The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  Punshon was quicker than most to realise what was happening under Hitler. To add to his social insights and occasional shafts of wit, he had a flair for the macabre. The last scene of the book, where the culprit commits suicide in a shocking yet peculiarly appropriate way, so as to ‘fall writhing and choked, a dreadful, disfigured thing no longer human’, stuns the onlooking detectives, ‘so held in stillness were they by the horror and the greatness of the deed’. This is one of the Golden Age fiction’s darkest finales, and an astonishing end to an uneven but unjustly neglected book.

  For most of the Thirties, British people were more concerned with the antics of Fascists in their own back yard than with Hitler’s manoeuvres on the Continent. One of the more embarrassing occasions in the Coles’ campaign to rebuild the divided Left saw them entertain Oswald Mosley and his wife Cimmie to dinner. A baronet from a family of wealthy landowners, Mosley was a gifted public speaker whose talents were eventually overwhelmed by aggression and arrogance. He had become a Conservative MP and married Lady Cynthia Curzon, daughter of the then Foreign Secretary and one of the wealthiest women in the country. Disenchanted with the Tories, Mosley became an Independent before joining first the Labour Party and then the Independent Labour Party. The Coles’ other dinner guests included Mosley’s ally John Strachey, who coined the phrase ‘the Golden Age of detective fiction’, and the Marxist academic Harold Laski and his wife.

  Mosley wanted high tariffs to deter foreign imports, nationalization of public bodies, and an ambitious programme of public works to cut unemployment. The Coles sympathized with many of these ideas and were tempted to join forces with him. But the joint project was stillborn because shortly after the dinner he flounced out of the Independent Labour Party and set up the New Party. As Labour loyalists, the Coles felt they had no choice but to cut off the talks. This turned out to be a stroke of luck that saved their reputations. It would have been ruinous to become associated with a demagogue who soon adopted aggressive anti-Semitism as a strategy for winning popular support.

  The New Party won backing from the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Mail, but was trounced in the election of 1931. Mosley responded by studying the methods of Mussolini and deciding that Britain would benefit from a dose of Fascism. He founded the British Union of Fascists, copying the black uniforms worn by Mussolini’s supporters. Before long, the BUF claimed fifty thousand members, but the Fascists’ brutality provoked a hostile response from the police and political opponents. They were also treated with contempt in novels written by members of the Detection Club.

  Some writers fought against Fascism with the weapon of wit. Ronald Knox guyed Mussolini in ‘The Fallen Idol’, a story about the murder of Enrique Gamba, ‘the Inspirer of the Magnolian Commonwealth’, who had liberated his country on April Fool’s Day, ‘abolished the national debt, and exchanged a flood of telegrams with the League of Nations’.

  The year before war broke out, Punshon’s Dictator’s Way mocked the dictator of Etruria, ‘“the Redeemer of his country”, in his characteristic country-redeeming attitude so strongly reminiscent of Ajax defying the lightning’. The book was yet another Detection Club product addressing the idea of the altruistic murder. A thrillerish narrative is interspersed with pot shots against Hitler and Stalin (‘who have done so much to bring back prosperity to our world by inducing us to spend all our money on battleships, bombs, tanks, and other pleasing and instructive toys of modern civilisation’), as well as Mussolini, Oswald Mosley and the City financiers who gave them financial backing (‘Money has no smell and money knows no loyalty either’). Mosley had ‘always been a rich man and has a rich man’s ideas all through’ Punshon’s contempt for brutal dictators and their apologists extended to the Foreign Office: ‘They wipe their perspiring brows and say: “… Thank God for Hitler, he may want our colonies but at least he’s fighting Bolshevism.” I don’t know if they thank God for Oswald Mosley too. Perhaps nobody could go quite that far.’

  A post-war Detection Club Secretary, Richard Hull, subtly poked fun at Mosley in Murder of My Aunt. Edward Powell, whose parents have died in a mysterious accident, lives with his scary Aunt Mildred on the outskirts of Llwll in a remote part of Wales. Edward spends his time reading smutty French novels, patronizing the locals and concocting ways to kill Mildred and escape from Llwll. He admires ‘the virile Mosley’, while his aunt is a fan of Stanley Baldwin. Edward’s political judgment proves to be on a par with his skills as a murderer.

