The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  Anticipating the methods of Crimewatch UK by almost half a century, Vosper’s former lawyer, William Pengelly, conducted in his London offices a re-enactment of the scene in Muriel Oxford’s cabin. He was assisted by Muriel, Willes and Vosper’s father. Willes claimed that he and Muriel ‘were talking so earnestly that Frank could have passed through the cabin without our seeing him. I can’t believe that he committed suicide. He wasn’t the type, and he seemed far too keen on his work.’ But re-staging the events of the fatal night cast no new light on what had really happened. If Willes knew more about Vosper’s death than he admitted, he kept the secret for the rest of his days. Meanwhile, Muriel Oxford married a stockbroker and faded from public view.

  The American novelist Ernest Hemingway had a walk-on role in the SS Paris incident. His state room was across the passageway from Muriel’s, and he had been at the party, though Muriel recalled he had left by the time Vosper went missing. According to Hemingway, Vosper had quarrelled violently with ‘one or two people’ about Muriel during the voyage. He was scarcely a neutral witness, though: years later, Hemingway sought to impress a woman friend with his ruggedness by telling her that when Vosper approached him on the deck with a view to having a drink together, he smashed Vosper’s glass, ‘to indicate that I did not wish to drink with a pederast’.

  Alfred Hitchcock never turned the mystery of the SS Paris into a film, but Christie must have been tempted to form a theory about the reason for her collaborator’s death. In her quiet way, she always fancied herself as a real-life detective, just as Sayers did. In 1929 she had written a newspaper article about the Croydon poisonings of Grace Duff’s husband, mother and sister. An unsolved Victorian domestic mystery, the Bravo case, intrigued her as much. At least three people are credible suspects for the murder of the wealthy lawyer Charles Bravo at the Priory, his home in Balham, but in her late seventies Christie wrote to The Sunday Times Magazine arguing that the family physician, Dr Gully, was the killer. Just as Wallace’s psychological profile persuaded Sayers that he had not beaten his wife to death, so Gully’s cool efficiency (coupled with the fact that he had had an affair with Bravo’s wife) persuaded Christie that he was ‘the right type’ to commit murder.

  Her personal connection with Vosper made her wary of public speculation about his death, but two books written more than a decade afterwards suggest she was still haunted by his ghost. In Crooked House, the actress Magda Leonides announces that a murder in the family provides the ideal opportunity to put on ‘the Edith Thompson play’, adding that ‘there’s quite a lot of comedy to be got out of Edith Thompson – I don’t think the author realised that’. This line casts light on Magda’s personality with elegant economy. The reference is to People like Us, revived at around the time Christie was completing her novel, once the Lord Chamberlain decided the theatre-going public no longer needed to be protected from Vosper’s supposedly salacious version of Edith Thompson’s story.

  Christie later created Robin Upward, a flamboyant and implicitly gay playwright who is a major character in Mrs McGinty’s Dead. The plot revolves around crimes of the past, and a thinly veiled version of the Crippen case is at the heart of the mystery. Robin is dramatizing a book written by Christie’s alter ego, Mrs Ariadne Oliver, a process which she describes as ‘pure agony’. The parallel with Frank Vosper is obvious, but the storyline bears no resemblance to events on the Paris – Robin is a suspect, rather than a victim.

  Did Vosper kill himself, and if so, why? Did love from a stranger lead to real-life murder – and if so, who was in love with whom? There were as many possible scenarios as in an Anthony Berkeley novel. If Christie did play the detective, she took care never to reveal her conclusions. The risk of being dragged through the libel courts was too great.

  Notes to Chapter 27

  its central plot device has been much imitated

  It was also anticipated by Chesterton in a Father Brown story, ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’, and to some extent by Berkeley in The Silk Stocking Murders. The ‘Z’ Murders, published four years before Christie’s book, was a serial killer thriller which took its central motif from the opposite end of the alphabet. The author was J. Jefferson Farjeon (1883–1955), a prolific novelist of whom Sayers said: ‘Jefferson Farjeon is quite unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures.’

