The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  The plan failed spectacularly, as the Duke found himself embroiled in another murder mystery. His friend Sir Harry Oakes, a wealthy tax exile, was found battered to death in his mansion. Oakes’ corpse had been burned and strewn with feathers from his pillow. His son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny, was charged with his murder, but although a rope was ordered for his hanging, he was acquitted. Not least because of the royal connection, conspiracy theories abounded. The killer was never brought to justice.

  Sayers’ immediate fear about the Abdication was that people would be too absorbed with the crisis to bother with the stage production of Busman’s Honeymoon. Luckily, Edward stepped down while the play was in Leeds, before its all-important West End premiere. In gossipy correspondence, she reported stories that Wallis was hand in glove with the Nazi regime, and that Helen Simpson (‘no relation’, Sayers joked) told her that Edward was disliked at the Sandringham estate both for treating his staff badly and ‘for running about the place with Mrs Simpson in an undignified manner in shorts!’ Sayers had no time for rich and arrogant womanizers, and in her view Edward’s younger brother was a much more suitable monarch. Before long, however, she realized that the Abdication had direct implications for the book she was writing.

  Berkeley’s reaction was very different. Contrary as ever, he launched a doomed campaign to save Edward from himself. He spent heavily on legal advice and hiring detectives to try to find ‘bedroom evidence’ that Edward and Wallis Simpson had committed adultery. Even after the Abdication, the earliest that Wallis’s divorce could be made absolute was May 1937. Berkeley hoped to compromise the divorce proceedings, and prevent Edward from marrying her. He did not have a hypocritical objection to the couple’s affair, but like a large proportion of the British public he believed Edward was the right man to lead the country.

  He informed the King’s Proctor that witnesses from a hotel in Budapest which the couple had visited during the Nahlin cruise would be willing to testify, provided their travel expenses were refunded. This proposal was rejected; it would have been improper to pay the witnesses. In any event, it was time to move on. Berkeley had to admit defeat, and it was just as well. Edward’s flakiness would have destroyed the British monarchy and helped smooth Hitler’s path to supremacy in Europe. For all his shyness and stammer, George was made of stronger stuff than his feckless brother.

  Berkeley had wasted his time and his money, but his detailed private diary telling the story of his effort is held in the Royal Archives at Windsor. He called it Commoner and King, and described it as the ‘journal of an obscure and unimportant Englishman who nevertheless touched with a fingertip the fringe of great events’. At least one American literary agent handled the manuscript, but found it hopelessly unpublishable.

  Berkeley’s obsessive campaign over the Abdication was the most striking symptom of an increasingly troubled mind. His eccentricities were no longer amusing, and his love of contradiction was turning into irrational dogmatism. Years of overwork had caught up with him, and the flow of stories had slowed to a trickle. The death of his father, to whom he dedicated his first detective novel, came as a dreadful blow. His health was fragile, his temper uncertain, his emotions and mental state confused. The cost to him, and to those around him, was becoming hard to bear. At last he married Helen Peters, but a secret passion still tormented him. Then he suffered the humiliation of seeing his name appear in the Press for the stupidest of reasons.

  The story began with one of those tiresome regulations which he derided in O England! A keen motorist, he was fined thirty shillings for ignoring a traffic sign. His defence was that it would have been more dangerous to stop than to slow down. ‘I would rather go to prison than compromise my conscience by paying a fine,’ he announced, despite pleading guilty. ‘It is your duty to fine me, but I flatly refuse to pay.’ He made what The Times wearily noted was ‘a long statement to the Bench’, but the magistrate wasted no sympathy on him, saying, ‘If everybody took your attitude, life would be chaos.’ Berkeley was forced to give in, but he was not quite finished. Having dodged a prison sentence, he assuaged his feelings by writing a short story based on the incident, with the appropriately childish title ‘It Isn’t Fair’. A motorist unjustly convicted of a traffic offence kills a Chief Constable sitting in an improperly parked car. Even though the exercise may have offered some form of catharsis, his story never made it into print.

