A. A. Milne’s quietness baffled Clarice: ‘He was a purely English type, nice-looking, almost film-starish, slim and small-boned, not short but not very tall either, with light brown hair … He’d take himself to a corner and just sit there, talking to no one, looking at no one.’ John Rhode told her that Milne was not standoffish, just naturally reticent in company, and Sayers too thought him a ‘shy bird’. A. E. W. Mason, on the other hand, proved very amiable on the rare occasions he came to the dinners and had ‘a grand presence’.
When they first moved to England, the Carrs lived in a bungalow in Bristol, not far from where Clarice had grown up. Carr persuaded his wife to move to London, partly so as to be handy for Detection Club meetings. They found a flat on Haverstock Hill, where they entertained people from the world of literature. Guests included fellow novelists and Edward Powys Mathers, a poet and translator better known as the crime reviewer and crossword compiler Torquemada.
Agatha Christie also socialized with the Carrs. On her first visit to Haverstock Hill, the lift to the third floor got stuck, and Christie found herself trapped for half an hour alongside J. B. Priestley, a professional Yorkshireman who played up to his curmudgeonly persona. Conditions were cramped – Christie was putting on so much weight that later Sayers wrote: ‘She is ENORMOUS – nearly twice as big as I am!’ – and Priestley’s wrath turned the air blue. Christie found the whole thing amusing. That night, since Carr was in charge of the entertainments, they played the Murder Game. Christie took the part of a suspect who claimed that the Archbishop of Canterbury would give her an alibi. Priestley, cast as the chief inspector, turned this claim on its head by inferring from it that she had murdered the prelate.
Clarice saw through the formidable manner that Sayers deployed as a protective shield. Bluntness and lack of diplomacy were part of Sayers’ DNA, but she loved letting her hair down among trusted friends. One night at Gerrard Street, Sayers, Rhode and the Carrs were the last survivors of a convivial dinner. Having downed a large quantity of Scotch, Sayers ‘arose like one addressing a Sunday School’ and recited a ribald limerick about the young girl from Madras.
Carr’s drive, and sheer likeability, enhanced the collegial ethos of the Detection Club. Margery Allingham was becoming increasingly ambitious as a novelist, and her publishers described The Fashion in Shrouds as ‘a powerful modern novel which has something to say about the world in which we live’, but Carr persuaded her to take a greater interest in the Club, and went to stay with her and Pip Youngman Carter in Tolleshunt d’Arcy. Later, they exchanged books with jokey inscriptions: Allingham’s said Carr was ‘the world’s best detective story writer – EXCEPT ME!’ As for Pip, Clarice was one of many women who felt the force of his charm.
Thanks to his encouragement, Margery Allingham stopped being intimidated by Sayers. She and Pip did not live far from Witham, although it was not until wartime that they started seeing Sayers apart from the Club dinners. At first, Sayers came over by bus, and Allingham decided she was ‘a nice old duck really when you know her. Just determinedly belligerent.’ Sayers was not yet fifty, but her demeanour, plain looks, and extravagant dress sense made her seem like a strangely exotic aunt with an erudite mind and an earthy sense of humour. Eight years were to pass before Allingham finally met Mac, ‘the famous husband’, when she and Pip were invited to Witham. Writing to her sister Joyce, Allingham even referred to her friend as ‘Dot Sayers’. The mind boggles at the thought of her addressing the great lady as ‘Dot’. Sayers’ reaction would be worth travelling a long way to see.