  Vosper died in baffling and controversial circumstances

  My account of the death of Frank Vosper (1899–1937) and its aftermath is drawn largely from contemporary newspaper reports.

  a fellow actor called Peter Willes

  Peter Willes eventually became a successful television producer whose circle included the playwright Joe Orton, murdered by his lover in 1967.

  The American novelist Ernest Hemingway had a walk-on role in the SS Paris incident.

  Hemingway was on his way to report on the Spanish Civil War, and had partied with Muriel Oxford along with the Marquis de Polignac and Brooklyn-born Sidney Franklin, who acted as Hemingway’s interpreter in Spain. Franklin’s unlikely claim to fame was that he was the first successful Jewish-American bullfighter, and in Death in the Afternoon Hemingway drooled over his ‘cool, serene and intelligent valour’.

  28

  No Judge or Jury but My Own Conscience

  The Crypt Bar, beneath the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, claimed to be the longest bar in England, and was a popular haunt for lawyers, police officers, journalists, and people ensnared in civil litigation as plaintiffs, defendants or witnesses. On 29 July 1937, a grey-haired American, a flamboyant actor who in his younger days played cowboys in silent films under the name ‘Young Buffalo’, bumped into a woman he knew as he came out of the court. She was a journalist and well aware that he liked to talk, and also to drink. The moment he knew that she was paying, he agreed to give an interview and they headed downstairs to the Crypt.

  The woman was Phyllis Davies, and she was carving a reputation on the Daily Mail as one of Britain’s first female crime reporters. Her interviewee was Philip Yale Drew, who eight years earlier had been the object of the coroner’s open suspicion over the murder of tobacconist Alfred Oliver in Reading. Since that ‘trial by inquest’, Drew’s acting career never recovered.

  Phyllis Davies got to know Drew after the murder, and they ran into each other several times in London. He was down on his luck, and his behaviour was eccentric. Although he tried to turn on the charm, and liked to cadge drinks from her, it became increasingly clear that he was not going to impart any revelations about the fate of Alfred Oliver – probably because he had none to impart. A confession would have given her a scoop, but his repeated protestations of innocence became tedious. Her interest in Drew was rekindled by his decision to seek compensation for libel because of a thinly veiled portrayal of him in a detective novel.

  The novel was Death to the Rescue, and the author whom Drew sued, along with publisher Victor Gollancz and printers Camelot Press, was Milward Kennedy. Drew argued that Kennedy had based the character of the actor Garry Boon on him. He had become aware of the book three years after it was first published, when Gollancz brought out a cheap edition. Gollancz had been bitten before by libel claims, and was no soft touch. The case reached the door of the court before frantic settlement negotiations resulted in a deal. After looking for £300 plus fifty guineas in costs, Drew accepted less.

  Drew’s life had been made a misery by wagging tongues and pointed fingers, he told Phyllis Davies as they sat drinking together in the Crypt Bar. Since Oliver’s murder, he’d been ‘the victim of poison-pen letter writers by the thousand’. He’d only had one week’s work in the past eight years, and had been reduced to sleeping on the Embankment. The case against Gollancz and Kennedy felt like a vindication: ‘I have been awarded substantial compensation and handsome apologies have been made to me.’ But his tale of woe lacked a happy ending; three years later, he was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. He died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave.

  For Kenne
dy, the case was a disaster. A libel action is one of the worst fates that can befall an author, and for all his intelligence and diplomatic skill he had made a crass mistake. Kennedy’s enthusiasm for true crime had returned to haunt him, as he used elements of a real-life mystery in his book but featured a character based on a man guilty of nothing. Even though Garry Boon committed no crime in Death to the Rescue, Kennedy portrayed him as a boastful drunk, and the resemblance between Boon and Drew was plain.

  As so often happens when acrimonious litigation is compromised, a bland agreed statement was issued, in which Kennedy claimed that ‘although he had used the circumstances of the inquest, he thought that he had so disguised the characters and the events as to prevent anyone thinking that Garry Boon referred to Mr Drew. He now appreciated that he had been wrong in so thinking.’ The book was withdrawn from circulation. With hindsight, it seems astonishing that an intelligent and sophisticated man such as Kennedy should blunder into libelling a man who was never charged with a crime, but it is all too easy to be caught by the traps set by the law of defamation.