  Clues to the way he harped on at Detection Club dinners about the supposed injustice lie in E. R. Punshon’s caustic remarks in Dictator’s Way about ‘indignant motorists convinced that laws were only for the other fellow’, and in Diabolic Candelabra about the way ‘some motorists never forgave … what they held to be the uncalled-for insult to their driving ability’. These are surely in-jokes intended for fellow Club members weary of Berkeley’s obsessive pontificating. He was in danger of becoming the Club bore, the traffic sign episode one more symptom of his self-destructive unhappiness.

  Sayers was in much better spirits, although she did not know how to surpass Gaudy Night. She turned Busman’s Honeymoon into a novel, and described it (worryingly, to whodunit fans) as a ‘love story with detective interruptions’. Peter and Harriet set off for a honeymoon in the countryside only to stumble upon a man’s body. The challenges of the detective novel were losing their excitement for her, and both plot and solution were sub-standard. P. G. Wodehouse, usually a Sayers fan, found it a let-down, while as Raymond Chandler said, a murderer needing so much help from Providence was surely in the wrong business.

  Sayers’ next idea for an original detective novel showed continuing ambition. The theme concerned the nature of married life. Perhaps the shortcomings of her own marriage tempted her to contemplate what might have been, through the idealized world of Peter and Harriet. She would integrate theme and plot by means of a contrast between the Wimseys’ marriage and the marriages of two other couples. She wrote several scenes during the course of 1936, and went so far as to map out on paper how the characters would interact. In July, pleased that the emotional development of Peter’s relationship with Harriet would lead to the solution of the murder mystery, she sent this detailed (and colour-coded) diagram to Helen Simpson. Significantly, she added that it now hardly seemed worth the bother of writing the story, though Paradise Lost had provided her with a title, Thrones, Dominations.

  She never did finish the novel, although a version completed by Jill Paton Walsh saw the light of day more than sixty years later. A mix of reasons explained her failure to complete Thrones, Dominations, including her increased focus on writing for the stage. But the key factor was Edward VIII’s decision to give up his throne for Wallis Simpson. The drama of the Abdication, with its sub-plots of supposed self-sacrifice and complicated divorce, was bound to affect the way in which readers viewed the story and its analysis of the dynamics of marriage. Real life had overtaken the fiction, and this sapped Sayers’ enthusiasm. She put the book aside, as she had put her biography of Wilkie Collins away, and never returned to it. Nor did she ever write another detective novel.

  King Edward VIII had a lot to answer for.

  Notes to Chapter 26

  sultry and sloe-eyed French courtesan Marguerite Alibert

  Andrew Rose’s research about the Fahmy case is the principal source for this account.

  a version completed by Jill Paton Walsh saw the light of day more than sixty years later

  The novelist Jill Paton Walsh (born 1937) had previously written four detective novels as well as children’s stories and literary fiction. The success of Thrones, Dominations has led to her writing three more books featuring Wimsey.

  27

  Collecting Murderers

  In the spring of 1936, Christie rejoined Max and his team at the dig at Chagar Bazar, not far from Mosul. One day, the local foreman told Max that he should take his wife into town the next day to witness a great event. A woman was to be hanged. Christie made it clear that she found the prospect repellent. Her reaction baffled
the elderly Arab. The woman to be hanged had poisoned three husbands. To attend the execution of a female was a rare opportunity. Surely the famous crime writer would not want to miss such a drama?

  All Christie wanted was to help her husband in his work. And the team’s efforts were ultimately rewarded by the discovery of seventy cuneiform tablets which established a link between Chagar Bazar and the royal house of Assyria. Meanwhile, Christie gathered material which provided unusual background colour for books such as Murder in Mesopotamia and Appointment with Death, and after each trip she came back to England fresh and invigorated. While Berkeley and Sayers struggled to maintain their love of the game, she remained committed to entertaining an ever-expanding readership. In 1936, when neither Sayers nor Berkeley managed to bring out a single novel, Christie published three, including one all-time classic.

