The Golden Age of Murder

by Martin Edwards

  People thought her a battleaxe, but like Christie she was wracked by guilt and shame. Like Christie, she judged herself too severely. At first she kept quiet for the sake of her parents and her job. Later, marriage to a difficult man brought fresh complications. Why did she not insist that John Anthony come to live at Witham once she and Mac had adopted him? Mac was reluctant, and the boy seemed happy with Ivy, but Sayers never pushed the point. Given the moral climate of the Thirties, she feared humiliation if she admitted to an illegitimate child. Trapped in the web of lies she wove in desperation when she found she was pregnant, she could find no escape. Sticking to her story was the only safe option.

  Why did she stop writing detective fiction, when her love of the Detection Club still burned bright? The Abdication may have killed off Thrones, Dominations, with its meditations on marriage, but devising a storyline that is overtaken by events is an occupational hazard for authors. Why did she fail to come up with an equally interesting mystery connected to the Wimseys’ married life? The answer, in part, was that she felt that she could not surpass Gaudy Night. The slightness of Busman’s Honeymoon (in content, if not in word count) supports this theory. Even P. G. Wodehouse, who admired her earlier books, told Anthony Berkeley privately that he was disappointed by it: ‘I shuddered every time a rustic came on the scene.’

  Sayers became more interested in corpus christi than Agatha Christie. Writing about religion gave her a deeper fulfilment than she could derive either from writing detective stories or from a marriage to a man whose personality had been damaged by the war.

  The stress of keeping constantly on guard, unable to confide even in close friends such as Helen Simpson and Muriel St Claire Byrne, must have been hard to bear. So was her inability to take a mother’s overt pride in her son’s successes, and the inhibited, arm’s-length nature of the relationship that the two of them maintained. A price also had to be paid in terms of public honour.

  Following the success of her religious plays, the Archbishop of Canterbury offered her a Lambeth degree, an honorary doctorate in divinity. This honour would have filled Sayers with pride, but she turned it down. At first she said she did not deserve it. Later she maintained that a writer of commercial fiction might become an embarrassment to the Church, especially given that a section of the Press ‘does not love me very much’. These were thin excuses. Her over-riding concern was that the Lambeth degree was incompatible with having given birth outside marriage. If she took the degree, and subsequently her secret came out, she feared her disgrace would be complete.

  Like Sayers, Berkeley never wrote any significant detective fiction after the start of the Second World War. In 1941, Hitchcock’s butchering of Before the Fact was matched by the miserable film version of Trial and Error. In Flight from Destiny, director Vincent Sherman turned Lawrence Todhunter into a university professor, moved the setting to the USA, and sacrificed irony for dismal solemnity. Even a man less cynical than Berkeley could be forgiven for despairing. A sign of how quickly his star fell is that, while Sayers’ literary contributions to the war effort earned national attention, a story in which Berkeley revived Roger Sheringham in order to reinforce the message that ‘careless talk costs lives’ was published only in the North Devon Journal.

  Pleasing speculation that he repeated the trick of Malice Aforethought by publishing a brand new novel under an undetectable pseudonym is not backed up by any evidence. Unlike Sayers, Berkeley did not take refuge in religion. His creativity was confined largely to producing raspberry-flavoured home-made wine, and writing limericks of dubious merit.

  The damage the German army’s gas had done to his lungs meant he was a martyr to asthma and bronchitis. As Francis Iles, he continued to review regularly, and his critical judgments mattered long after his books disappeared from the shelves. Julian Symons, a man capable of being as acerbic as Berkeley, said in an obituary, ‘A whole generation of crime writers was in debt to Francis Iles.’

  Even when he fell out of love with the Detection Club, Berkeley remained emotionally entangled with detective fiction. He supported the Crime Writers’ Association – membership of which did not depend on a secret ballot – from its inception, contributing acerbic articles highlighting the shortcoming of publishers to the CWA’s early newsletters. In the early Sixties, as a member of a panel judging the awards now known as Daggers, he condemned one shortlisted author’s work as full of ‘superior sex and sadism’. One might think these qualities would appeal to Berkeley, but he complained that the author in question did not deserve to be reviewed, let alone win a prize. As usual, he found it impossible to be philosophical when unable to get his own way, and resigned in a huff. Hard though he sometimes worked to cultivate friendships, they had to be on his terms.