  Taking Berkeley’s lead, Kennedy had explored the nature of justice with irony and cynicism, using actual murder cases as a springboard for his mysteries to give an added touch of realism. Now he had been caught out, and so had Victor Gollancz. Kennedy’s crime-writing career was derailed, even though Gollancz did not drop him from his list at that point. Before the case was brought, Kennedy published fourteen novels in nine years. Afterwards, he lived for more than thirty years, but produced just four more novels.

  Prior to the court case, his books displayed touches of daring. Poison in the Parish begins with a scathing dedication to an unnamed ‘friend’ who has pointed out that the characters in Kennedy’s novels are unpleasant, and it promises: ‘Here is an attempt at something different.’ The victim, an elderly woman resident in a village guest house whose exhumed corpse reveals that she was poisoned by arsenic, is typically unappealing, the suspects more attractive. The book opens innovatively, with a ‘Prologue or Epilogue’ which reveals the final act in the drama.

  The narrator, a wealthy invalid who is asked to assist the police with their enquiries into life in the village, is called Francis Anthony. Kennedy borrowed the forenames from the two most celebrated pseudonyms of Anthony Berkeley Cox in a mischievous tribute to his friend. The story boasts a final twist which Berkeley surely enjoyed, with an unsuspected killer ultimately revealed thanks to a bizarre fluke. Kennedy came up with an original murder motive and Francis Anthony is unsentimental about British justice: ‘I was tempted to remind him that before now innocent men had come to the gallows.’ Again, we are a long way from cosiness, despite the village setting. An extra helping of irony, this time unintended, arises from the inclusion of an inquest, and veiled reference to Philip Yale Drew.

  The novel Kennedy published in the year of the court case, I’ll Be Judge, I’ll Be Jury, included a libel disclaimer – an unfortunate example of shutting the stable door too late. He offers an alternative take on the theme of Before the Fact, but in his version the woman who fears that she is ‘married to a murderer’ is made of stronger stuff than Lina Aysgarth. Rather than succumbing to her fate, she resolves to ‘watch and fight’.

  The book opens boldly. Mary Dallas sneaks out from the hotel where she is staying with her husband very early one morning for a tryst in a beach hut. Under her short beach-coat, she is topless. Before encountering her lover, George Needham, she stumbles over the corpse of her guardian, while the murderer hides behind a curtain. In a panic, she and George contrive to make the death look like an accident, and their hurried interference with the crime scene succeeds in confusing the police. Soon Mary starts to suspect that her husband John committed the murder in order to benefit from the money she was due to inherit from her guardian. Her love turns to hatred, and she decides to act as judge, jury – and executioner. As so often with Kennedy, the book’s concept is striking and original, and as with Malice Aforethought there is a cynical final twist. But Milward Kennedy could not match the success of Francis Iles, and the book sank without trace.

  When the penalty for murder was death on the scaffold, miscarriages of justice had terrifying consequences. Anthony Berkeley was cynical about lawyers and the legal system, long before his confrontational antics in the magistrates’ court. His prejudices were reinforced by close study of the cases of Florence Maybrick and Edith Thompson, and the unpredictable and sometimes unjust fates suffered by those accused of murder in real life.

  He took a special delight in identifying with meek middle-class professional men who found themselves driven to murder. Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the model for Dr Bickleigh, was one example. Hawley Harvey Crippen, the mild-mannered American who ran businesses selling dubious homeopathic medicines and offering ‘painless dentistry’, was another. Crippen, like Armstrong, was an amiable, slightly-built man who was bossed about by a domineering wife. Cora Crippen, a brash extrovert who enjoyed a less-than-illustrious career as a music hall artiste under the name Belle Elmore, vanished from the couple’s home at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Camden, in January 1910. The subsequent discovery of human remains in the cellar of their house launched one of the most famous manhunts in history.