  The ABC Murders became a landmark in detective fiction, and its central plot device has been imitated by countless other crime writers. Christie brought Captain Hastings back to London from his ranch in South America to narrate, and with customary understatement he says, ‘It had been a difficult time for us out there. Like everyone else, we had suffered from world depression.’ Hercule Poirot receives a series of anonymous letters signed ‘ABC’ which draw his attention in turn to Andover, Bexhill-on-Sea, Churston and Doncaster. In each place, a murder is duly committed, the victim’s initials are the same as the crime scene’s, and a copy of the ABC Railway Guide is left by the killer. Apart from the alphabetical links between the crimes, there is no apparent connection between the victims. A sequence of short chapters interspersed with Hastings’ account of the case suggests that the culprit is a mentally unstable travelling salesman, and a serial killing story is brilliantly combined with a fairly clued whodunit.

  The explanation is clever yet essentially simple, the hallmark of the best detective novels. Yet Christie produced her masterpiece through much trial and error. She flirted with the possibility of turning the story into another of her ‘victim as killer’ stories and only came up with the idea of the alphabetical sequence later. The creation of Alexander Bonaparte Cust may well have been inspired by the memorable initials of Anthony Berkeley Cox.

  The story was serialized in the Daily Express, alongside a column of ‘Readers’ Guesses’ about the solution, and one disgruntled train enthusiast complained that Poirot had not checked the Guide carefully enough. Freeman Wills Crofts would have taken pains over such minutiae, but he could never have written such a dazzling mystery. In the third chapter, Poirot suggests an idea for a murder puzzle: ‘Four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. One of the four, while he is dummy, has come over and killed him, and intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you!’

  This became the premise of Cards on the Table. Mr Shaitana, the exotic foreigner who indulges in the risky hobby of ‘collecting’ murderers, and inevitably becomes a murder victim, is presented with a subtlety as characteristic as it is unobtrusive. Christie makes fun of the conventional English who sneer at Shaitana just as they condescend to Hercule Poirot. Mrs Ariadne Oliver, the detective novelist who aids and abets Poirot, is a satirical self-portrait; she bemoans the fact that she made her detective Finnish when she does not ‘really know anything about Finns’. The contrast between Christie’s light-hearted self-deprecation in her creation of Mrs Oliver, and Sayers’ serious approach to characterizing Harriet Vane illustrates the difference between them not only as writers, but also as women. Yet they shared some opinions, including their views on the British government’s limp response to the deepening crisis in Europe.

  Christie became fascinated by the story of Akhnaton (often now spelt Akhenaten), an Egyptian pharaoh who was husband of Nefertiti and father of the boy king Tutankhamun. He has been described as ‘the first scientist’, ‘the first monotheist’ and even, in a bold claim, as ‘the first individual’. He owes this celebrity status to his abandonment of Ancient Egypt’s polytheism and his insistence that only the Sun God should be worshipped. His fatal flaw was a wish to appease aggressors. Christie found his story astonishingly topical, and decided to adapt it into a play.

  Christie’s Akhnaton is peace-loving and convinced of the goodness of men, but he lacks strength of character. He neglects the defence of his country, alarming his follower Horemheb, who still worships the sect of Amon, most powerful of the old gods. The people are angered by their ruler’s attacks on the old religion, and the way his tax-gatherers relieve them of their money, but Akhnaton resists Horemheb’s attempts to deal with insurrection, and continues to dream of a world with fewer sacrifices and with ‘foreign countries given back to rule themselves’. This weakness leads to turmoil. Horemheb becomes convinced that the Pharaoh is mad, and causes his death. Afterwards, the old ways are restored.

  Akhnaton was a thinly disguised attack on the belief that Hitler could be appeased. Christie was writing at a time when most people still hoped that a war could be averted, and her message was unlikely to be popular. Given that she had no talent for didactic writing, and no experience in writing historical drama, it is hardly surprising that nobody wanted to stage her play. The fact that it required eleven scene changes and more than twenty speaking parts did not help.

