Sayers dominated the Detection Club to the end of her life, and continued to insist that candidates for membership must write books of quality. This requirement often gave rise to fierce debate, especially when Berkeley was in argumentative mood. She exploited her contacts in the hierarchy of the Church of England to find new premises for the Club, at Kingly Street, in a building owned by the Church. When Bentley, during a sad descent into alcoholism, gave up the Presidency at the end of 1949, she was his natural successor. Objections to the thriller writers were dropped, while the first Jewish member, Julian Symons, was elected on the strength of a handful of promising books, long before he became a master of the crime novel, which (to the continuing dismay of purists) he saw as a linear successor to the classic detective story.
Mac Fleming, whose heavy drinking contributed to prolonged ill-health, died of a stroke in 1950. For Sayers, motherhood continued to be a bittersweet experience. She was thrilled to see John Anthony follow in Peter Wimsey’s footsteps, winning a scholarship to Balliol, and taking a first class degree. Her taste in clothes continued to be unorthodox – the only time she wore evening dress was for Detection Club dinners, and even then she never wore anything new, because ‘excited torchbearers are apt to spill hot wax all over one while arguing about procedure’ before the initiation ritual.
Michael Gilbert and his wife bumped into Sayers in London while shopping for Christmas cards in 1957. A few days later, the Gilberts received a card from her, but by that time she was dead. She was found at the foot of the stairs in the house in Witham, surrounded by Christmas presents. John Anthony was the sole beneficiary in her will. A few months before his own death, he told Sayers’ friend and biographer Barbara Reynolds, ‘She did the best she could.’
Sayers had seemed irreplaceable, but the Detection Club needed a new President. In conversations at her memorial service (with readings by Val Gielgud and Cyril Hare, and a panegyric by C. S. Lewis), Michael Gilbert urged fellow members to elect Agatha Christie. Christie was desperate to avoid joining organizations, let alone leading one, and made an unlikely figurehead. Nevertheless, she agreed to become President, demonstrating the depth of her continuing devotion to the Detection Club. At her initiation, Allingham, once so sceptical about the Club, took the role of Skull-Bearer, solemnly carrying Eric on his cushion.
Christie imposed one condition before taking office: that she should not be called upon to deliver any speeches. Lord Gorell (disrespectfully known by younger writers as ‘Lord Sheep’) agreed to undertake the public speaking, but insisted on being appointed co-President, and held that role until his death in 1963. After that, Christie continued in office alone for another thirteen years, with the legwork undertaken by Honorary Secretaries such as the lawyer Michael Underwood. Yet on one occasion never forgotten by those who witnessed it, she broke her own rule, and donned the President’s red satin robe, filling it almost as amply as Chesterton had done. She read out her part of the ritual with unexpected brio, demanding of the initiate, ‘Is there anything you hold sacred?’ with a startling mixture of humour and solemnity. As Harry Keating said, the shrinking violet had transformed into ‘trumpeting fierce-coloured African Queen Lily’. When in her last years she was too frail to attend dinners, she offered to stand down, but was persuaded to remain in office for the rest of her life.
Anthony Berkeley longed to be President of the Club, and felt it his due. The trouble was that he had alienated too many of his colleagues with his unpredictable moods and bad temper. At one point he even argued that the jokey title ‘First Freeman’ he awarded himself when the Club was set up gave him a right of veto over new members. A neat compromise would have been to ask him to act as co-President with Christie. Surely this solution occurred to a group of people with unrivalled gifts for unravelling complicated puzzles? Perhaps they feared Berkeley would become unbearable and the convivial atmosphere at Club dinners would be ruined. Berkeley’s reaction was to sever all connections with the Club he had founded.
Notes to Chapter 32
the Detection Club’s last significant venture for years
Correspondence between members during the war, and in years that followed, with a focus on discussion about whether prospective new members ‘played fair’ with their readers, is summarized in Evans, Curtis, Was Corinne’s Murder Clued?, the title of which comes from debate about the merit of Douglas G. Browne’s fiction. Browne (1884–1963), grandson of Charles Dickens’ illustrator Hablot K. Browne, alias ‘Phiz’, also co-wrote a biography of Bernard Spilsbury.