  R. C. Woodthorpe wrote two novels excoriating Fascists in the year the Daily Mail printed an article by Rothermere headed, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. Having given up teaching for journalism, he joined the Mail’s left-wing rival, the Daily Herald, writing book reviews and music and drama criticism, while gathering background for his second mystery. A Dagger in Fleet Street blended social comedy with an authentic picture of working lives at a time when no job was safe. A newspaper editor, ‘a petty Mussolini’, has his throat cut, while another character owns an unpleasant dog called Hitler. A likeable secretary, who says, ‘Thank God for the National Union of Journalists’ and reveals herself to a newspaper colleague as a closet Communist, confides: ‘You’d be staggered if you knew how many people in this jolly old stronghold of capitalism are communists.’ Woodthorpe’s next book confirmed that his approach to crime fiction was the polar opposite of Christie’s. His interest lay in people and politics rather than puzzle and plot.

  Silence of a Purple Shirt, acclaimed by Sayers as ‘the most brilliant and humorous detective story of its season’, satirized Mosley’s followers in the shape of the ‘Make Britain Free’ movement, populated by the purple-shirted army led by the repellent Duke Benedict. One of Benedict’s right-hand men, Henry Truscott, is bludgeoned to death, and the murder weapon is linked to a fellow Purple Shirt, Alan Ford. In a furious tirade, the novelist and amateur sleuth Nicholas Slade tells Ford, ‘In spite of the best efforts of you and your fellow harlequins, this is not yet Russia or Germany or Fascist Italy. Let us have no more of this nonsense.’ Whilst Slade is ‘not overmuch in love with the established order of things. Indeed, he had satirised it in many of his books’, he hates the prospect of a regimented life under the Purple Shirts. Slade dismisses a suggestion that Britain is ‘a law-abiding country’, saying, ‘I cannot remember a time, except, perhaps, during the war, when laws were not deliberately flouted.’ He refers to the Nonconformists, the Suffragettes, and ‘the army officers who mutinied in preference to coercing Ulster’. Truscott’s murderer is allowed not only to remain unpunished, but to bask in public eminence and admiration, and Woodthorpe was fast-tracked into membership of the Detection Club.

  Helen Simpson’s Vantage Striker was a flawed novel, but intriguing and ahead of its time in that, as early as 1931, she portrayed a popular politician as a closet Fascist, and allowed him to be dealt with ruthlessly by extra-legal means. As the dangers posed by Hitler and Mussolini became clearer, colleagues in the Detection Club took up this theme, blending their entertainments time and again with a serious question seldom mentioned in most discussion of the Golden Age. Could there be such a thing as a justified murder?

  Frightening political developments throughout Europe gave this debate increasing resonance. Through his role in the International Labour Organisation, Milward Kennedy stayed closer to corridors of power in the world’s major capitals than anyone else in the Detection Club, even Lord Gorell. Kennedy was acutely aware of the threat to peace posed by Hitler and Mussolini, but no clearer than anyone else about how to deal with it. Wrestling with this dilemma prompted him to write an experimental novel, Sic Transit Gloria. James Southern discovers the body of glamorous Gloria Day in his London flat. Has she committed suicide or been murdered? Southern reflects on the morality of murder for political purposes. Can the assassination of a demagogue ever be justified? He ends up playing ‘the part of justice … A jury could only have secured injustice. What did the law matter – if the law could not have secured justice? People
talked of judicial murder: was not judicial failure to secure the just punishment of a murderer just as bad?’

  This question of when murder can be justified is tackled so often – and so inventively – in books by Detection Club members that it was surely debated over drinks in Gerrard Street. Christie was so fascinated by the notion that it inspired three of her finest plots. She dropped a hint about one especially brilliant idea for committing the perfect murder in Peril at End House, and toyed with it for years before turning it into the book which brought Poirot’s career to an astonishing end. Curtain: Poirot’s Final Case was completed in the early stages of the Second World War, but not published until 1975.