  As a reviewer, Berkeley was one of the first critics to laud the talents of gifted young writers such as P. D. James and Ruth Rendell. He corresponded for years with a prolific if minor crime writer, the Mancunian bank manager Harold Blundell, who wrote as George Bellairs. When they eventually met, Bellairs’ wife cooked for them, and Berkeley heaped praise on her escalopes – the old charmer had faded, but not quite vanished. At one point, he offered shrewd advice to Bellairs on how to negotiate better terms with his publishers. To Bellairs, he made one of his most revealing remarks: ‘You cash in on the gusto while you’ve got it. Believe me, it goes.’

  But why did it go? The clues lie buried in Berkeley’s writing. Corroboration can be gleaned from the work of the woman he yearned for. The fact is that Berkeley’s career as a crime novelist began at around the time he met E. M. Delafield, and ended when she died. This was no coincidence. She inspired and obsessed him. Without her, he was finished as a crime writer.

  Their relationship blossomed with those discussions about the tragedy of Edith Thompson, and is as intriguing as any between writers of the inter-war years. Yet it has been missed by everyone. The only evidence of it comes from coded references scattered throughout their writing. The couple played a secret game involving as many literary impersonations and hidden identities as could be found in any detective novel. Rather than portray their relationship directly in their work (as Sayers did in Strong Poison), they opted for subtlety, packing their books with nods and winks to each other, in characters’ names and life stories. They revelled in their own ingenuity, finding a strange consolation for the fact they could not be together. Like Poe in ‘The Purloined Letter’, they were planting clues to their mutual devotion in plain sight.

  Messalina of the Suburbs influenced Berkeley’s use of actual crimes in his fiction, and he dedicated his second detective novel to Delafield. His description of her as the ‘most delightful of writers’ is slyly ambiguous. She returned the compliment, dedicating to him a book called Jill, in which the hero, like Berkeley, married in haste during the war. The stumbling-block was that Delafield was also married, with a young son and daughter.

  In The Way Things Are, Laura Temple, a self-portrait, becomes obsessed with a male admirer, Duke Ayland, but tells him she cannot abandon her marriage, for fear of harming her children. Ayland writes music, as Berkeley did, while another character is a novelist whose first names have the same initials as Berkeley’s. Laura is a detective story fan, and Delafield alludes to their shared interest in Edith Thompson. At one point Laura writes a long letter to Ayland expressing her feelings for him, before a recollection of correspondence featuring in murder trials prompts her to put a match to it. The book’s ending is tantalizingly inconclusive, as if Delafield were teasing Berkeley, hinting that perhaps one day, things might be different. Yet Laura does not leave her husband. Neither did Delafield.

  The soul-baring was mutual. Berkeley showed Delafield ‘It Pays to Look Soulful: a Story for Cynics’, in which he satirized social attitudes towards infidelity. He never published the manuscript, although Delafield commented on it approvingly. His main aim was to send her a message about the intensity of his feelings for her. One can picture him telling Delafield that his wife d
id not understand him. This was undoubtedly true, for Delafield was perhaps the only person who ever came close to understanding him.

  Once Berkeley became involved with Helen Peters, Delafield knew she and he would never become a couple. She consoled herself, in the guise of her most famous character the Provincial Lady (a very thinly veiled self-portrait), with the reflection that ‘writers are too egotistical to make ideal husbands for anybody’. The need to accept the inevitable influenced Thank Heaven Fasting, a biting study of what marriage meant for an upper-class woman. She reinforced the autobiographical subtext by giving her second forename to her protagonist, Monica.

  Despite her spell as a Bride of Heaven, Delafield was not hostile to divorce. Her concern was about its consequences, and Nothing is Safe highlights the damage done to children after their parents split up. This was an age when woman divorced for adultery risked losing custody of her children. It was not a risk she could bring herself to take, yet she kept returning to the theme that it is a mistake to marry a person one has never truly loved. To live without one’s true, passionate soulmate is to live without fulfilment.

