The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  Jarrolds announced the forthcoming publication of a book called On His Deliverance, and a Berkeley novel called Poison Pipe was also supposed to appear in 1941, but neither was published, and no trace of the manuscripts has been found. Berkeley had burned out. Like Sayers, he was finished as a detective novelist, but for a very different reason.

  The times were changing. A terrifying novel by an illustrious founder member of the Detection Club showed the way forward for novelists of psychological suspense who wanted to explore the nature of evil. This groundbreaking novel was written not by Bailey or Blake or Berkeley, but by Hugh Walpole. The idea for the story obsessed him ‘as no idea for a book ever has done’ for three years before he wrote out a synopsis in 1937, the year he was knighted. With the unquenchable optimism of someone born, or doomed, to be a writer, Walpole thought the book ‘will undoubtedly write itself and should be my best macabre and one of the best ever if it comes out right’. Yet like many brilliant ideas for novels, it proved challenging to execute, and he did not finish work on the book until the Luftwaffe was blitzing London. Ill health had taken hold, and a coronary thrombosis killed Walpole a few months before The Killer and the Slain saw the light of day.

  The concept of The Killer and the Slain was simple but superb. A prissy novelist, John Ozias Talbot is driven to murder an old schoolfriend, but gradually metamorphoses, physically and morally, into his degenerate tormentor, James Oliphant Tunstall. Split personalities fascinated Walpole so much that he was surely intrigued by Anthony Berkeley. This probably explains why Talbot’s finest book bears a striking resemblance to Before the Fact. Walpole, almost as much a true crime buff as Berkeley, drew on a real-life criminal case, the trial of one John Tunstall for attacking his wife’s lover. On one level, Tunstall’s crudity and character flaws reflect Adolf Hitler’s, and in the final section of the book Walpole launches a searing attack on the cruelty of Nazism. Beyond the political message, there is a timeless aspect to this sexually charged riff on the Jekyll and Hyde theme, in which heterosexual and homosexual passions are conveyed subtly but with genuine power. Publication in wartime, with the author already cold in his grave, meant that The Killer and the Slain was destined for obscurity. The final tragedy of Walpole’s life was that his posthumous masterpiece never received the acclaim it deserved.

  Notes to Chapter 31

  his choice of Josef Stalin as his ‘Man of the Year’

  Gollancz was invited to choose his Man of the Year by Cavalcade magazine in November 1937, and explained that Stalin ‘is safely guiding Russia on the road to a society in which there will be no exploitation’. Gollancz was not alone in his misplaced enthusiasm for the Russian leader. Maxim Litvinov, a former Bolshevik revolutionary, accepted an appointment as Stalin’s Commissar of People’s Affairs in 1932; in the same year, Litvinov’s London-born wife Ivy (1889–1977) published His Master’s Voice, although her publishers advised her not to use the Litvinov name, since ‘readers of detective fiction prefer an English author’. American publishers rejected the book, one reader saying: ‘We advise Ivy Low to cut out the stuff about spring over the Kremlin, and put in another murder or two.’ A couple of years later, Ivy entertained Margaret Cole to afternoon tea when a party of socialist thinkers visited Soviet Russia, following Labour’s general election wipe-out, to learn how society ought to be run. Ivy wrote no more mysteries, and Margaret Cole justly described her solo effort as ‘odd’. Maxim and Ivy both had Jewish origins, and after the war Stalin had Maxim killed when it suited him to indulge in a campaign of anti-Semitism. Maxim’s last words to Ivy were, reputedly, ‘Englishwoman, go home.’

  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’

  The jacket artwork itself, which featured a bland rural landscape, was utilized by Jarrolds for other books, an act of frugality uncommon among even the most parsimonious publishers.

  J. D. Beresford, who twenty years earlier recommended Collins to take Freeman Wills Crofts’ The Cask

  John Davys Beresford (1873–1947) was a versatile writer admired by Orwell among others. He occasionally wrote detective fiction, although his best-known novel, The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), is science fiction. His daughter Elisabeth, a children’s writer, created the Wombles of Wimbledon Common. His son Marcus changed his name to Marc Brandel, had an improbable fling with the lesbian writer and later Detection Club member Patricia Highsmith, and went on to publish a handful of crime novels and to write screenplays for television series such as Burke’s Law.

