The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  Along with Margery Allingham and Michael Innes, Blake was one of the ‘young masters’ acclaimed by John Strachey in his seminal article for The Saturday Review, ‘The Golden Age of English Detection’. Describing himself as a ‘steady student’ of the detective novel, Strachey argued that ‘some of these detective novels are far better jobs, on any account, than are nine-tenths of the more pretentious and ambitious highbrow novels’. Although he disliked Sayers’ Gaudy Night, he thought Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors ‘glow with a vitality which, in spite of their absurdities, justified her vast success’.

  For Strachey, like so many of his contemporaries, detective fiction offered much-needed escape from grim reality and dread about what the future might hold. Knowing that his name appeared on a Nazi death list, he had a suicide pill prepared. If Germany invaded Britain, he expected to be tortured before being killed, and suicide seemed preferable. These fears did not seem fantastic – they were shared by other left-wing intellectuals. His sister Amabel Williams-Ellis, wife of the architect who built the fantasy Italian-style village of Portmeirion in North Wales, also kept a suicide pill. Strachey and his sister never needed to kill themselves, but Brecht’s friend, the German Marxist Walter Benjamin, took a fatal dose of morphine to avoid falling into the hands of the Nazis.

  The late Lord Balfour was reputed to read one detective story a night, and Franklin D. Roosevelt was a fan, leading Strachey to wonder whether their literary taste was shared by Neville Chamberlain, and to add the withering comment that perhaps the Prime Minister never felt ‘any need of escape from the world of which he is so largely the architect; for he sees nothing wrong with such a world’.

  Two thriller writers who did see a great deal wrong with the world were making their mark, and both men saw the answers in terms of politics rather than religion or moralizing. Their attitudes were very different from the reactionary worldviews of popular contemporaries Sapper, Phillips Oppenheim and Dornford Yates. Both were elected to the Detection Club after the Second World War, when Sayers, Berkeley and their colleagues saw that everything had changed, including crime fiction.

  Paul Winterton, a journalist who became well-known for thrillers written as Andrew Garve, started with Death Beneath Jerusalem, published under the pseudonym of Roger Bax. The story is set in a tense pre-war Jerusalem, with the British military struggling to contain the threat of Arab insurrection. Anyone reading the story with an open mind at the time would struggle to believe that the British Mandate for Palestine could be sustained.

  Eric Ambler, the son of music hall artistes who ran a puppet show, dropped out of an engineering course, and joined an advertising agency – one of the few things, other than membership of the Detection Club, which his career had in common with Sayers’. He was only thirty when The Mask of Dimitrios appeared in 1939, but by then he had already published four novels, travelled widely, and become a fervent anti-Fascist. Ambler wrote short stories about an amateur sleuth called Dr Czissar, but he believed conventional detective fiction failed to reflect the darkness of Europe in the late Thirties. His protagonist, Charles Latimer, is a sort of Douglas Cole with added vim, a lecturer on political economy who becomes a detective novelist. On a visit to Istanbul, Latimer meets Colonel Haki, a detective story fan, who offers him a plot in which the butler did it, and who also provokes his interest in a real murderer – a shadowy villain called Dimitrios, whose corpse has just been pulled out of the Bosphorus.

  Latimer has never either seen a dead man or a mortuary, and because ‘every detective story writer should see those things’, he persuades Haki to take him to inspect the body. Haki’s dossier on Dimitrios has mystifying gaps, and Latimer becomes obsessed with the idea of ‘an experiment in detection’, in which he travels around talking to people who might be able to provide him with material for ‘the strangest of biographies’. Soon Latimer is zigzagging across the Continent, encountering a string of sinister informants as his quest for the truth becomes increasingly dangerous.

  The moral landscape is bleaker than the Fenland of Fenchurch St Paul, the neat solutions of the detective genre conspicuous by their absence. Latimer’s friend Marukakis explains that a ruthless criminal like Dimitrios exists ‘because big business, his master, needs him. International big business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood!’ Latimer realizes that Dimitrios cannot be explained in terms of good and evil: ‘Good Business and Bad Business were the new theology … The logic of Michaelangelo’s David, Beethoven’s quartets and Einstein’s physics had been replaced by that of the Stock Exchange Year Book and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.’

