The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  Richard Hull, a rare example of a chartered accountant with a gift for crime writing, became as bold an experimenter as Berkeley, specializing in trickery with story structure and point of view. Hull became the Detection Club’s Secretary after the Second World War, but wrote his best books in the Thirties. Like Berkeley, and Kennedy, he loved creating unpleasant characters. Keep it Quiet was set in a London club similar to the one in which Hull, a bachelor, lived for years. The members include a homicidal maniac and, in a touch of self-mockery, a fat man with the same initials as the well-upholstered Hull. A sub-plot involves a series of thefts of ‘Dorothy Sayers’ books. An amateur sleuth deduces that the culprit must be female, since Sayers’ books appealed much more to women. After omitting Sayers’ middle initial, and making such a sweeping generalisation, Hull was lucky to be elected to the Detection Club at all.

  Forever exploring collisions between law and justice, this most creative of accountants came up with a superb plot in Excellent Intentions, which opens at the start of a murder trial. In a clever spin on the whodunit concept, the identity of the accused is kept hidden until the judge addresses the jury. The victim is a wealthy misanthrope with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and five people had the means, opportunity and motive to commit the murder by lacing his snuff with cyanide. The action zips back and forth in time, between the trial and the events leading up to it, and the consensus is that whoever killed the old man had excellent intentions. ‘To commit a murder because it was a Good Thing’ is a new idea, Inspector Fenby reflects, and yet not entirely new: Hamlet regarded killing as a duty and Charlotte Corday, who assassinated French Revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, was ‘invariably … regarded as a heroine’.

  Edgar Wallace had tackled well-meant murder in The Four Just Men thirty years earlier. Now the concept gained fresh resonance, as people decided the world would be a better place without Hitler or Mussolini. The judge’s summing-up at the end of the trial is central to Hull’s plot, and he quotes from the Thompson–Bywaters case as well as referring to G. K. Chesterton’s love of paradox. The final pages deliver an original twist which sees the legal process manipulated to contrive an unorthodox but just result.

  One unlikely admirer of Hull’s novel was Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, who thought this ‘an extremely pleasant book. His prose is able, his characters convincing, his irony civilized.’ Yet he had a typically Borgesian twist up his sleeve: Hull’s solution was ‘so unsurprising that I cannot free myself from the suspicion that this quite real book, published in London, is the one I imagined in Balvanera, three or four years ago. In which case, Excellent Intentions hides a secret plot. Ah me, or ah Richard Hull! I can’t find that secret plot anywhere.’

  When it came to altruistic murder, nobody did it better than Berkeley. In Jumping Jenny, a detective novelist organizes a fancy-dress party with guests representing well-known killers (including Crippen) or their victims. Berkeley seizes the chance to express his views about marriage and neurotic women, and even his obsession with spanking resurfaces: ‘What Ena needs is to be married to a great big he-man who’d give her a sound thrashing every now and then. That’s the only way to keep her in order.’

  Sheringham makes a light-hearted offer to strangle the odious Ena Stratton, but someone else beats him to it. Berkeley plays a trick on the reader by appearing to show who is responsible for the crime, and most of the book is devoted to the efforts of Sheringham and his fellow guests trying to persuade the authorities that Ena Stratton committed suicide. The final sentence presents an alternative version of events. Both the actual and supposed culprits are appealing – the dead woman is appalling.

  After publishing fifteen mysteries in ten years, as well as making major contributions to the round robins, Berkeley failed to produce a novel in either 1935 or 1936. He was under no financial pressure to write, but the root cause of this drop-off in productivity was mental turmoil. His ludicrous campaign against the Abdication, and the debacle of the motoring case, illustrate his troubled mental state, but whereas Margaret Cole published an excruciatingly detailed report on her husband’s medical problems, no records confirm that Berkeley suffered some form of nervous collapse. He rallied, and his next crime novel was a masterpiece of wit and ingenuity. Returning to the theme of altruistic murder, again he based the plot on an actual murder. Unlike Kennedy, he took care to choose a case with dead protagonists.

  On Boxing Day in 1864, a brawl in the bar of the Golden Anchor pub in Great Saffron Hill, London, led to murder. An Italian called Seraphini Polioni boasted to the landlord: ‘I could kill six Englishmen like you,’ and an associate called Gregorio Mogni struck the landlord. A fight started, a knife was brandished, and a man called Michael Harrington was stabbed to death.