Dorothy Bowers … died young of tuberculosis
My understanding of Bowers’ life has been aided by information supplied by Tom Schantz, whose Rue Morgue Press have reprinted all her novels.
Bentley, during a sad descent into alcoholism, gave up the Presidency
Bentley’s problems with drink are referred to in the memoirs of his son Nicolas.
Spain was considered for membership of the Detection Club in the Fifties, but turned down
See Nancy Spain, Why I’m Not a Millionaire (London: Hutchinson, 1956). Spain (1917–64) was a columnist for the Daily Express, which boasted: ‘They call her Vulgar; they call her Unscrupulous; they have called her the worst-dressed woman in Britain.’ She based her amateur sleuth Miriam Birdseye on the actor Hermione Gingold, who was at one time married to Val Gielgud’s BBC colleague and crime-writing collaborator Eric Maschwitz.
several new writers of talent emerged
They included Anthony Shaffer (1926–2001) and his brother Peter Shaffer. The Shaffer twins collaborated on two entertaining novels in the classic cerebral style in the Fifties. According to Anthony, he provided the basic plots and the pair wrote alternate chapters, while Peter had previously produced one solo effort with illustrations by E. C. Bentley’s son Nicolas. Later, they both earned fame separately, writing plays as diverse (and successful) as Sleuth and Equus. Anthony also worked on several screenplays based on Christie’s novels, and describes encounters with the Queen of Crime and with Hitchcock in his breezy if perhaps not entirely reliable memoir So What Did You Expect? (London: Picador, 2001).
Michael Gilbert and his wife bumped into Sayers in London
See Michael Gilbert, ‘A Personal Memoir’ in Dorothy L. Sayers: the Centenary Celebration.
In conversations at her memorial service … Michael Gilbert urged fellow members to elect Agatha Christie
This emerges from copies of correspondence with the Honorary Secretary of the Detection Club, which also disclose Christie’s offer to stand down as President and her reluctance to have the BBC film the ritual.
Agatha Christie and her publisher Billy Collins.
Part Seven
Unravelling the Mysteries
33
Murder Goes On Forever
How can we unravel the mysteries of the Detection Club? It is time to settle down in an armchair in the library, review the evidence, and do a little detective work. What, for instance, did Agatha Christie mean when she inscribed Murder in Mesopotamia ‘with love from one who may have done crimes unsuspected not detected!?’ Her light-hearted choice of words was a kind of false confession. She had not broken the law, but in writing the novel, she’d committed a social crime. After biding her time for years, she had paid back Katharine Woolley, domineering wife of the archaeologist Leonard Woolley, for reacting so poisonously to her marriage to Max Mallowan.
Christie emulated Anthony Berkeley, taking revenge through fiction as she drew on her experience of an archaeological dig for the novel’s background. Several characters had real-life counterparts. Nurse Amy Leatheran resembles Christie, Max is represented by the amiable David Emmott, while Father Eric Burrows, a cleric who had specialized in the translation of cuneiform tablets, becomes Father Lavigny. The plot depends on an impersonation wildly unlikely even by Golden Age standards – Torquemada reckoned it ‘near impossible’.
The biting portrayal of the murder victim is more memorable than the storyline. Louise Le
idner is beautiful yet appalling, variously compared to La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the Snow Queen and a swamp creature. Poirot says she possesses a ‘calamitous magic’. Like the killer in the story, Louise Leidner was impersonating someone. She was a very thinly disguised version of Katharine Woolley. Christie seldom unsheathed her claws, but this novel reveals her fury at Katharine Woolley’s treatment of her. And that cryptic inscription provides an insight into Christie’s nature. She did not simply love mysteries, she relished being mysterious.