  Berkeley became obsessed by the idea of justified murder. He had already addressed the way ‘civilized’ people can cease to be bound by the norms of human behaviour in Panic Party, which is prefaced by a tongue-in-cheek riposte to the challenge Kennedy set him in Death to the Rescue: ‘You once challenged me, in public print, to write a book in which the only interest should be the detection. I have no hesitation in refusing to do anything so tedious, and instead take the greatest pleasure in dedicating to you a book which is precisely the opposite, which breaks every rule of the austere Club to which we both belong, and which will probably earn my expulsion from its membership.’

  Berkeley’s claim was as perverse as ever. The novel does not break all the Club’s rules, and detection plays a part, although it fails to solve the mystery in traditional fashion. Sheringham joins a yachting party organized by Guy Pidgeon, an Oxford don who has come into the money. The group finds itself marooned on a desert island, and Pidgeon announces that their party includes a murderer. He admits to borrowing the idea from J. M. Barrie’s play Shall We Join the Ladies? and to inventing the story about the killer. This folly has a predictable outcome – Pidgeon is found dead in the sea, having apparently been pushed off a cliff.

  Berkeley addressed the problem left unanswered by Barrie. As Sheringham put it: ‘What … would a company of perfectly normal, presumably civilised persons do on learning that their numbers included an undetected murderer?’ The set-up, with an assorted cast of characters and a murderer trapped on an island, anticipates the scenario of Christie’s And Then There Were None. But Berkeley went further, tackling issues of human behaviour under pressure that were later portrayed with power and intensity by William Golding in Lord of the Flies.

  The whodunit becomes a thriller as the veneer of civilization wears thin. Members of Pidgeon’s party succumb to mass hysteria when they identify the person they think is the killer and set about lynching him. Roger Sheringham, no longer a caricature, morphs into a hero. He tries to save the victim, but is knocked unconscious for his pains. Only the arrival of a rescue ship saves an innocent man from a savage death.

  Sheringham – making his final appearance in a novel less than a decade after his debut – continues to act as Berkeley’s mouthpiece: ‘A man is exceedingly foolish when a beautiful woman is concerned.’ The woman in question, who is utterly self-centred, relishes the imminent killing of a fellow human being in way that chills Sheringham even more than ‘the naked bloodlust’ of her companions. She insists on the lynching because ‘it is the law’.

  In his portrayal of her, Berkeley again seems to be taking revenge for a disastrous entanglement of his own – but with whom? Even though he had succeeded in luring Helen Peters away from her husband, he was still unpredictable and often unhappy. The sourness that marred so many of his personal relationships had spread to his fiction. Sayers found Panic Party exciting and clever, but complained about ‘the author’s sneering hatred of his own puppets … There is a point at which ruthless realism becomes not merely too unpleasant for popularity, but a little too bad for belief’. Yet there was more to his novel than that. Panic Party is forgotten, while Lord of the Flies is a modern classic, but Berkeley’s dark vision of the way supposedly civilised people behave when normal constraints break down was perceptive. His pessimism was borne out in Hitler’s Germany.

  Hitler and Mussolini and their regimes seemed untouchable, and their quest for domination impossible to resist. With each passing year, the turmoil in continental Europe became more dangerous. Britain, meanwhile, was gripped by a constitutional crisis that had strange and unexpected consequences for Berkeley and Sayers.

  Notes to Chapter 25

  a tongue-in-cheek riposte to the challenge Kennedy set him

  Berkeley may also have been irritated by the claim of Kennedy’s American publishers, on the cover of Corpse in Cold Storage, that Kennedy was ‘President of the Detection Society of England’, and therefore all the more determined to put him in his place.

  26

  Touching with a Fingertip the Fringe of Great Events

  King Edward VIII’s succession to the throne, following the death of King George V, led to an extraordinary sequence of events that changed Britain, as well as the British monarchy. Much less well known is that the Abdication provoked further crises, each of a strange and personal nature, for both Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy L. Sayers. As if unwittingly disrupting the careers of two popular novelists were not enough, Edward’s lavish and self-indulgent lifestyle saw him become embroiled in a couple of sensational real-life murder cases.