Carr was probably responsible for talking Agatha Christie into becoming a member of the Detection Club’s committee, along with Sayers, Simpson, Nicholas Blake, Anthony Gilbert, and Gladys Mitchell (who took charge of the Club’s growing library of crime books). If it was Carr’s doing, this was an astonishing feat of persuasion, even by his standards. Christie was exceptionally self-effacing, and the antithesis of a ‘joiner’, never mind a natural committee person. Her continuing enthusiastic participation in the Detection Club illustrates how much the Club still meant to her. She was now rich and successful, far more assured and contented than the broken woman whom Berkeley had invited to those early dinners in Watford, but she never became too grand to go to the Detection Club. Yet she remained reluctant to talk about her books. One of her successors as Club President, Harry Keating, recalled her being asked where she found her ideas – and her conversation-killing reply, ‘At Marks and Spencer’s stores.’ Keating’s wife, the actor Sheila Mitchell, found Christie hard work until they discussed the difficulty of travel, and Christie started chattering about the state of the motorways. Her preoccupation with the commonplace helps to explain the universality of her books’ appeal. So does her intense curiosity. Julian Symons recalled arriving late at a Club dinner and not having time to wash his hands. His fingernails were rimmed with dirt and he saw Christie eyeing them with fascination, as if wondering if he had just buried a body and was hastily attempting to establish an alibi.
A glance at the pre-war list of members’ addresses reveals that everyone except for J. J. Connington and Baroness Orczy had a home in London or elsewhere in southern England. Geographical proximity at least made it easier for Club members to attend at Gerrard Street, helping to forge bonds between founder members and newer recruits, but the North and Midlands continued to be massively under-represented among crime writers in general, as well as within the Detection Club. This only began to change when a new generation of writers, often educated at provincial grammar schools rather than fee-paying public schools, emerged in the Fifties and Sixties.
Despite all Carr’s efforts, and even though veteran writers like Austin Freeman continued to produce books, the Detection Club needed new blood. Edgar Jepson died, while Morrison, Robert Eustace and Baroness Orczy gave up on detective fiction. Advancing years took their toll, and so did poor health. Connington, for instance, rarely managed to travel to London for the dinners. Cataracts formed in both his eyes, rendering him almost blind before surgery: at work on the later chapters of In Whose Dim Shadow, he could not read the words he was typing. The title of A Minor Operation was a mordant reference to the risks of cataract surgery. Plot elements include love letters in a cipher created by a Braille-writing machine (Wendover suspects a clue to a Thompson–Bywaters type of intrigue) and Driffield secures the final evidence by drawing on what he ‘learned at school by doing thiosulphate titrations’.
Connington suffered a heart attack before the book was published, and the quality of his later work dipped; Truth Comes Limping, Driffield’s next case, was as lame as its title. For Murder Will Speak, which featured that reliable Golden Age plot device, an outbreak of poison pen letters, marked a partial return to form, but the scientific plot elements (including trickery with a wireless receiver, and X-ray treatment for a glandular disorder that has caused the luckless sufferer to become promiscuous) are very much of their time.
Fresh blood was needed – but whose? The members debated potential candidates long and hard, with Sayers and Berkeley adamant that standards must not slip. Along with Nicholas Blake and Christopher Bush, E. C. R. Lorac (a pseudonym for the prolific Edith Caroline Rivett, who also wrote as Carol Carnac) and Newton Gayle were elected in 1937. Gayle was the writing name chosen for an unlikely literary partnership between the American poet and equal rights campaigner Muna Lee and a Shell oil executive, Maurice Guinness; Gayle was her maternal grandmother’s maiden name, and Newton his paternal grandmother’s name. The strange title of the third of their five books, Murder at 28:10, refers to barometric pressure; it is surely the only crime novel to feature a series of barometric charts, a gimmick which helps to build tension in a story about a devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico.
In hard financial times, not every writer could afford the cost of the dinners. Doris Ball, who wrote as Josephine Bell, attended Blake’s initiation at the Dorchester as the guest of Freeman Wills Crofts, who lived near her in Guildford. She was invite
d to become a member the following year, but reluctantly declined because she was short of money; she was ultimately elected in 1954.
John Dickson Carr exerted an unexpected literary influence upon the future Poet Laureate, who shared his pleasure in playing the detective game. Thou Shell of Death, Cecil Day-Lewis’s second book as Nicholas Blake, is a splendid ‘impossible crime’ novel about a ‘fantastic and paradoxical case … solved by a professor of Greek and a seventeenth century dramatist’. The famous airman Fergus O’Brien, a fictionalized T. E. Lawrence, has received messages threatening that he will die on Boxing Day, and calls on Nigel Strangeways’ help. He is found shot – on the appointed day – in a hut surrounded by snow with only his own trail of footsteps leading to it. Good lines abound – a femme fatale is ‘blonde as a Nazi’s dream’ – and Nigel meets his future wife, the explorer Georgia Cavendish.