  With gloomy wit, Latimer imagines how a judge would condemn his meddling in affairs he does not understand. At the end of the book he returns to escapism, thinking about his next mystery: ‘There was always plenty of fun to be got out of an English country village, wasn’t there? … Summer, with cricket matches on the village green, garden parties at the vicarage, the clink of teacups and the sweet smell of grass on a July evening. That was the sort of thing people liked to hear about.’

  The power and energy of Ambler’s prose took readers’ breath away, and he was one of the first British crime writers to tackle the fracturing of the moral certainties to which Christie, Crofts and others clung. Interestingly, Anthony Berkeley was among his early admirers. Yet Ambler’s time passed, just like that of the dons who wrote detective stories for amusement. He was disheartened by the Nazi–Soviet pact, and his growing estrangement from the politics of the left culminated in tax exile in Switzerland. Eventually, his pessimistic world view became oddly reminiscent of the disillusionment that tormented Berkeley.

  Notes to Chapter 30

  the Detection Club still numbered among its members prominent Christians

  Canon Whitechurch and Father Knox were not the only Golden Age novelists in holy orders. Cyril Argentine Alington (1872–1955), a former royal chaplain who became Dean of Durham in 1933, dabbled in the genre, and was a member of the panel tasked with selecting titles for publication by Collins Crime Club. James Reginald Spittal (1876–1951) was a vicar whose third, and regrettably final, whodunit, Casual Slaughters (1935), starts and ends with a meeting of a parochial church council.

  the ‘scavenger hunts’ popular in the Thirties

  ‘Scavenger hunts’ take various forms, but typically involve a competition to see who can collect a set of specified objects the quickest. Knox was fascinated by games of this kind, and his Double Cross Purposes features a treasure hunt in the Highland countryside.

  a strong sense of evil had pervaded H. C. Bailey’s writing

  My account of Bailey’s life and work has benefited from the research of Barry Pike, author of a series of articles about the Reggie Fortune stories in CADS from May 2011 to date, and of Tom Schantz, whose Rue Morgue Press has reprinted some of Bailey’s books. See also Nicholas Fuller, ‘The Moral and Social Dramas of H. C. Bailey’, CADS 54, July 2008. For a powerful example of Bailey’s journalism, see ‘Hitler’s Grim Six-Year Record in Technique of Perfidy’, Daily Telegraph, 4 September 1939.

  For Strachey, like so many of his contemporaries, detective fiction offered much-needed escape from grim reality

  The genre’s unlikely fans included Ludwig Wittgenstein, who favoured American fiction but had a soft spot for Agatha Christie; see Josef Hoffmann, ‘PI Wittgenstein and Language-Games from Detective Stories’, CADS 48, October 2005.

  31

  Frank to the Point of Indecency

  John Dickson Carr was as far apart from Ambler in his political sympathies as in his writing, but the brewing international crisis troubled every member of the Detection Club, and it cast a shadow over The Reader is Warned, published under his pen name Carter Dickson. The mysterious Herman Pennik claims to be a thought-reader who can kill without leaving any sign, external or internal, of murder. At a country house party, Pennik forecasts that the host, the husband of a mystery writer, will die before dinner –
and the man’s corpse is duly found, with no indication as to cause of death.

  When Pennik predicts the death of the author, and she dies in similarly mysterious fashion, the concept of murder by ‘Teleforce’ is seized on by the newspapers and becomes an international sensation. People wonder if Hitler and Mussolini could be disposed of by thought waves, and if bombers can be knocked out of the air by the same invisible death-rays. Pennik’s confidence that he cannot be convicted of any crime seems rash, but Carr’s second-string sleuth, Sir Henry Merrivale, deduces that the man is a cat’s-paw.

  With Teleforce debunked, at the end of the book Merrivale strikes a positive and defiant note for the benefit of Carr’s anxious readers: ‘When you hear about these super-planes, these super-weaknesses on our side, think of Teleforce too. This tendency to believe anything puts a leerin’ face on people … there never was much room for Voodoo here.’ Carr’s treatment of racial issues – in a storyline touching on Bantu fetishism – is of its time, but steers clear of bigotry. Perhaps uniquely in Golden Age fiction, the catalyst for the crimes is the first victim’s casual racism.