  Berkeley felt the same. But anger and an irrational sense of betrayal came easily to him. Delafield teased him from time to time in her books, and he retaliated with a series of dark portrayals of beautiful temptresses whose behaviour was monstrously inhuman. Read in this light, his books seem like howls of anguish, because he was besotted with a woman who had enslaved him yet refused to sacrifice her comfortable way of life to be with him.

  In some respects, theirs was a love–hate relationship – but that intense mutual attraction persisted to the end. In ‘They Don’t Wear Labels’, Delafield ventured into psychological suspense, with another nod to Francis Iles, as a wife staying in a boarding-house worries that her apparently adoring husband means to poison her. The resemblance to Before the Fact is unmistakable, while the notion of feeding someone shards of broken glass comes straight from the fantasy Edith Thompson shared with Frederick Bywaters.

  A collection containing this seldom-noticed story was published in the same year that Berkeley’s last novel appeared. He dedicated As for the Woman to Delafield with ‘affection’ and spoke of their ‘long, happy and candid’ friendship. That reference to candour speaks volumes. He and she could say things to each other in private that could never be revealed to anyone else. But did his story amount to a confession of a desire to commit murder?

  Detective novelists love to test credibility to the limit. Laying false trails is seductive. Bluffs and double bluffs become a way of life. Berkeley’s Roger Sheringham, more than any other fictional detective, demonstrated that apparently logical deductions can be wildly mistaken. Yet As for the Woman does imply that Berkeley harboured a homicidal fantasy driven by his infatuation with Delafield. Berkeley’s alter ego in Malice Aforethought, Dr Bickleigh, was a dreamer, and Berkeley’s imagination was equally hyperactive. Given the endless tricks he played with character names, there can be no coincidence in the surname of the man who stands between Alan, based on Berkeley, and the woman he loves. It is Pawle – and it sounds exactly like the name of Delafield’s husband, Paul.

  Riven by jealousy, Alan contemplates murdering Pawle, and at one point believes he has done so – by accident. But Pawle survives, and so does the marriage. Alan is humiliated, and shamed by his own cowardice. He no longer knows whether Evelyn still loves him, and finishes up thinking only of himself. Pawle has ‘destroyed his soul’.

  Did Berkeley contemplate killing Paul Dashwood? If so, was this driven by jealousy, because Paul, like ‘Pawle’, had an unbreakable hold on the woman he loved? Perhaps, but Berkeley’s overactive imagination may have led him to think that killing Paul would be an ‘altruistic murder’ of the kind he wrote about obsessively. A detective studying Delafield’s fiction might deduce that she, like Evelyn, had been mistreated by her husband. If so, did she confide in Berkeley, and if she did, was she telling the truth? If Lina Aysgarth, the masochistic victim of Before the Fact, was a version of Delafield, was the seemingly charming but actually sociopathic Johnnie Aysgarth a savage caricature of Paul Dashwood?

  Delafield drops delicate hints in books such as Nothing is Safe about husbands who make excessive and unpleasant sexual demands of their wives. Yet it is almost impossible to reconcile Delafield’s gently humorous portrayal of the Provincial Lady’s dull husband with the notion that Paul abused her – unless she was using fiction as way of masking the truth. Did she tolerate the intolerable simply for the sake of the children, or was Paul guilty of nothing worse than a lack of sparkle? No outsider can guess what goes on behind closed doors in respectable homes in the English countryside. Mental torture, perhaps, or simply mind-numbing tedium.

  Berkeley may have devised the storyline of As for the Woman as a subtle metaphor for his dysfunctional relationship with Delafield and her husband, with Anthony, Elizabeth and Paul represented by Alan, Evelyn and Pawle. Yet whatever the truth about Delafield’s marriage, it would be a miscarriage of justice to convict Paul Dashwood of domestic abuse on fictionalized and equivocal evidence from a man who probably loathed him. Berkeley was depressed when he wrote As for the Woman, dissatisfied with his second marriage, and despairing because Delafield was out of reach. If he did fantasize about murdering Paul Dashwood, writing offered catharsis, and he committed no crime more serious than that minor motoring offence. He planned another book, in which Alan Littlewood married. Presumably this was to be another exercise in self-flagellating fictional autobiography. What stopped him from going ahead with it?