  Witnesses said that Polioni struck the fatal blow. He was charged with murder, found guilty and sentenced to death. But Enrico Negretti, a high-profile fellow Italian who had been one of the pioneers of photography, was not satisfied, and formed a committee to try to establish Polioni’s innocence. A private prosecution was launched against Mogni, who admitted his guilt, claiming that he had acted in self-defence. Polioni gave evidence through an interpreter, and his first words to the court were memorable: ‘I am now in Newgate under sentence of death.’

  Polioni gave a convincing account of his limited involvement in the affray, and the jury found Mogni guilty of murder, with a strong recommendation to mercy. Polioni was set free, and Mogni sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. A private prosecution had overturned the outcome of a state-backed trial, even though the judge who condemned Polioni had rashly said, ‘I am as satisfied that you committed this murder as if I had seen it with my own eyes.’

  As Berkeley summarized it, there were ‘two men imprisoned at the same time, each of whom had separately been found guilty of the death of the same man; and the authorities clearly did not know what to do about it’. A situation so brimming with irony and paradox was tailor-made for Berkeley. He dedicated Trial and Error to P.G. Wodehouse, and opened it by echoing John Stuart Mill – ‘The sanctity of human life has been much exaggerated.’

  Lawrence Todhunter is told by his doctor that he is suffering from an aortic aneurism and only has a few months to live. Surreptitiously, he seeks advice from friends about the best use to which he may put his remaining time and finds himself ‘advised, with remarkable unanimity, to commit a murder’. Todhunter contemplates the possibility of trying to do away with Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin, but decides on a more domestic form of altruistic crime, the murder of someone who is making life a burden for a small number of people.

  He meets a popular author, Nicholas Farroway, who has fallen for a deeply unpleasant actress, Jean Norwood, and finds that the lives of Farroway and his circle are being ruined by Jean’s vindictive behaviour. Todhunter decides to shoot her, but although he escapes arrest after carrying out his murderous plan, Farroway’s son-in-law, another man ensnared by Jean, is charged with the crime and duly convicted. Todhunter admits his guilt – only to find that nobody believes him.

  As the plot thickens, Berkeley keeps hurling satiric darts. Newspapers, politicians and the judicial system are targeted time and again. When Berkeley savages the judge presiding over Todhunter’s trial – few judges refrain, he says, ‘from the temptation to tell other people to live their lives in accordance with the law books’ – he was taking revenge for his own brush with the law the year before. In the final paragraphs, Berkeley returns to the question that so preoccupied him, of whether ‘it is better to preserve a pestilential nuisance alive rather than bring happiness to a great many persons by eliminating one’. In the very last sentence, with a breezy flourish, he reveals what really happened to Jean Norwood.

  Jean’s capacity to destroy the happiness of anyone with the bad luck to cross her path is as formidable as that of the women whom Berkeley savaged in Panic Party and Jumping Jenny. Nobody mourns Jean. ‘There is such a thing as the fatal type,’ Farroway insists. ‘If you’re
lucky enough not to meet that type, your life goes on quietly, respectably, peacefully. If you do, it goes to pieces. You’re done for.’ He was surely speaking for Berkeley.

  He contrived another variation on the theme of altruistic murder in Not To Be Taken. With hindsight, the opening sentence – ‘Is it my imagination, or have other people noticed, too, that there is always something slightly sinister about the third of September?’ – is bizarrely prescient. War broke out again on that very date the following year.

  The story is told by Douglas Sewell, a fruit-farmer with a typical Berkeley inferiority complex. Sewell muses at one point: ‘How many of us really know our own wives?’ One character, a doctor’s sister, is an Oxford-educated feminist who seems like a variant of Sayers, but with a different outlook on life. Berkeley allows himself a swipe at ‘the bullying, hectoring, loud-mouthed, exceedingly unpleasant detective of American fiction’ and introduces two minor characters who prove to be Nazis, satirizing their anti-Semitism.

  Perverse as ever, Berkeley inserted a ‘Challenge to the Reader’ in the manner of Ellery Queen, whose books he disliked. Despite his interest in the mind of the murderer, he had not lost his love of the detection game. His challenge poses four questions, and notes that those who read the story in serial form failed to produce a single set of fully correct answers.

