reader is presented with an alternative version of events which suggests supernatural forces are at work after all.

  Carr, the devotee of fair-play detection, had broken the ‘rules’ in spectacular fashion. He never wrote another book in the manner of The Burning Court, saying that reader reaction to it had ranged ‘from mildly shocked disapproval to puzzled wrath’, but the following year The Crooked Hinge drew on his interest in Satanism. He dedicated the book to Sayers ‘in friendship and esteem’. The story opens with an impersonation puzzle, and the circumstances are those of a classic impossible crime. Dr Fell announces that the case ‘is what I’ve been half-dreading for a long time – an almost purely psychological puzzle … There is an almost complete absence of material clues.’ The most powerful image in this atmospheric book is that of the Golden Hag, an automaton as sinister as it is bizarre and based (like the key plot gimmick in The Hollow Man) on a device from the Maskelyne Mysteries magic shows.

  Fell suggests a solution of the crime involving a gypsy throwing ball covered with fish-hooks, but this turns out to be a ploy to draw out the real culprit. The true explanation for the killing is dependent on a key character having been a legless circus performer. It could only happen in a Golden Age detective novel (or so one hopes). The use of two dazzling yet very different solutions to the puzzle is worthy of Berkeley, but Carr’s method is that of the conjuror, and the story is founded on ingenuity of method rather than the psychology of the characters. But Carr allows the guilty to escape justice in a way that Berkeley surely approved.

  Carr’s novels focused on ingenious techniques for committing murder, rather than on the psychology of crime. Yet he understood that the appeal of murder is often linked to the mysteriousness of human behaviour, and was fascinated by real life murder – over the course of his career, his books referred to more than seventy different criminals. Above all, he loved playing the detective, and coming up with solutions to mysteries that had left the police baffled. At Christmas, he delighted in recou
nting the facts of a famous case and inviting family and friends to come up with their own solutions. The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey was his full-length account of a notable seventeenth-century crime presented in the form of a detective story, while in 1937 he was one of several writers (John Rhode was another) invited by The Star to contribute an article solving a notorious case to accompany a competition inviting readers to test their skills as armchair sleuths. Carr chose the murder of Caesar Young.

  On 4 June 1904, the morning bustle of West Broadway in New York was disrupted by the sound of a gunshot. Startled passers-by thought someone had fired from inside a hansom cab. The cab pulled up at a nearby pharmacy, and everyone rushed over to see what had happened. They found inside a dying man and a pretty young woman. The driver headed straight for the Hudson Street Hospital, but Francis Thomas Young was found dead on arrival. Young, nicknamed ‘Caesar’, was a well-known ‘turfman’, a bookmaker and gambler with an uncanny knack for picking winners at the races. He had been married for ten years when he began an affair with Nan Randolph Patterson, a showgirl and member of the ‘Florodora Girls’.

  Young’s enthusiasm waned when Nan pressed him to divorce his wife and feigned a pregnancy by way of encouragement. He offered to pay for her to go away to Europe, but when she refused, he booked a passage for his wife and himself. Young spent the evening before the ship was due to sail in Nan’s company, but they started quarrelling. During a row at a restaurant, he shouted that he never wanted to see her again, but Nan told him he could not escape. Young spent the rest of the night with his wife Margaret, but crept out at seven in the morning, saying he wanted to buy a hat. Instead, he met Nan for a breakfast of whisky and brandy, before they set off in the hansom cab together.

  ‘Caesar, Caesar, why did you do this?’ Nan sobbed after arriving at the hospital. She claimed he had shot himself because he could not bear the thought of parting from her. He had begged her to forgive him for his cruelty, and resorted to suicide when she refused. The police were not convinced, and she was tried for murder. Her veteran lawyer, Abraham Levy, exploited her charming appearance with no great subtlety, playing on the sympathies of the all-male jury.

  ‘Do you believe that this pleasure-loving girl could conceive the plot that would permit her at one second to kill and in the next to cover this act by a subtle invention?’ he demanded. The courtroom drama proved too much for one juryman, who suffered a heart attack, and a mistrial was declared. Two further trials were deadlocked thanks to hung (or infatuated) juries. In the end, the judge ordered that all charges should be dropped, and Nan was cheered from the courtroom by admirers.

  On her release from prison, Nan wrote a helpful article warning young girls about the perils of the stage, and, for good measure, ‘idleness, fast-living, restaurant life, drink’. Unable to take her own advice, she soon appeared in a stage musical with modest success, before remarrying a man she had divorced as a teenager. After divorcing him for a second time, she slipped out of sight, though Alexander Woollcott reported an improbable rumour that she was ‘living in Seattle a life given over to good deeds and horticulture’.

  Carr’s explanation for the mystery of the hansom cab was that Young drew out a gun and pretended to commit suicide. In a panic, Nan seized hold of the weapon and discharged it by accident. His scenario was typically inventive, if also typically far-fetched. He, like Berkeley, was susceptible to a pretty face.

  Gideon Fell says in The Crooked Hinge that, of the questions ‘who, how and why?’ the most revealing, but usually by far the most puzzling, is why. ‘Why did Mrs Thompson write those letters to Bywaters? Why did Mrs Maybrick soak the fly-papers in water? … Why did Julia Wallace have an enemy in the world?’