  32

  Shocked by the Brethren

  As the threat posed by Hitler intensified, Sayers volunteered her services to the War Office. She was invited to join a committee tasked with briefing authors about how they could best help in the event of war. Other members included A. P. Herbert and the novelist and critic L. A. G. Strong, who later contributed dialogue to a film version of Busman’s Honeymoon that Sayers refused to watch. The secretary to the committee was A. D. Peters, the first husband of Berkeley’s second wife. Sayers became as frustrated by the inefficiency of the civil servants as by the BBC when masterminding Behind the Screen and The Scoop. The Ministry of Information, like Joe Ackerley, found her impossible to work with, and an internal memo described her as ‘very difficult and loquacious’. Before long, she and the Ministry parted company.

  The ‘phoney war’ following Neville Chamberlain’s announcement that Great Britain was at a state of war with Germany was nicely evoked in Dorothy Bowers’ Deed without a Name. Chamberlain had not only announced the beginning of war, but also, in effect, the end of the Golden Age of detective fiction, less than nine months after John Strachey introduced the term. Nothing would be the same again.

  The BBC broadcast a series of plays by Berkeley and other members in 1940, the Detection Club’s last significant venture for years. The Blitz meant dinner meetings were no longer feasible, and Punshon wryly dedicated Ten Star Clues, which he was composing at the time, ‘to THE SIREN whose irresistible song so often lured the writer from his work’. Punshon remained in London, as did Anthony Gilbert, who told Sayers that she did not think Punshon would be ‘put out by a bomb. I feel [the bomb] would go in another direction if it realised he was near by.’ In October, Sayers wrote to Gilbert, saying she thought the Club’s premises in Gerrard Street were still standing, if only because nobody had told her otherwise. She urged Gilbert to put the Minute Book and some of the prints that hung on the walls in a place of greater safety, but admitted that it was difficult to know where would be safer. It was a frightening time.

  Sayers and the Club suffered a cruel blow with the death, at the age of forty-two, of Helen Simpson. Sayers had noticed her friend’s face gradually ‘getting smaller and smaller’, a grim clue to an inoperable cancer. At the convalescent home where she died, Simpson told the sister how much she admired Sayers. Shocked by the loss of the vibrant and gifted Australian, Sayers wrote a poignant obituary for The Spectator. The death of the woman with whom she had discussed in depth her plans for Thrones, Dominations was the final nail in the coffin of that last projected Wimsey novel.

  After Simpson’s death, Sayers concentrated on translation and religious work, such as The Mind of the Maker, a study of creativity from a Christian perspective. The Man Born to Be King, a radio drama produced by Val Gielgud, was highly successful, although some conservative Christians disliked it, and some even suggested that the fall of Singapore was a sign of God’s displeasure with the portrayal of Christ by a human actor. Sayers’ personal view was that her finest achievement was her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

  Club funds were severely depleted, causing a problem with the payment of rent to the landlord in Gerrard Street, ‘J. P. Isaia, Human Hair Merchant, Importer and Exporter’, who sounds rather like a shady character in a novel by one of the members. Emergency donations of two pounds per head were sought, although Margaret Cole improbably pleaded poverty. Thieves
broke into the premises, but they did not bother to steal a motley collection of items including a chiffonier and other bits of furniture, together with saucepans, china tea, beer, and the Club library. Once the war was over, the Detection Club met again, but the miseries of war had taken their toll. John Dickson Carr found the occasion chastening: ‘The brethren shocked me by looking much greyer and more worn.’ He was dismayed that Sayers was devoting herself to Dante, but although he and Henry Wade tried to persuade her to write more detective fiction, their pleas fell on deaf ears.