  The answer surely lies in a series of disasters that befell Delafield in quick succession. Her son Lionel died at the age of twenty, from gunshot wounds in the armoury of the Infantry Training Service. An open verdict was recorded, but he may have killed himself. This shattering blow was followed by Delafield undergoing a colostomy. Cancer ravaged her beauty, as it had Helen Simpson’s a couple of years earlier. She collapsed while giving a lecture, and died at the age of fifty-three. Her premature death explains why, for all her literary gifts, her name is no longer well known. Yet The Diary of a Provincial Lady continues to be reprinted, and its author resurfaced in the guise of Esme Delacroix in an episode of The Simpsons called Diatribe of a Mad Housewife. The ludicrous improbability of this would surely have appealed to her mischievous sense of humour.

  Berkeley’s career as a detective novelist began at the time of those criminal conversations with Delafield, and ended as her health failed. In her he found inspiration, and the grief caused by her death destroyed his creative impulse. The tragedy thickened the fog of misery that enveloped him during and after the Second World War. With the same obsessive persistence with which he pursued women and grudges, he stockpiled crates of ‘Victory’ stamps in the mistaken belief they would prove a shrewd investment. Seeking to outwit the taxman, he hid money under floorboards and stuffed family silver into false cupboards.

  Berkeley’s stepdaughter has miserable memories of the Forties, much of which she spent in rural isolation at Linton Hills while her brother stayed with their father. The large, lonely house was lit by oil lamps because there was no mains electricity or gas. In the teenage girl’s eyes, Berkeley was a bully with a sadistic streak, a man who took pleasure in hurting women. He frightened her and was unkind to her mother, once ‘la belle Helene’.

  Helen’s temperament was depressive, and she could not stand up for herself. Berkeley’s attitude towards women was tainted by the conviction that they exploited men. He mourned Delafield openly, and spoke to his stepdaughter about her ‘as if she were the love of his life’. He would shut himself away in his room every morning ‘to write’ – but never produced anything worthy of note.

  When Berkeley’s London house became habitable again after the war, the small, unhappy family returned there, but they lived separate lives on separate floors. Berkeley went back to Devon from time to time, but on his own. In 1951, Helen reverted to her maiden name, Peters, and moved out altog
ether. Berkeley never saw his stepdaughter again, and she was not sorry. ‘He could be good company when he was in the mood, he was clever and entertaining,’ she said, ‘but ultimately the dark side dominated. I have never met anyone else like him, and I say that with profound thankfulness.’

  Yet with Berkeley, there was always another twist in the tale. He entertained his niece, the daughter of his brother Stephen and Hilary, at Linton Hills after the war, and invited her to the Café Royal for a Detection Club dinner. To assist her recuperation from tuberculosis, he took her for a holiday in the Canaries and Madeira. She admired his wit and intelligence, and he treated her with generosity and respect. They got on well for the rest of his life, although his physical ailments and depressive streak sometimes made him challenging company. Hilary, who divorced Stephen Cox and married a soldier, was wary of Berkeley’s avuncular interest in her daughter, and warned her about his reputation for womanizing. In fact, he behaved himself, even though one or two people they met on holiday jumped to the mistaken conclusion that the supposed ‘niece’ was really his mistress. Berkeley being Berkeley, he was not embarrassed, but amused.

  The detective fiction of the Golden Age was as flawed as the human beings who wrote it. It does not take a Great Detective to find books awash with examples of homophobia, sexism and racism, along with other prejudices and faults. Even books written by progressives such as the Coles contain elements that a modern reader will find offensive. Equally, many successful books written today would have repelled readers in the Thirties.

  Novels written by Detection Club members displayed the vices of their time, and sometimes a sloppiness falling far short of the standards to which the Club aspired. Theirs was popular commercial fiction, matching the demands of readers and publishers in the English-speaking world. Bucking the trend was fraught with difficulty. Yet Sayers, Berkeley and Christie dared to be different, time and again. The best books from the Detection Club did more than give readers enduring pleasure, in itself an honourable achievement. Their range, quality and inventiveness pointed the way forward for writers in the decades that followed.