  The culprit’s explanation of the motive for murder reflects the concept that now obsessed Berkeley: ‘I consider it a beneficial act to rid the world of a parasite and an incubus, which is what I intended to do. You may cling to the law if you like, with all your public-school mind. I admit no judge or jury but my own conscience.’ But for Sewell, this is ‘sheer Bolshevism’.

  Once again, justice is satisfied by extrajudicial means. The killer endures an unbearable punishment for the crime that has nothing to do with the legal system, and, rather like the murderer in Allingham’s The Crime at Black Dudley, departs the scene to become devoted to charitable work. The book ends in tantalizing fashion. Just as Berkeley seemed to yearn to do something utterly decisive to put an end to his emotional troubles, so Sewell is unsure whether to tell the authorities what he has deduced:

  ‘I feel I really ought to do something.

  But what ought I to do?’

  Notes to Chapter 28

  The Marxist sympathizer (and godson of Arthur Conan Doyle) Bruce Hamilton

  Arthur Douglas Bruce Hamilton (1900–74) never created a series detective. This, coupled with the fact that he only published novels infrequently and kept varying his approach to crime writing, contributed to neglect of his work even during his lifetime. Bruce solicited a quote from his godfather to support his first novel, To Be Hanged, although the ailing Conan Doyle confided that not only had he forgotten the ‘transaction’ of becoming Bruce’s godparent, but that he felt the book faltered after a good start. Nevertheless, Hamilton’s books were unusual and interesting; Middle Class Murder is one of the better ironic novels influenced by Malice Aforethought. Bruce had a close but ambivalent relationship with his brother, Patrick Hamilton (1904–62), author of Rope, Gas Light and Hangover Square. Patrick’s biographer, Sean French (himself one half of the crime-writing team Nicci French) has pointed out that Bruce’s last, unpublished novel A Case for Cain ‘culminates in a man rather like Bruce murdering a man rather like Patrick’.

  Her interviewee was Philip Yale Drew

  Richard Whittington-Egan’s book about Drew is the main source of information about him. The settlement of his claim against Kennedy was reported in The Times on 30 July 1937. Phyllis Davies enjoyed a high profile while working for the Daily Mail, and was a prime mover in the Women’s Press Club before succumbing to mental illness.

  The case against Gollancz and Kennedy

  Milward Kennedy was represented in the Drew litigation by Henry C. Leon, a young barrister who later became a county court judge. After the war, Leon was better known by his pen name of Henry Cecil, as a prolific author of light-hearted fiction, much of it with a mystery theme. Thirty-one years after Drew’s libel claim, in the year of Kennedy’s death, Leon too was elected to membership of the Detection Club.

  a scathing dedication to an unnamed ‘friend’

  It seems clear from the content of the dedication that Kennedy was not addressing Sayers. Yet when reviewing Corpse in Cold Storage, she said of Death to the Rescue that ‘the hatefulness of his human beings reached the point of being actively repellent’. She was kinder about hard-drinking Sir George Bull and his attractive wife, appealing rogues who feature in two books including Corpse in Cold Storage.

  more than a decade later, he argued in an essay

  ‘Was Crippen a Murderer?’, published as by Francis Iles in A. J. Alan, et al., Great Unsolved Crimes.

  his disciples included C. E. Vulliamy

  Colwyn Edward Vulliamy (1886–1971) was a Welsh historian, biographer and belle-lettrist whose early work in the Iles vein, notably The Vicar’s Experiments (1932) appeared under the name Anthony Rolls. See Curtis Evans, ‘Anthony Rolls (C. E.Vulliamy): Master of the Golden Age Crime Novel’, CADS 68, August 2014, which contends plausibly that in Bloody Murder, Julian Symons ‘underestimated both the quantity and quality of psychological crime novels published during the Golden Age of detective fiction’.

  Gladys Mitchell and friends: Tyte (Margaret Tyte), Mike (Gladys Mitchell), Gunn (Muriel Gunn, afterwards Hall), Rene (Rene Woodgate, afterwards Fleming).

