Three-quarters of a century later, we still love playing games. The structures of Golden Age detective fiction and the notion of ‘rules of the game’ inspire pastiche, parody, ‘murder mystery parties’ like those which John Dickson Carr hosted, and also hugely popular interactive games. Recent years have seen the arrival of mysteries that can be downloaded as apps, with viewers influencing plot developments via dedicated websites, receiving emails and mobile phone messages from characters in the drama, and being invited to attend ‘events’ in the story, which pop up in the calendar on their phones. It is only a question of time before cameras built into tablets read a viewer’s facial expression, adjusting the story according to how they react to key dramatic moments in the plot. Back in the world of books, traditional whodunits have also inspired literary experiments from postmodernists such as Borges and Gilbert Adair. In Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? Pierre Bayard offered a dazzling alternative take on the Christie classic which, he argues, has fascinated the likes of Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco and Alain Robbe-Grillet, The detective story retains some claim to being, as Carr called it, ‘the grandest game in the world.’
Notes to Chapter 29
he wrote an essay celebrating traditional detective stories, ‘The Grandest Game in the World’
The essay was written in 1946, and a segment of it was published in an Ellery Queen anthology in 1963; the complete version finally appeared in a posthumous paperback edition of Carr’s The Door to Doom.
Edward Powys Mathers
Edward Powys Mathers (1892–1939) translated One Thousand and One Nights, as well as love poems from Sanskrit. Some of his translations were set to music by the American composer Aaron Copland. He completed J. S. Fletcher’s final novel, Todmanhawe Grange, after Fletcher’s death, speaking in the introduction of his youthful enjoyment of the work of Fletcher and Austin Freeman. The prolific Fletcher (1863–1935) enjoyed a boost to his American sales when former President Woodrow Wilson said he was his favourite mystery writer.
J. B. Priestley, a professional Yorkshireman
John Boynton Priestley (1894–1964), a popular novelist, playwright and broadcaster, occasional dipped a toe in criminal waters: see Scowcroft, Philip, ‘A Good Companion of Crime Fiction’, CADS 10, January 1989.
her conversation-killing reply, ‘At Marks and Spencer’s stores.’
This resembles a remark in her introduction to Passenger to Frankfurt, a disappointing thriller written when her powers were fading, and Keating may have had that in mind.
the American poet and equal rights campaigner Muna Lee and a Shell oil executive, Maurice Guinness
Muna Lee was at this point married to Luis Muños Marin, a poet and politician who became known as ‘the Father of Modern Puerto Rico’. A leading feminist, Lee contributed to the struggle for equal rights and was a founder of the Inter-American Commission of Women. Maurice Guinness was stationed in Puerto Rice when he met Lee. They became friends and decided to try collaborating on detective novels. Guinness thought up the plots and Lee did the bulk of the writing. After five Newton Gayle novels, Lee gave up detective fiction for good, while Guinness did not resume crime writing until the Sixties, when he wrote three thrillers under the name Mike Brewer. Perhaps he was inspired to return to the genre by a brief acquaintance with Raymond Chandler, who at the time of his death was engaged to Guinness’s cousin, the literary agent Helga Greene. In correspondence, Chandler and Guinness debated the pros and cons of marrying off Philip Marlowe.
In Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? Pierre Bayard offered a dazzling alternative take
Not to be confused with Edmund Wilson’s essay ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Bayard, a French professor of literature, not only cares, but seeks to demonstrate that the culprit identified in Christie’s original novel was not the true murderer.
30
The Work of a Pestilential Creature
Just before noon on a chilly June morning in 1937, a crowd of people at the barrier of Victoria Station watched as a group of latter-day pilgrims set off on a privately chartered train heading for Canterbury. Sayers had invited a party of guests, including Helen Simpson, Dennis Browne and Muriel St Clair Byrne to see the premiere of her new play. Lunch would be provided on the train. As usual, Sayers did not miss a chance to publicize her work. Because she was attending a dress rehearsal, she could not be present at Victoria to greet her guests. Sticking to her credo that murder must advertise, she asked her secretary, Dorothy Lake, to wait at the barrier with the tickets – flourishing a copy of Busman’s Honeymoon. The shocking yellow dust jacket, with its vivid violet and black typography, was guaranteed to grab people’s attention.