  She showed the script to John Gielgud, who made polite noises, but the play remained unpublished until shortly before her death and has seldom been performed. But she was not finished with writing about Egypt, ancient and modern. Death on the Nile, set mainly on board a river steamer, the SS Karnak, became one of her most successful titles and was later adapted for the stage. Seven years after the stillbirth of Akhnaton, she published Death Comes as the End, a murder mystery which broke fresh ground by being set in Ancient Egypt, and anticipated a landslide of historical crime fiction that continues to this day.

  Readers and theatre audiences thirsted for Christie whodunits, but not for a preachy play about ancient history. Yet she was far-sighted in her criticism of appeasement, and unlike some vociferous critics of the ‘guilty men’ responsible for fruitless attempts to appease Hitler she was not being wise after the event.

  The Prime Minister was less astute, and also much less well travelled. Neville Chamberlain had never flown in an aeroplane before he set off for Germany at the age of sixty-nine, to meet Adolf Hitler at Munich and sign up to an Anglo-German agreement, a piece of paper that he waved in triumph on his return to England. Chamberlain’s claim that Hitler was agreeable to ‘peace for our time’ was foolish, but his optimism was widely shared. Among many others, Virginia Woolf gasped with relief: ‘What a shave!’ President Roosevelt sent the Prime Minister a two-word telegram: ‘Good man.’

  Sayers shared Christie’s robust attitude towards appeasement, and believed that pacifism encouraged dictators. In her customary forthright manner, she said that the Germans had succumbed to ‘persecution-mania’ because they had been treated unfairly in the aftermath of war, but the only way to deal fwith people who behaved badly and would not see reason was ‘to hit them extremely hard on the head and stop them’.

  Around the time that Christie started work on Akhnaton, Frank Vosper’s Love from a Stranger began a successful run in the West End. The first night performance was so tense that reports claimed members of the audience fainted with fright. Love from a Stranger remains one of the more successful stage versions by other hands of any Christie story, and was twice filmed. Less than a year after the excitement of the first night at the New Theatre, Vosper died in baffling and controversial circumstances. The mystery boasted a cast of characters worthy of a Golden Age whodunit, including a playwright, an actor, a beauty queen, a French marquis, a gay Jewish bullfighter, and a legendary American man of letters.

  When Love from a Stranger transferred to Broadway, Vosper took the lead role, as he had done in London, but the play closed after a short run. Disappointed, Vosper sailed back from New York on the luxury liner SS Paris, but vanished dur
ing his last night on board before the ship arrived in Plymouth. A naked and badly injured corpse, minus a leg, was found washed up on the beach near Eastbourne sixteen days later. A make-up artist who knew Vosper, and was familiar with the shape of his profile and jaw, had the miserable task of helping to identify him. Medical evidence established that Vosper was alive when he went into the water.

  He spent the night of his disappearance in the company of a former Miss England and a fellow actor called Peter Willes. Muriel Oxford, a ‘blue-eyed, brown-haired beauty queen’, had enjoyed a brief romance with a wealthy New York nightclub owner, and was returning home from a show in which she had been a chorus girl. Vosper and Willes, who were both homosexual, shared a cabin, and Muriel had invited them to come to her state room and drink champagne for what Press reports described as a ‘gay party’. Nobody could explain how Vosper, at some point that evening, could have fallen into the water by accident. According to one report, at the time of his disappearance he had twenty thousand dollars in his possession, and the money was never found. The journalists had a field day.

  The evidence of what happened that night was confused and contradictory. Facts were obscured by gossip and innuendo. Had Vosper caught Muriel with Willes on her divan, and been pushed out of the window to his death during a fight fuelled by jealousy and alcohol? Muriel insisted there was no question of lovemaking – she and Willes had been lounging, rather than lying, on the divan. Muriel denied rushing up on to the deck crying that Vosper had committed suicide.

  Willes said it was not true that he wanted to marry Muriel, or that she had fondled him and stroked his cheek. A night steward who had called into the state room told the inquest that Muriel and Willes were merry, and Vosper’s manner quite normal. In response to a juryman’s question, he had no comment to make on the close friendship between Willes and Vosper. Stewards, he said, took no interest in such things. The jury was plainly dissatisfied with what they were told, but faced with so much discretion and denial, found no evidence of murder and returned an open verdict.