One serious crime of which she was briefly suspected was treason. Early in the Second World War, MI5 speculated that she was guilty of disclosing national secrets. Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime, a traitor? She was certainly the least likely of suspects. Time after time, however, Poirot and Marple demonstrated that nobody is above suspicion. Her novel N or M?, in which the Beresfords track Nazi spies, featured a suspicious character called Major Bletchley. Even more alarmingly, she had moved into the Isokon Building, the modernist block of flats in Lawn Road, Hampstead. This experiment in semi-communal living was the first building in Britain constructed with reinforced concrete – a safe haven that attracted as residents a number of Soviet spies, including the Kuczynski family and Eva Collett Reckitt. The authorities panicked. Was Christie a woman who knew too much? Was she taunting the establishment, by making Major Bletchley’s name a clue to treachery? Would she betray the secret work undertaken at Bletchley Park to crack the German Enigma code?
Dilly Knox, brother of Ronald, was sent for. He was working on cryptanalysis at Bletchley, and knew Christie personally; presumably through guest visits to Detection Club dinners. When he was quizzed about how much she knew about Enigma, he found it impossible to believe either that she had stumbled upon the secret of Bletchley, or that she would give it away if she had. But his superiors feared there was no smoke without fire.
Dilly was asked to approach her and find out why she had mentioned Bletchley. The codebreaker duly invited the crime writer to meet for tea and scones. After the initial pleasantries, Knox led the conversation to the subject of N or M? At last he dared to put the question – why mention Bletchley? He studied her carefully. Would she lie or bluster, or even break down?
Christie responded with a gentle smile: ‘My dear, I was stuck there for ages one day travelling on the train from Oxford to London. It was so dreadful, I took revenge by giving the name to one of the most odious people in the book.’
Dilly probably never realized that for Christie, the main attraction of the Isokon Building was not living cheek by jowl with spies (although there are hints of her acquaintance with the Kuczynskis in N or M?) but that it was also home to Stephen Glanville, the Eygptologist who helped her to research Akhnaton and the man to whom, after Max, she was closest. She treated him as a confidant when Max was away from home.
Sometimes coincidences are genuine. We need to temper our sleuthing instincts with realism when reading between the lines of a detective novel. Finding answers to the questions that persist about Christie’s disappearance is a particular challenge. She hated talking about those missing days, and gave no explanation of them in her autobiography. So we have no neat and rational explanation of what happened, with all the loose ends tied up, in the manner of her books. Theories abound, ranging from the plausible to the playful. Kathleen Tynan’s entertaining but far-fetched screenplay for the film Agatha saw Christie, played by Vanessa Redgrave, disorientated by electroconvulsive therapy. A witty episode of Doctor Who had her rendered unconscious by an alien in the form of a giant wasp.
Could she have engineered her disappearance to publicize her books, as a hostile Press believed? The evidence shows that in the first half of the Twenties she took part in promotional stunts, such as the mock trial presided over by G. K. Chesterton. In The Secret Adversary, Jane Finn faked amnesia – might Christie have adopted her own character’s ploy?
Any detective who pays the slightest heed to the psychology of the suspect cannot believe the disappearance was designed to raise her public profile. Christie was far too self-effacing. Even at the time of publishing her breakthrough novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, she did little or nothing to promote it. She saw her job as to write. Selling books was emphatically the responsibility of her publisher. The mock trial is a red herring. She took part for the fun of it, and in any event she did so not to promote herself but In the Next Room, a play adapted by two other women, the now obscure duo of Harriet Ford and former actress Eleanor Robson, from the novel by Burton E. Stevenson.
Archie, and even the loyal Madge, suspected that she wanted her disappearance to result in publicity – but aimed at damaging him rather than selling more books. This is more credible. Long after her divorce, she wrote books which hinted at her preoccupation with Archie’s infidelity, and it is tempting to believe that she meant to punish him for it. Her most autobiographical novel is Unfinished Portrait, published under the Westmacott name, which is not a detective story; the heroine is a woman who contemplates suicide in the aftermath of divorce. Among her mysteries, Death in the Clouds is one of several in which a seemingly attractive young man nurses a discreditable secret. Occasionally, she also let characters voice her own feelings.