The play her guests would watch was not a work of detection. Religious dramas staged during the Canterbury Festival, notably T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral two years earlier, had enjoyed huge success, and although Sayers was not known as a religious writer, she had been commissioned to produce a new work for performance in Canterbury Cathedral. The result was The Zeal of Thy House, telling the story of William of Sens, a twelfth-century architect who rebuilt the central portion of the Cathedral after a devastating fire, but whose pride led to a fall when he crashed fifty feet from shoddily constructed scaffolding. Pride, integrity and the nature of creative imagination were among Sayers’ themes. An amateur film-maker shot footage of characters in the play, and also of Sayers. For June, the wind was bitter, and the author was draped in furs, but she beamed for the camera, looking radiantly happy. She felt she had found her vocation.
Religion mattered to Sayers, and many of her Detection Club colleagues were regular worshippers. They had firm opinions about good and evil, though Christie devoted little space to spiritual reflection, even in The Murder at the Vicarage. Henry Wade and his family went to see The Zeal of Thy House, and Sayers introduced them to members of the cast – but there was one conspicuous absentee from the pilgrimage to Canterbury. Mac Fleming complained that Sayers was never at home, and spent his time in the Red Lion rather than at church. Sayers simply got on with her life without him. She invested time and money in organizing a provincial tour of the play at her own expense, and raised funds by writing advertising copy for Horlick’s Malted Milk. When The Times teased her about this, she fired off an indignant letter in reply. Since the Church would not invest in the tour, she said, she had ‘unblushingly soaked Mammon’.
The tour was a flop. People were too preoccupied with the gathering international storm to bother with the new play, and Sayers made a heavy loss. When overwork and disappointment left her in need of a break, she set off on a cruise of the Dalmatian coast with a woman friend, rather than her husband. The marriage continued to stagger along, without quite collapsing, and Sayers found relief from domestic unhappiness by exploring religious themes in her writing.
Her next drama was written for the Canterbury Festival of 1939. The Devil to Pay was a Faustian pact story about the battle between good and evil. The theme was perfectly in keeping with the preoccupations of the day. Yet the timing was disastrous, as the play’s run coincided with the outbreak of war. Gladys Mitchell was among the few who managed to catch the play before it vanished from the stage, seldom to return.
The BBC commissioned a radio play from her, with Val Gielgud as producer. John Rhode listened on the wireless in (where else?) his local pub on Christmas Day, and wrote to tell Sayers how much he and his fellow drinkers had enjoyed it. The plays’ succcess encouraged her to write more, although she was still telling correspondents that she hoped to write another Wimsey story ‘before long’.
Sayers formed a strong friendship with Val Gielgud, a man who packed a good deal into his life, including five marriages. A flamboyant figure who would have made an excellent suspect, or sleuth, in a detective novel, he had a goatee beard and often wore a cloak and carried a swordstick. He kept writing crime novels, on his own as well as with Eric Maschwitz, and after John Dickson Carr invited him to a Detection Club dinner, Gielgud encouraged Carr to start
writing for radio. Carr, like Sayers, was soon bitten by the bug.
Despite the deaths of Canon Victor Whitechurch and G. K. Chesterton, the Detection Club still numbered among its members prominent Christians such as Sayers, Knox, Helen Simpson and Freeman Wills Crofts. Crofts identified with the Oxford Group, a loose association of the spiritually motivated, but Sayers rebuffed him when he tried to enlist her backing, telling him that ‘as an English Catholic’ she found some aspects of the Group’s thinking distasteful. Years later, when Crofts published The Four Gospels as One Story, written as a modern biography, Knox, who did not approve of ‘rearranging’ the Gospels, confided in Sayers that he had refused to write a review. Christian faith could divide as well as unite.