  As Prince of Wales, Edward was the most photographed celebrity of his time. He was handsome, gregarious and oozing charm, but also vain, petulant and reckless. He moved from one unsuitable mistress to another, with sultry and sloe-eyed French courtesan Marguerite Alibert an especially risky choice. Like so many unwise people who live to regret their indiscretions in detective stories, Edward wrote her a series of compromising letter. Marguerite recognized their value and kept hold of them, even after marrying a young and wealthy Egyptian ‘prince’ called Ali Fahmy.

  It was scarcely a match made in Heaven: Marguerite was volatile and Fahmy sadistic. In July 1923, while staying in a suite at the Savoy Hotel in London, they had a violent quarrel and Marguerite told the band leader that her husband had threatened to kill her. In the small hours, a porter heard three shots fired from inside the suite. Fahmy’s body was found sprawled across the floor. Marguerite had shot him at point-blank range. Earlier that evening, they had visited the theatre, to watch The Merry Widow.

  When she was tried for murder, Sir Edward Marshall Hall secured an improbable acquittal. He argued that Marguerite acted in self-defence when Fahmy, a sexually deviant Oriental intent on degrading a beautiful Western woman, attempted to strangle her. A recent theory suggests that the Establishment contrived her escape from justice because of the fear that the Prince of Wales’ incautious correspondence would be made public. The main evidence is a letter from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, saying the authorities ‘were terribly afraid that [Edward] might be dragged in. It is fortunate that he is off to Canada and his name is to be kept out.’

  The near-disaster of the Fahmy case did not deter Edward from his pursuit of dangerous liaisons, often with married women. These culminated in a passionate relationship with Mrs Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee whose second husband was a wealthy shipping executive. The affair continued after Edward became king, and although the British Press kept quiet about the brewing scandal so that the public in Britain remained in ignorance, newspapers in the United States and elsewhere showed less restraint.

  The lovers sailed off on a luxury yacht, the Nahlin, for a cruise around the Adriatic that became the stuff of legend. Edward, who made little secret of his regard for Hitler, was persuaded by the Foreign Secretary not to stop off in Mussolini’s Italy, but he and Wallis soon found other ways of amusing themselves. They introduced nudism to the island of Rab off Dubrovnik, and drove three thousand golf balls into the sea while practising their golf swings on deck. In Budapest, Wallis did a gypsy dance in public, while Edward tended bar in the Ritz before shooting out a row of street lights along the embankment in a drunken demonstration of his skills as a marksman. Back on board, they may not have found time to read detective
novels, but Edward did try his hand at solving erotic jigsaw puzzles.

  On returning to England, Edward segued smoothly from hedonistic playboy to man of the people. He toured the mining areas of South Wales and professed sympathy with people suffering extreme poverty. His visit produced a sound bite, long before there were sound bites: the King’s message was that ‘something must be done’. This spasm of social conscience might have been sincere, and it did no harm to his popularity. The Daily Mail contrasted his energy with the lassitude of the National Government led by Lord Rothermere’s old enemy Stanley Baldwin.

  Edward had probably made up his mind by this point to marry Wallis and give up the throne, leaving it to others to work out how to alleviate hardship in South Wales. After a flurry of alarm and excitement about a ‘constitutional crisis’, he abdicated on 11 December and was succeeded by his younger brother, who became George VI. Baldwin’s patience with Edward’s self-indulgence had run out, but he defused the crisis with tact and dexterity. Once George had been crowned, he retired as Prime Minister, handing over to Neville Chamberlain.

  In the country at large, there was widespread sympathy for the man seen as sacrificing his royal destiny for the woman he loved. The new Duke of Windsor left Britain with Wallis, and displayed his flair for doing the wrong thing by paying a visit to Adolf Hitler’s country retreat, where he gave a full Nazi salute. Later, the government installed him as the Governor of the Bahamas to keep him out of harm’s way.