  Carr captured the mood of fear as war loomed. Just as in 1914, Sherlock Holmes had told Watson that an east wind was coming, cold and bitter, so there was a chill in the air as the Thirties drew to a close. In February 1939, the premature death of Torquemada, whose reviews, crosswords and detective puzzle-novella reflected the game-playing spirit of the Golden Age, seemed to symbolize the end of an era. Unemployment had fallen from its peak, but poverty remained commonplace, and the bleakness of life for working-class people in the industrial north of England was evoked in the first half of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, published by the Left Book Club in 1937.

  Perhaps the reason why working-class Northerners rarely featured in Golden Age mysteries was because little about their lives seemed either golden or mysterious. The second half of Orwell’s book was a controversial essay, questioning attitudes towards socialism. When he could not persuade Orwell to cut out the second half of the book, Gollancz tried to subvert it by writing an explanatory introduction, This was an error of judgment, although not on the same scale as his choice of Josef Stalin as his ‘Man of the Year’.

  Unexpectedly, it was Henry Wade who explored the stresses felt by poor people encountering the forces of law and order at the sharp end. As a slice of social history, Released for Death is not in Orwell’s league, but Wade’s sympathy for people under pressure is not patronizing. He traces the misadventures of a cat burglar, Toddy Shaw, released from prison only to resume his criminal career with disastrous results. When Toddy is charged with a murder he did not commit, he realizes that he has been set up. At one point, the ambitious young PC John Bragg admits to his wife that as part of his duties he is trying to win the affections of a woman who has given the real culprit an alibi. The scene is superfluous to the plot, but Wade’s willingness to show a junior officer juggling his responsibilities at work and at home signposted how the police story might develop in years to come.

  Wade surpassed himself in Lonely Magdalen, making imaginative use of a downbeat storyline. The novel is an innovatively structured account of a police investigation into the strangling of a scarred prostitute on Hampstead Heath. The first section follows Inspector Poole’s efforts to uncover the victim’s true identity, while the second steps back twenty-five years, from the brink of one world war to the brink of another, describing the poignant sequence of events that cost her a life of privilege. The final section, returning to 1939, sees a culprit identified, but Wade does not flinch from showing police brutality, while an extraordinary last-paragraph tease hints that Poole mistakenly helped to send an innocent man to the gallows. The two-way journey in time is handled adroitly, and the portrayal of life in different strata of society, and the corrosive and never-ending consequences of war, is compelling. The result was not remotely cosy or humdrum. Wade had written the finest and darkest police novel of the Golden Age.

  Christie’s response to the gathering storm was to deluge her readers with escapist entertainment. Finding herself trapped in the lift at the Carrs’ apartment block may have inspired her to devise an ‘impossible crime’ novel of her own, set at a homicidal country house Christmas party. At first, Christie called the book Blood Feast, and a key element is the double interpretation of the Shakespearean epigraph, ‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ The novel became Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, and includes one of her slickest pieces of misdirection. When Poirot questions an elderly butler about a wall calendar, causing the butler to peer at it from close range, the reader assumes that this is a clue about a significant date, but in fact the crucial piece of information is that the butler is very short-sighted.

  Leafing through the Evening Standard, Anthony Berkeley spotted a review of Christie’s book by Howard Spring which gave away the ending. Outraged, he told Carr that Spring had spoiled the story for readers: ‘You’re Secretary of the Club. You must write to him and complain.’ Carr readily agreed, but an unrepentant Spring retorted that books like Christie’s were trash. Sayers was infuriated, possibly recalling that Spring had once compared her advocacy of detective fiction to an advertising man selling toilet rolls. She insisted that the question was not about literary merit, but about whether a reviewer was entitled to ruin a reader’s enjoyment of a puzzle. Spring’s attitude seems churlish, given that only four years earlier he had rhapsodized about detective fiction in a foreword to an anthology including stories by Christie and Sayers. Did he become jealous of their greater fame? Carr fictionalized this spat in The Case of the Constant Suicides, and the episode illustrated the solidarity between Detection Club members, and the genuine regard in which her friends held Christie.