With military preparations gathering pace, an American minister, Frank Buchman, who had formed the Oxford Group seven years earlier, declared that the time had come for moral rearmament. From this grew Moral Rearmament, an international movement now known as Initiatives for Change. Crofts concluded that Moral Rearmament was ‘the only way of tackling the problem of crime at its root’, and his detective novels increasingly reflected his beliefs, emphasizing that crime does not pay. Antidote to Venom was intended as a twofold experiment. First, Crofts combined an inverted crime story with a straight account of police detection by Inspector French. Second, it was ‘an effort to tell a story of crime positively’. Milward Kennedy was puzzled by the phrase, but Crofts meant he was writing a detective story with a clear moral purpose.
George Surridge is the respected Director of Birmington Zoo, but his marriage is unhappy and his precarious finances are compromised by a gambling habit. When he falls for a demure widow, he harbours thoughts of murdering an elderly aunt from whom he expects to inherit. The aunt dies of natural causes, but her solicitor has stolen her assets, leaving George in deep trouble. He finds himself sucked into a criminal conspiracy to kill someone else in order to recoup his losses. The zoo background is crucial to the plot, as the victim is killed by snake venom. But the precise method by which the murder is committed remains obscure until Inspector French – more receptive here than usual to ‘psychology’ – starts to investigate. A page of the book is devoted to diagrams clarifying the complicated means of murder.
The moral is that George faced a choice of doing right or wrong, and not, as George saw it, between two evils. At the end of the book, however, George finds redemption in God. Venom is to be found, as the chapter titles make clear, not only in snakes but in many different aspects of human life. For Crofts, the ‘antidote to venom’ is the love of God. George has sinned, but he is able to find redemption, and ‘a peace he had never known before’, despite having to pay the price demanded by the law for what he has done.
The story suffers from Crofts’ limited skills of characterization. Nancy, the woman for whom George risks everything, is a cipher, and when George’s haughty wife Clarissa mends her ways at the end of the book, the effect is unconvincing. Overall, Antidote for Venom was an ambitious but flawed attempt to write detective fiction with a religious message at its core. If Sayers had attempted something similar, the result might have been memorable, but the boldness of Crofts’ unique experiment attracted less attention than it deserved.
Carr, Christie and Crofts were, like Wade, writing with as much energy as ever. But along with Berkeley, Sayers and Kennedy, some other Detection Club members were losing their love of the game. Life was becoming too serious for novelists whose only interest in crime lay in its possibilities for creating puzzles.
Evelyn Waugh, biographer of Ronald Knox, acknowledged that Knox ‘had no concerns with the passions of the murderer, the terror of the victim, or the moral enormity of the crime’. His best novel, The Body in the Silo, was a quintessential country house mystery, complete with a map, a cipher based on an early form of shorthand, and clue-finder footnotes. The Bredons become involved in an ‘elopement hunt’, a variant of the ‘scavenger hunts’ popular in the Thirties, only for one of their fellow guests to be found dead in the hosts’ grain silo. The culprit kills the wrong person by mistake, and eventually dies as a result of a further mishap while trying to target the originally intended victim. The paradoxes are reminiscent of Chesterton, but Knox was never able to write a detective novel matching the satiric brilliance of ‘Broadcasting from the Barricades’. His career in crime ended with a whimper thanks to an incident on a Hellenic cruise.
Sailing the Mediterranean, Knox’s most devoted admirer, Lady Acton, read the fifth and final Miles Bredon novel, Double Cross Purposes. She was so unimpressed that she hurled the book into the sea – together with her lipstick (Knox disliked women wearing ‘paint’). Knox’s bishop was equally dubious about his indulgence in criminal frivolity, and within a couple years Knox left the Oxford chaplaincy to become chaplain on the Actons’ estate at Aldenham, where he concentrated on translating The Bible afresh from Latin. He remained incurably frivolous, and claimed that, in an audience with the Pope, they spent half an hour talking about the Loch Ness Monster.
Detective fiction darkened in tone, reflecting the mood of the nation. Yet even during the Twenties, a strong sense of evil had pervaded H. C. Bailey’s writing. Bailey was that rare beast, a shy journalist, and he preferred to spend time at home with his wife and daughter rather than out carousing with Carr and company in the Detection Club. His stories were admired by Sayers and Christie, and reflected his powerful moral sense. In stark contrast to Ronald Knox, Bailey believed that ‘if detective stories are concerned with crime, they are serious,’ and although some of his short stories featuring Reggie Fortune were light-hearted, others were bleak and unforgiving of cruelty, especially where the victims were children or vulnerable adults.