  Crippen fled to the Continent, accompanied by his typist and mistress, Ethel Le Neve, who was disguised as a boy. Posing as father and son, they boarded the SS Montrose, heading for Canada, but the ship’s captain became suspicious of them and communicated his suspicions to England by Marconi telegram. To the delight of journalists and a thrilled public worldwide, Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard pursued the couple in a faster ship and eventually caught up with them. Crippen was tried for murder, despite doubt as to whether the flesh in the cellar could be identified as belonging to Cora. Bernard Spilsbury, in his first celebrated courtroom appearance, made his name as a pathologist by coming up with seemingly authoritative expert evidence supporting the prosecution case that Crippen had poisoned Cora with hyoscine had dismembered her corpse, and had buried some (but not all) of the remains in the cellar. Crippen was duly found guilty and hanged. Tried separately, Ethel Le Neve was acquitted after her counsel presented her as the innocent dupe of Crippen, who was inventively and inaccurately described as ‘imperturbable, unscrupulous, dominating, fearing neither God nor man, and yet a man insinuating, attractive, and immoral’. Le Neve disappeared from public sight, although she travelled no further than Croydon, to spend the rest of her life in respectable suburban obscurity married to a man named Smith who went to his grave not knowing his wife’s real identity.

  Doubts persist about what really did happen at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, and the case has fascinated criminologists and crime writers ever since. Detection Club members often talked and wrote about it. J. J. Connington, the robust chemist, focused on Crippen’s use of hyoscine to drug his wife for sexual gratification, while Sayers, who devoted so much of her life to an elaborate pretence, empathized with Ethel Le Neve’s determined refusal to face up to the possibility that her lover had done away with his wife. Christie, after her experience with Nancy Neele, could never be starry-eyed about pretty young women who seduced married men, and suspected that Ethel knew much more about Cora’s death than she (and Crippen, who remained besotted) would ever admit. Ethel had worn the dead woman’s furs and jewellery – psychologically curious behaviour that intrigued Hugh Walpole as much as it had appalled Cora’s friends. Berkeley, for his part, sympathized with the plight of Crippen, the affable adulterer with an inferiority complex.

  As early as his second novel, Berkeley had Roger Sheringham side with Crippen – ‘if ever a woman deserved murdering, Cora Crippen did’ – and more than a decade later, he argued in an essay that Crippen did not have the right psychological profile to commit a savage killing. ‘One does not remain gentle and kindly for 48 years and then reveal oneself as a fiend.’ He agreed with Edward Marshall Hall, the legendary barrister known as ‘the Great Defender’, that Crippen overdosed Cora with hyoscine
by mistake, wanting to keep her quiet while he had sex with Ethel in their home. On that view, his crime was not murder, but manslaughter.

  Forever on the lookout for miscarriages of justice, Berkeley’s weapon of choice when highlighting them was not passion or outrage, but irony. He led the way for a group of ironists who saw murder from the criminal’s perspective, and derided the judicial process. As well as Raymond Postgate and Richard Hull, his disciples included C. E. Vulliamy, who wrote satires about vicars and dons becoming demented serial killers. The Marxist sympathizer (and godson of Arthur Conan Doyle) Bruce Hamilton followed up his scathing critique of the bourgeoisie in Middle Class Murder by adapting the Notable British Trials format into a fictional murder trial set in the near future. Rex v. Rhodes: the Brighton Murder Trial was not so much a novel as a polemic excoriating Fascism and eagerly anticipating the defeat of the established order by the workers.

  Time and again in books by the ironists, murderers escape punishment for their crimes, although Fate often throws a spanner in the works just when they think they have got away with it. Kennedy was an early ironist, and Hull (Richard Henry Sampson under a pen name) was another. Miscarriages of justice were also central to books by traditionalists such as Agatha Christie. In Five Little Pigs, Caroline Crale dies in prison, sentenced to life for a crime she did not commit, while the real culprit escapes judicial punishment, suffering instead a metaphorical kind of living death. Caroline is not the only Christie character wrongly convicted of murder and imprisoned. The widespread consensus that Christie and company never questioned the status quo is wildly mistaken.