  The culprits in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and her next book, Murder is Easy, are splendidly unexpected. Christie had an unsentimental determination to outwit her readers and prove that in a detective novel nobody is ever above suspicion. Over the years, her murderers included a child, the person presumed to be the killer’s intended victim, one of the apparent victims in a series of murders, the entire cast of suspects, a pillar of the British establishment, a police officer, a narrator, a Dr Watson figure, a spinster reminiscent of Miss Marple – and Hercule Poirot himself. It is striking how many Great Detectives were prepared to commit murder themselves – in order to do justice, in the widest sense, naturally.

  The sunset of the Golden Age yielded the ultimate masterpiece of traditional detective fiction. And Then There Were None, published two months after the outbreak of war, is Christie’s most stunning achievement. Ten people are invited by a mysterious stranger to a small island; one by one, they are killed, until no one is left alive. The murders followed the pattern of an old nursery rhyme, a conceit first used by S. S. Van Dine in The Bishop Murder Case. This idea worked so well that Christie introduced nursery rhymes into several later novels, although never again did she integrate the device so perfectly with storyline and theme.

  Christie was at the peak of her powers, and set herself twin aims – to test herself as a creator of ever more ingenious plots, and to enthral her readers by presenting them with a bewildering mystery. The solution, revealed in an epilogue, is dazzling. As in Murder on the Orient Express, Christie is using the classic whodunit form to explore how to secure justice for innocent victims when the conventional legal system fails to do its job. Yet the subtext never gets in the way of the story. Christie was not as cynical about the legal status quo as Berkeley, but she had a genuine passion for justice.

  As for the Woman was the third and final book which Berkeley published as Francis Iles. ‘I wrote the book at a time of severe emotional strain,’ he confessed to John Dickson Carr. His relationship with Helen was disintegrating, and his powers as a novelist were failing. The last detective story published under the Berkeley name, Death in the House, was feeble. The ingredients of an impossible crime, a Challenge to the Reader, and a House of Commons set
ting were enticing, but the writing is lifeless. The man who for years wrote with imagination, ingenuity and industry was running out of steam. As for the Woman is in many ways a remarkable novel, but suffered because Berkeley prioritized paying off scores in his personal life rather than entertainment. There was no puzzle to solve, and few flashes of his trademark wit. Delivering a fatal blow to Berkeley’s fragile confidence, Victor Gollancz stunned him by turning it down, saying: ‘It is too sadistic.’

  Jarrolds, a less prestigious imprint, agreed to publish the book. As if determined to give it the kiss of death, they supplied a dust jacket blurb which proclaimed that the novel was ‘not a thriller’, and added alarmingly that it was ‘not intended to thrill’. The blurb, a case study in missing the point, continued: ‘It is no more, and at the same time no less, than a sincere attempt to depict the love of a young, inexperienced man for a woman much older than himself, with all its idealism, its heart burnings, and its inevitable disappointments.’ To make matters worse, the title page describes the book as ‘a love story’. The copy might have been drafted by Berkeley’s worst enemy. Perhaps he upset someone at Jarrolds.

  The dismissive phrase ‘as for the woman’ had been used by the judge in referring to Edith Thompson shortly before he sentenced her to death. Berkeley returned to his theme that guilt and innocence are as much a matter of chance as of design. It was a subject that obsessed him. He wanted to show how a murder – like that of Percy Thompson – might happen almost by accident, as a horrifying form of wish-fulfilment.

  Berkeley’s protagonist, Alan Littlewood, is an Oxford undergraduate who, while convalescing from illness, becomes infatuated with a doctor’s wife. Having won his sympathy by confiding that her husband makes her indulge in perversions, she proceeds to seduce him. In a weird and suggestive sequence, Alan is persuaded by his lover to disguise himself as a girl, and goes on the run in women’s clothing. She has a masochistic streak, and that disturbing touch of inadequately suppressed violence towards women so characteristic of Berkeley surfaces once more. The book offers an insight into what passed for explicit sexual action immediately before the Second World War. Tame as the sex scenes seem in the age of Fifty Shades of Grey, the book was judged ‘frank to the point of indecency’ by author and critic J. D. Beresford, who twenty years earlier had recommended Collins to take Freeman Wills Crofts’ The Cask.