Not long after Blake’s book appeared, Carr and John Rhode devised a novel together. Carr had the idea of a murder committed in a sealed elevator, but he struggled with technical aspects of the murder method. Rhode came up with an ingenious and elaborate do-it-yourself weapon. Carr wrote most of Drop to his Death, with the pair collaborating on technical details when he made weekend visits to Rhode’s home in Kent. A diagram of the murder weapon is provided, in classic Rhode style, but although the book sold well it fell far short of Carr’s best work, and the outbreak of war put paid to their collaboration. Reflecting the co-authors’ fondness for alcohol, the characters in the novel spend much of their time drinking – so much so that Carr’s friend Torquemada told him that the book should have been called A Drop Too Much.
Carr’s next detective, Colonel March, owed both his physique and his personality to Rhode, and was a large, amiable man weighing seventeen stone, with ‘a very short pipe protruding from under a cropped moustache’ and an extensive knowledge of trivia. He headed Scotland Yard’s splendidly named Department of Queer Complaints. The March stories were later televised, with Boris Karloff, of all people, playing the Colonel. The resemblance to Rhode was lost, since Karloff was seventy years old, and wore an eye patch,
Sayers still loved the game-playing aspect of detective fiction, even though her interest in writing novels about Wimsey had waned. She had fun with a new pastime, as entertaining as delving into Sherlockiana, but more personal. Assisted by Helen Simpson, Muriel St Clair Byrne, and an expert in heraldry, Wilfred Scott-Giles, she explored the supposed history of the Wimsey family. The quartet produced a pamphlet, Papers Relating to the Family of Wimsey, with text written by Sayers and Simpson, whose flair for writing pastiche Sayers admired. Scott-Giles also organized a meeting at which the quartet delivered papers. Helen Simpson read extracts from an eighteenth-century Household Book kept by Mary Wimsey, whose descendants lived in New Zealand, while Sayers recounted the story of Lord Mortimer Wimsey, the Hermit of the Wash, who lived alone in a hut on the Norfolk coast, totally mute and eating nothing but shrimps and seaweed.
The fun and games of initiation into Detection Club membership continued. Sayers fine-tuned the wording of the ritual, and instructed Carr, as Secretary, that the promises to be made on Eric the Skull must be made by each new candidate individually. Richard Hull was among the potential new members, but ultimately the coming of war meant that he had to wait until 1946, when he joined along with Cyril Hare, the American Alice Campbell, and Christianna Brand.
John Rhode was tasked with compiling a volume of short stories on behalf of the Club. To his delight, A. A. Milne agreed to contribute a foreword, but some members, such as R. C. Woodthorpe, whose enthusiasm for the genre was fading, proved impossible to pin down. Many of the stories were reprints. Ianthe Jerrold, Arthur Morrison, Edgar Jepson and Baroness Orczy were among those who featured – but Berkeley, as Rhode said in his introduction to Detection Medley, was ‘unfortunately … unable to contribute’. This seems odd, since Berkeley had written several short stories that would have been eminently suitable for inclusion. Possibly he had succumbed to the ‘severe emotional strain’ which, as he later confided in John Dickson Carr, was tormenting him. More likely, he was sulking over some imagined slight and opted out of the game like a moody child who takes his bat and ball home.
An unknown writer called Cameron McCabe played a unique and ingenious game with the Detection Club in The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor. A taut story, narrated by McCabe himself, grows rapidly in complexity following the discovery of an aspiring actress’s body on a film studio’s cutting room floor. In a lengthy epilogue, one of the characters, A. B. C. Muller (the initials are a nod to both Berkeley and Christie), apologises for his ‘unwarranted intrusion into Mr McCabe’s story’ and proceeds to dissect it, with the help of quotations from a range of critics, include Sayers, Berkeley, Blake and Milward Kennedy.