‘Men always approve of dowdy women – but when it comes to brass tacks, the dressed-up trollops win hands down! Sad, but there it is.’ So says Sarah Blake in ‘Triangle at Rhodes’. She was probably speaking for Christie.
‘There is a horrid side of one,’ Sarah adds, ‘that enjoys accidents and public calamities and unpleasant things that happen to one’s friends.’ This reflects the response to Christie’s disappearance, including Sayers’ eager participation in the hunt for clues. Although Christie kept her counsel, years passed before the scars caused by Archie’s adultery, and the public and Press hostility her disappearance aroused, began to heal. It may be no coincidence that, in one of her accounts of Bentley’s initiation, Ngaio Marsh said Christie did not attend the dinner or ritual but turned up at Gerrard Street later in the evening. The Chief Constable of Surrey Police was a guest speaker at the dinner, although he had not been in post at the time of her disappearance. Remembering Superintendent Kenward’s public pronouncements about her, Christie would be keen to avoid opening old wounds through an encounter with Surrey Police.
The truth about the disappearance is almost certainly chaotic and incoherent. Christie was desperate to run away from the horror of her marriage’s collapse. Perhaps she hoped, in a confused way, that her flight would somehow bring Archie to his senses and enable them to salvage something from the wreckage.
The woman who planned her mysteries with such care, whose great detective was obsessed with logic and the need to use ‘the little grey cells’, exposed herself to public humiliation with no rational thought about the consequences of her actions, and no idea of what to do next. It was crazy and self-defeating, the result of unbearable emotional stress. Her determination to remain silent about the episode stemmed from a sense of guilt and shame, especially over her abandonment of her young daughter.
Christie was far too harsh on herself. She was a victim, but too strong to wallow in victimhood, and too proud to seek help before she cracked. Her extreme reaction to Archie’s infidelity demonstrates more vividly than any psychiatrist’s diagnosis the harm she suffered when her secure family life was destroyed. This left a mark on her writing. The ‘ordeal by innocence’ undergone by ordinary people whose lives are disrupted by murder recurs in her writing as often as the ‘wronged man’ in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
It does not take a Poirot to deduce that Christie was innocent, not guilty. The ordeal she suffered was greater and longer-lasting than Archie’s short-term embarrassment when his matrimonial misdemeanours came under public scrutiny. She never committed a real ‘crime unsuspected not detected’, and the passion for justice evident in her finest work was driven by her empathy for those who suffer injustice through no fault of their own.
Clues to the mysteries surrounding
Dorothy L. Sayers lurk in the pages of Murder Must Advertise. A minor but memorable member of the supporting cast is Miss Meteyard, whose final words sum up Sayers’ philosophy of business life: ‘You have to advertise.’ Meteyard is a self-portrait, a Somerville graduate and ‘a funny woman’ who shares Sayers’ taste for vulgar limericks, her sardonic humour, and perhaps much more. For Miss Meteyard has in the past been threatened by the murder victim, Dean, with the exposure of a regrettable affair. ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at her, would you?’ says an unimaginative man ‘naïvely’. Her response to Dean was to say ‘publish and be damned’.
A latter-day Wimsey might infer that a colleague at Benson’s discovered the truth about Sayers’ secret pregnancy, despite the lengths to which Sayers and Beatrice White went in constructing the charade of her supposed sickness absence. Sayers must have loved taking revenge on the mischief-making snooper by transforming him (if her enemy was a man – nothing can be taken for granted with detective novelists) into Victor Dean, an unpleasant blackmailer. Sayers implied that he was homosexual, and sent him tumbling to death on Benson’s steep spiral staircase.
Sayers was too resilient to submit to the threats of a bully, but her strength came at a cost. The legacy of her treatment by her early lovers John Cournos and Bill White was that terror of emotion. The only way to protect herself was by building defences that nobody could destroy. The overbearing manner, the outlandish clothes, the relentless emphasis on passions of the intellect rather than of the heart, gave her as much security as a cast-iron alibi.
The Golden Age of Murder Page 42