  Carr owed his interest in the fate of Julia Wallace to Sayers. She was amazed when he admitted ignorance of the 1931 Liverpool case, and gave him a copy of a full account of it. He duly came up with his own theories, which focused on a single clue, that Julia’s body was found in a room usually reserved for practising and playing music. This led him to suspect first a violin master, and then her piano teacher, although he failed to come up with a credible motive. In return for Sayers’ gift, he sent her a book about the mystery of whether Lizzie Borden took an axe to her father and stepmother. To Sayers’ delight, the book arrived in time to give her ‘a happily blood-stained Christmas Day’.

  Domestic murder in fact and fiction still preoccupied the Detection Club members, and their readers. But politically motivated crimes in Europe, as well as the behaviour of agitators at home, was already making a mark on the genre.

  Notes to Chapter 24

  A chance encounter in the men’s barbershop during an Atlantic crossing changed John Dickson Carr’s life

  My account of Carr’s life and work draws extensively on information supplied by Douglas Greene and on his biography of Carr.

  a classic ‘impossible crime’ mystery

  In discussing ‘impossible crimes’, I have benefited from the expertise and writings of both Douglas Greene and Bob Adey.

  Part Five

  Justifying Murder

  25

  Knives Engraved with ‘Blood and Honour’

  Agatha Christie met her first Nazi in the unlikely setting of a tea party in Baghdad. After finishing work on Lord Edgware Dies, she had been helping Max on a dig at a tell (the Arabic word used for a mound covering an ancient ruin) called Arpichiyah, near Mosul. Max directed the work on behalf of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, and conditions were physically demanding, while the worsening political climate in the region added to the challenge. The excavations were a triumph for Max, yielding a large amount of the distinctive pottery of the Halaf period, and confirming Arpachiyah as one of the most important prehistoric sites in the region. The heat was cruel and unrelenting, and Christie was now a heavily-built woman, but she laboured for hour after hour, measuring the pieces of smashed vessels, and making calculations to guide the process of reassembling the scarlet, orange and black fragments. It was a form of detective work that she came to love. At the end of the season, the party returned to Baghdad. Max supervised the packing and shipping of his finds, a complex task which brought him into contact with the German Director of Antiquities, Dr Julius Jordan.

  Cultured and charming, Jordan invited Max and Christie to his house for tea. He offered to play on his piano for them, and as she listened to Beethoven in Jordan’s sitting room, Christie admired her host. He was a fine figure of a man, gentle and considerate. But in the course of conversation, someone mentioned Jews, and Christie saw a change come over his face, a change so remarkable that she’d never seen anything like it before.

  ‘You do not understand,’ he said. ‘Our Jews are perhaps different from yours. They are a danger. They should be exterminated. Nothing else will really do but that.’

  Christie was stunned. Soon she discovered that Jordan’s wife was an even more ferocious Jew-hater than her husband. Jordan was a trusted representative of the Nazi government, and had been sent to spy on the German Ambassador in Baghdad. Even so, it took time for the reality of Nazism and Fascism to sink in fully with Christie, and millions like her who could scarcely believe that atrocities were happening across the North Sea. Depressing prejudices about Jewish people, and their supposed fondness for money and political influence, died hard. Even so, hints of anti-Semitism in Christie’s books, and other novels of the period, became less frequent. A few years later, a character in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe was mocked as a member of the ‘Imperial Shirts’ who march with banners and have a ‘ridiculous salute’.

  Civilization was under threat, but few people had any idea how best to protect it. Sayers was one of many who at first saw Nazism as a form of unpleasant nationalism rather than anything more sinister. She instructed her literary agent that even if her German publishers insisted on cutting out ‘one or two slightly acid references to Mr Hitler’s policy, they must not alter these references into any expression of agreement with it’. Some o
f her Detection Club colleagues were more scathing, but Margaret Cole frankly admitted that even those who were dismayed when Hitler came to power failed to understand what it would really mean. Berkeley and H. C. Bailey were never in much doubt about the odious nature of Hitler and his regime, but it was the left-leaning E. R. Punshon who appears to have been first to heap scorn on Nazism in a detective story.

  This comes towards the end of a novel which up to that point, like its title, Crossword Mystery, had reflected familiar Golden Age values. In a wildly improbable police stratagem, Punshon’s detective Bobby Owen is sent to stay at the East Anglian home of a retired businessman, George Winterton, who believes that his brother Archibald’s death by drowning was no accident but is unable to provide worthwhile evidence to substantiate his claim. Winterton is equally fanatical about crosswords and the gold standard: ‘Getting back to gold is the only thing that can save civilisation.’ When he devises a crossword with ‘gold’ as the keyword, even an ingenuous reader may guess that it contains a cipher revealing the location of a hidden cache of gold. Unfortunately, long before Bobby pinpoints the only viable suspect, Winterton has been murdered, and so has his dog. Sharper than his plotting is Punshon’s satire, with the decision to give the name of Dreg to an unappealing solicitor an inspired touch.

  A striking climax makes up for the tedium of the crossword aspect of the mystery. A German analytical chemist with Jewish blood paints a graphic picture of life in his homeland as he describes how he tried to curry favour with the Hitler regime: ‘When I saw a number of high-spirited young Storm Troopers kicking an aged Jew into a canal, and then pulling him out to kick him again, I gave the Nazi salute as I passed. Also, when the son of a friend of mine was baptized, I had sent, as a christening gift for the baby, one of the new youth dagger-knives with “Blood and Honour” engraved on the blade … That weighed very much in my favour, and finally I was released on promising to hand over my business … to a real Nazi, who had distinguished himself greatly by his zeal against Jews, but who afterwards had the misfortune to blow up himself and my laboratory … chemicals caring, apparently, very little whether you are Jew or Nordic, if you do not mix them in the right proportions.’