The quotes, such as Kennedy’s assertion that ‘there is a world of difference between controlling your clues and interpreting those left by other people, and often, moreover, inadequately reported by other parties’, are cunningly adapted to refer to McCabe’s narrative. Malice Aforethought is discussed in this extraordinary segment, as is the fact that ‘whistling in Germany is a sign of disapproval. It used to be, anyway, till Hitler came. Now it’s all different, of course. There’s no disapproval left. They’ve abolished it officially. You sure can’t hear them whistle nowadays.’
Muller argues that ‘the possibilities for alternative endings to any detective story are infinite’, and the epilogue’s finale is devised to demonstrate precisely that. The book winds up with a quotation from Trent’s Last Case: ‘As for attempts being made by malevolent persons to fix crimes upon innocent men, of course it is constantly happening. It’s a marked feature, for instance, of all systems of rule by coercion … If the police cannot get hold of a man they think dangerous by fair means, they do it by foul.’
In a pleasing twist of fate, Milward Kennedy was given the job of reviewing the book, and he loved it: ‘If you are jaded from a surfeit of conventional detective stories or if you are persuaded that all detective stories are made from a conventional pattern, make haste to read The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor; and if you are neither, make haste to read it … I have found it difficult to give any idea of it without spoiling it, and I would not do that for worlds.’
The McCabe pseudonym concealed the identity of Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann, whose life was stranger than any fiction. A penniless teenage Marxist, he fled to England from Nazi Germany, and wrote The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor at the age of nineteen, as ‘a finger exercise on the keyboard of a new language’. With the bravado of youth, he delivered his typescript in person to Victor Gollancz, because of his admiration for the Left Book Club, and Gollancz accepted it. After being interned as an enemy alien, Bornemann went to the United States, working as a jazz musician with Eartha Kitt, and in the film business for Orson Welles, before carving a reputation as a sexologist, whose credo was that ‘you learn everything about life in bed with an interesting woman or – if you’re gay – with a man.’ At the age of eighty, he committed suicide with a cocktail of whisky and pills, following the collapse of an intense relationship with a beautiful woman less than half his age. None of his other books ventured into Golden Age territory, but Julian Symons judged The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor as a ‘dazzling and perhaps fortunately unrepeatable box of tricks.’
Unrepeatable in that precise way, perhaps, but despite novelists’ increasing focus on criminal psychology, many of them enjoyed playing literary games just as much as Carr and Bornemann. Writers like Richard Hull experimented with the form of the detective story throughout the Thirties, while Gollancz published Edward Powys Mather’s The Torquemada Puzzle Book, which included Cain’s Jawbone, a one-hundred-page detective story – with the pages printed in the wrong order. Each page was written so as to finish at the end of a sentence, and readers were invited to work out the names of the murderers and their victims, along with the correct page sequence. It sounds simple, but the idiosyncratic phrasing
of the text makes solving the mystery fiendishly difficult. Despite offering a cash prize, Gollancz received only three correct answers.
Detective fans who loved playing games were spoiled for choice. The publishers Harrap produced ‘jigsaw mysteries’, while Collins promoted the Crime Club by marketing a card game dreamed up by Peter Cheyney, a Cockney who wrote hard-boiled thrillers in the American idiom. Another thriller writer, Dennis Wheatley, and J. G. Links, author of a renowned tourists’ guide to Venice, carried the structural devices of The Documents in the Case and the Coles’ Burglars in Bucks to their ultimate conclusion with four ‘murder dossiers’. Each dossier was supplied in a cardboard folder with all the evidence and clues such as ‘poison pills’, cigarette ends, used matchsticks and curls of hair. The solution was in a sealed section at the back of the folder. The dossiers, starting with Murder Off Miami, enjoyed a brief vogue, and Milward Kennedy called them a ‘great game’, although Howard Spring sneered, ‘It is not for me to criticise Murder Off Miami any more than it would be for an art critic to criticise the artist’s haystack’.
Examples from the Crime Club Card Game, devised by Peter Cheney.
The Golden Age of Murder Page 38