  Part Six

  The End Game

  29

  Playing the Grandest Game in the World

  As members of the Detection Club, following a splendid dinner, staggered back to Gerrard Street through the dark and dimly lit streets of sexy, seductive Soho, their young American colleague, swaying slightly from the effects of alcohol, urged them forward. ‘Say, why don’t we play a few games when we get back? There are paper and pencils in the room …’

  Sayers and John Rhode, his closest friends in England, talked him out of the idea. After consuming a great deal of rich food, and even more drink, the wits of the Detection Club’s finest were blunter than usual. They simply wanted to spend the rest of the night chatting – and drinking. Gracious as always, John Dickson Carr admitted defeat. Subsequently, he brought along expensive bottles of whisky to make a change from the beer paid for from Club funds. Carr was excellent company, and even if he liked alcohol too much for his own good, in those early years it never dampened his high spirits. His wife Clarice Dickson Carr, pretty, vivacious and still in her twenties, was equally popular.

  For Carr, playing games was a lifelong passion. Crime fiction became increasingly serious as the Thirties drew to a close, but he still saw detective stories as a contest between writer and reader. Even after the war, when tastes were changing, he wrote an essay celebrating traditional detective stories, ‘The Grandest Game in the World’. Inevitably, he became a mainstay of the Detection Club. The arrival of an energetic and American with a passion for the genre and its traditions gave the dinners a fresh infusion of vitality, and Carr was a natural choice as the next Honorary Secretary.

  He loved the conviviality of the dinners and those late boozy evenings, putting the world to rights together with his literary heroes and heroines. They responded warmly to his generosity and enthusiasm. The bond between Carr and Sayers was strengthened by mutual admiration, though their lives and books had little in common. Presumably on Sayers’ advice, Carr appointed David Higham as his British literary agent, and she also recommended him to the fiction editor of the Evening Standard. This led Carr to write the first Gideon Fell short story, and the evocative opening of ‘The Wrong Problem’ includes a slightly disguised reference to the Club: ‘At the Detectives’ Club it is still told how Dr Fell went down into the valley in Somerset that evening and of the man with whom he talked in the twilight by the lake, and of murder that came up as though through the lake itself.’

  Carr was thrilled to meet Richard Austin Freeman, who turned up for the dinners when he could despi
te his frailty and advancing years. Carr escorted the older man up the stairs leading to the Club rooms – praying that Freeman would not collapse and die of a heart attack on the way to dinner. It was a wonder that John Rhode never broke his neck tumbling down that staircase. Carr claimed to have seen Rhode ‘polish off ten pints of beer before lunch and more than that after dinner’. Given his drinking habits, it is amazing that Rhode managed to write almost one hundred and fifty novels. Physically he was much bigger than Carr – after G. K. Chesterton’s death, incontestably the largest member of the Club – and coped much better with alcohol than Carr, who was five foot six and slightly-built.

  Good-looking, with brown hair and large, dreamy grey eyes that Clarice adored, Carr liked women – and they liked him. After the war, both he and Anthony Berkeley carried a torch for the young and attractive Christianna Brand – according to Brand – but romance never blossomed. Gladys Mitchell enjoyed Carr’s sense of fun, while Anthony Gilbert nursed a hopeless passion for him – again, if Christianna Brand is to be believed.

  Clarice took several portrait pictures at the Detection Club that survive to this day. Anthony Berkeley, very much in Dr Jekyll mode, looks dapper and good-humoured. The reserved E. C. Bentley seems a little uncomfortable, as if he found it rather un-English to pose for the camera. Sayers is shown holding Eric the Skull with as much delight as a mother cradling her newborn, and John Rhode smokes a pipe whilst flourishing a cushion on which Eric sits wearing a wicked grin. Rhode’s insouciant expression struck Sayers as ‘superbly characteristic’.

  As Club Secretary, Carr kept coming up with bright ideas. He proposed a Viennese psychoanalyst as a guest speaker, and Sayers agreed, ‘provided he was not embarrassingly earnest’. Carr was gratified that Baroness Orczy continued to make the trip to London from Monte Carlo for the main annual dinner. Clarice found her a ‘small vivacious old lady with white hair and flashing dark eyes’, and was amused when she said in a strong Hungarian accent, ‘Oh Mr Carr, no one would ever guess, you know, that you’re an American.’ In contrast, the Irishman Freeman Wills Crofts sometimes seemed more English than the English. Crofts was invariably courteous – Gladys Mitchell compared him to a family solicitor – but his thoughts often seemed elsewhere, as if he were mentally unscrambling a complicated alibi concerning train timetables. To young Clarice, his white moustache made him look older than his years.