  Carr told Frederic Dannay, who now combined fiction with editing the highly influential Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, that the Club was finding it difficult to gain new members of distinction. In the United States, the private eye novels of Hammett and Chandler had overtaken elaborate whodunits in popularity, although Ellery Queen moved with the times. The Queen novels became less ornately plotted and artificial, but the Detection Club’s influence persisted. The plot of Calamity Town, first of the more naturalistic Queen stories, was a remix of Before the Fact, with a hint of Peril at End House and a few drops of Strong Poison.

  Carr told Dannay in 1946 that the Detection Club had ceased to function, but he was wrong. Seven new members were elected over the next couple of years, although Dorothy Bowers, widely seen as a worthy successor to Sayers, died young of tuberculosis. She learned from Sayers that she had been elected to join the remaining members (she was told there were twenty-two; there may have been unrecorded resignations, as well as deaths), and wrote a poignant letter to a friend, hoping – in vain, as it proved – that her health would recover to allow her to take part in her initiation ritual and resume her writing: ‘Much as I’d welcome greater financial success for my books, I do appreciate still more this recognition by fellow craftsmen.’ These sentiments have been echoed by many Club members over the years. Three other new recruits (Cyril Hare, Christianna Brand and Edmund Crispin) did become major figures in the genre, and so did Michael Innes and Michael Gilbert, elected in 1949. Sayers recognized the need for an injection of youth and vitality, and became frustrated by Berkeley’s cussedness in objecting to candidates other than his own. He did not seem to care whom he offended, and wrote a rude letter to Punshon, now the Secretary, insisting that he had a right of veto over recruitment. This prompted the imperturbable older man to remind him to pay his subscription. As Sayers said to Milward Kennedy, ‘We had better hasten to elect some new members before [Berkeley] Molotovs the lot!’

  Photos by Elisabeth Chat featured in Picture Post’s ‘Behind the Whodunits’ in 1952 featuring G.D.H. and M. Cole in their Flamstead home; Gladys Mitchell promoting sports training for schoolgirls at Brentford; Oxford men Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake; and railway enthusiast Freeman Wills Crofts demonstrating how signals were meant to imitate the action of the human arm.

  Sayers and Berkeley were not alone in falling out of love with writing detective novels. Shortly before the outbreak of war, Milward Kennedy found himself writing a mystery for children, Who Was Old Willy? The book featured a ‘challenge to the reader’, but the old zest had been killed off by Philip Yale Drew’s libel action. After the war, Kennedy forsook pioneering detective fiction for thrillers. He could still come up with fresh ideas – the political assassination idea at the heart of Escape to Quebec broadly anticipates Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal – but failed to make best use of them. His final crime-fighting hero was a Canadian Mountie.

  The Coles’ last detective novel was written by Douglas. Halfway through their next effort, Margaret became so bored that she stopped work, and never resumed. For a while, she continued to turn up for Detection Club dinners, where her spiky manner irritated younger writers like Christianna Brand. After Douglas died, Margaret remained as keeper of the flame, and in her seventies she published his biography – under the imposing name of Dame Margaret Cole. Her final crusade was as a campaigner for comprehensive education; like Berkeley, her confidence that she knew what was best for other people never wavered. She died shortly after the nation elected as Prime Minister another Margaret equally untroubled by self-doubt.

  E. R. Punshon published mysteries until he was eighty-three years old, but R. C. Woodthorpe lacked staying power. After the prophetically titled Put out that Light appeared in 1940, he lived for more than thirty years, but never published another book. He seems to have lost touch even with Allingham and Pip, while his failure to respond to a request for a story for Detection Medley irritated John Rhode. This reserved and very private man vanished so completely from the scene that his name has been almost completely airbrushed from the history of the genre, as well as from the Club’s list of members.

  Connington’s poor health contributed to the variable quality of his later work. Henry Wade also suffered various ailments, but continued to craft enjoyable novels until the late Fifties. H. C. Bailey, another devoted family man, retired from The Daily Telegraph and moved to the idyllically situated house in North Wales where, decades earlier, he had first met his wife. His last novel, featuring the hymn-singing solicitor Joshua Clunk, appeared in 1950, but his great days were over long before then.