Reggie is driven by humanity and sympathy for the underdog. According to Bailey, ‘He holds by the standard principles of conduct and responsibility, of right and wrong, of sin and punishment. He does not always accept the law of a case as justice, and has been known to act on his own responsibility in contriving the punishment of those who could not legally be found guilty or the immunity of those who were not legally innocent. A cruel crime is to him the work of a pestiliential creature … There is no more mercy for the cruel criminal than for the germs of disease.’ This might equally have been Connington, speaking about Sir Clinton Driffield.
Shadow on the Wall, the first Fortune novel, elaborated on this theme. At a Buckingham Palace garden party, his friend Lomas, chief of the CID at Scotland Yard, tells Reggie about a vindictive letter sent to the child of a woman who has committed suicide, and strange events at a fancy dress party are followed by the death of a malicious gossip. Step by step, he uncovers a conspiracy of cruelty, occasionally wandering into his laboratory and using medical and scientific expertise to analyse doped champagne or a blood smear on wood, but more often relying on his supposedly ‘simple mind’ to examine the evidence. Bailey had much less faith in science than Austin Freeman or Connington.
The final scenes, as Reggie confronts a culprit riven with hatred, and Bailey draws a parallel between cruelty and cancer, are as compelling as any in a Golden Age novel. The comparison between the shadow on the wall that Fortune sees at the fancy dress party, and the shadow on the killer’s lung, is unforgettable. Bailey’s moral sense causes the murderer to be betrayed by a failure to allow for the fundamental decency of other people. ‘That’s the real force of progress,’ Fortune says in the final paragraph, ‘The common man’s common virtues. Not the eminent expert.’
Bailey’s loathing of cruelty is an enduring strength of his writing. The trouble with Shadow on the Wall, and his work as a whole, is that sound plotting and strong themes, intelligently explored, are shrouded in a fog of literary mannerisms. Fortune moans, murmurs and mumbles along, sighing regularly and harping on so much about his ‘simple mind’ that he risks becoming tedious. For awareness of his own brilliance, he ranks with Holmes and Poirot, but without some of their redeeming qualities. Bailey had a great deal of interest to say, but he becam
e too ponderous about how he said it.
Crofts and Bailey, both born in the Victorian age, believed in moral absolutes. The younger generation of crime writers grappled with moral ambiguities. Nicholas Blake explored the obsessive nature of revenge and the working of a guilty conscience in The Beast Must Die, which offers both a study in psychological complexity and a crafty game played with story structure. This memorable book, later filmed by Claude Chabrol, echoes Henry Wade’s Mist on the Saltings in its bleak mood and grim finale. The first section of the book is narrated by detective novelist Felix Lane, who pays due tribute to his ‘colleagues in the thriller racket’, John Dickson Carr, Gladys Mitchell and Berkeley. The opening paragraph is as striking as Berkeley’s best: ‘I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him.’
Lane’s beloved son has been killed in a hit-and-run accident, and he sets about tracing the reckless motorist. In the second section of the book, written in the third person, Lane’s scheme is discovered by his quarry, and in the third section, once murder has occurred, Nigel Strangeways is brought into the picture, with a view to establishing Lane’s innocence. An ingenious plot is unravelled in the fourth section and, as with the culprit in Wade’s novel, the murderer’s conscience does not allow the punishment of someone innocent.
The Beast Must Die is one of the few Golden Age novels where a child is a key figure in the story, and the clever way Blake combines a kind of ‘inverted’ crime novel and traditional detection is complemented by compelling characterization. Like Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and Richard Hull in Murder of My Aunt and Murder Isn’t Easy, an interesting if flawed novel set in the world of advertising, Blake exploits the trust the reader places in a first-person narrator, in a classic example of tricky storytelling technique.
The Golden Age of Murder Page 39