  The same was true of John Rhode – although his production line continued to clank and whirr until the Sixties – and of Freeman Wills Crofts. Crofts prided himself on his scrupulous research, but all authors make mistakes. He and the librarian from Harrods were once invited to tea by two Mancunian businessmen, who challenged him about one of his books, where a quarter of a million pounds in single notes is carried in two suitcases. Did he realize that, even if tightly packed, they would occupy ten cubic feet and weight two hundredweight? In 1955, a couple of years before his death, Crofts included a rueful inscription in Many a Slip, a collection of his short stories: ‘Now that I see these little tales in book form, I think they should have been further expanded, with more build up of the characters. Alas, that is now too late!’

  John Dickson Carr kept dreaming up tricky methods of killing people in locked rooms, but increasingly resorted to historical settings to disguise the essential lack of realism in his impossible crime scenarios. Clarice became so concerned by his binge-drinking, and his fondness for taking chloral hydrate to aid recovery, that she persuaded him to seek professional help. The drinking did not stop, and it wrecked his health. He was afflicted by hypochondria as well as an incurable distaste for the post-war world. On one occasion he was taken to hospital after overdosing on chloral hydrate when drunk, and the newspapers interpreted this as an attempt at suicide. Sayers’ priority was – according to Christianna Brand – to protect the Club’s reputation, and she told the Press that this was ‘not our John Dickson Carr at all’.

  Carr recovered, and resumed writing. His career ended with The Hungry Goblin, a weak effort featuring Sayers’ old hero Wilkie Collins as a detective. The locked room mystery fell out of vogue, before enjoying a revival decades later, thanks to the popularity of television series such as Jonathan Creek and Death in Paradise in Britain and Monk in the US. The puzzle in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is termed, in the English translation, a ‘locked room mystery’, though Larsson’s scenario actually offers a ‘closed circle’.

  Christopher Bush and E. C. R. Lorac churned out books for the rest of their lives, and Anthony Gilbert, Ngaio Marsh and Gladys Mitchell were equally prolific. Nicholas Blake led his double life as crime writer and poet with distinction and boundless energy. During his first marriage, he pursued a lengthy affair with the novelist Rosamund Lehmann, before abandoning both wife and mistress to marry a young and beautiful actress, Jill Balcon. Their son Daniel became an admired actor, their daughter Tamsin a successful film-maker.

  Margery Allingham died at the age of sixty-two after a long period of poor health punctuated by bouts of depression, which at one point led to her undergoing electroconvulsive therapy. Despite her private torments, she became one of the leading women detective novelists of the twentieth century. Pip Youngman Carter completed Allingh
am’s last novel about Albert Campion and wrote two more by himself. He achieved posthumous notoriety when it emerged that he had fathered a child with the journalist, media celebrity and writer of humorous detective novels Nancy Spain. What made the affair startling was that she was also a lesbian of iconic status. Their son Tom was brought up by Spain’s lover, Joan Werner Laurie, and his parentage was not publicly acknowledged until after the deaths of both Pip and Spain (who was killed along with Joan in an aeroplane crash as she was on her way to commentate on the Grand National). Spain was considered for membership of the Detection Club in the Fifties, but turned down – because of the flimsiness of her books, not because anyone knew the truth about Tom.

  As for Ngaio Marsh, her long and successful career was belatedly marked in 1974 by her election to the Club whose initiation ritual had made such a lasting impression on her thirty-seven years earlier. The honour delighted her, but she was not well enough to travel from her home in New Zealand to attend.

  Tastes were changing. Books in the Golden Age style continued to be written, and enjoyed, and several new writers of talent emerged. The dominant crime novelists, however, belonged to a generation preoccupied by the challenges of life in the Atomic Era. Traditional mysteries were perceived as past their sell-by date, and people who did not care to read them were nevertheless happy to make sweeping generalizations about them which contributed to the crude stereotyping of Golden Age fiction that persists to this day.