The Division
Bell Mystery
Ellen Wilkinson
With a Preface
by Rachel Reeves
And an Introduction
by Martin Edwards
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Originally published in 1932 by George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., London. ©Ellen Wilkinson 1932
Preface Copyright © 2018 Rachel Reeves MP
Introduction Copyright © 2018 by Martin Edwards
Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with
the British Library
First U.S. Edition 2018
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948399
ISBN: 9781464210853 Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9781464210860 Ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
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Contents
The Division Bell Mystery
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
Author's Note
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
More from this Author
Contact Us
Dedication
Dedicated with sincere apologies to
my good friends among the police and
kitchen staff of the House of Commons
Preface
When I first stumbled upon The Division Bell Mystery, it was with the rather instrumental intention of finding out more about the culture of the House of Commons during the inter-war period and the status of women in Parliament. Yet by the end of the first chapter, I had become hooked on the fusion of whodunit suspense and political commentary that Ellen Wilkinson so cleverly creates.
Wilkinson was one of the first Labour women in Parliament, being elected for Middlesbrough East in 1924 during a general election in which the three incumbent Labour women were defeated in the opposite of a landslide for MacDonald’s embattled minority government. Wilkinson grew up in an impoverished mining community in Manchester where she remembers that even the leaves were grey from the soot. She quickly developed an all-consuming passion for social justice. Having managed to win a scholarship at Manchester University—no mean feat for a working-class young woman—she became a political organizer, suffragist campaigner, and councillor for Manchester City Council.
When she entered Parliament in 1924, it was just five years since the election of the first woman MP to take her seat (Nancy Astor). Wilkinson was alone as the only woman on the Labour benches—one of the “Orphans of the Storm” as she jokingly put it in her Maiden Speech—and yet it did not impede her limitless confidence, enthusiasm and commitment to parliamentary politics. Standing at just 4’10 with flame-red hair that matched her left-wing politics, she earned the epithets “Red Ellen”, “The Fiery Particle” and the “Pocket Pasionara” (for her involvement in Spanish Civil War campaigning). Wilkinson quickly developed something of the celebrity about her—with her penchant for colourful outfits, her various love affairs with married men, and her strong independence of mind. In the chamber, she spoke the most of the women MPs and cast the most votes, despite bouts of ill health. While Nancy Astor sported a minimalistic black and white suit with a tricorn hat, Wilkinson ignored her advice and sported a range of eye-catching outfits. She was also the first to venture into the male fortress that was the Smoking Room. When accosted by a policeman who informed her that ladies did not usually frequent the Smoking Room, she quipped “I am not a lady—I am a Member of Parliament,” as she pushed the door open defiantly.
Yet despite her early success as a woman pioneer, Wilkinson was, like her colleagues, swept away in a greater storm than the one she had weathered previously: the 1931 election. She would return to Parliament four years later, but in the meantime she took to writing—both fiction and political works. An avid murder mystery fan who named her kettle “Agatha” after her heroine Agatha Christie, Wilkinson now ventured into the genre herself as boldly and zestfully as she had ventured into the parliamentary Smoking Room. The book was written at the precipice of a transition within the Golden Age of crime fiction, at a time when the genre was gradually replacing cosy escapism with politicized dramaticism. The plot draws heavily from the political climate of the time: the crucial loan being negotiated between the government and Oissel, an American financier, is an unconcealed allusion to the difficulties experienced by the British government in the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Political commentary is interlaced throughout the story, and yet despite the strength of Wilkinson’s political ideology, she never descends into political point-scoring. Instead, her political experience gives colour and warmth to the drama that unfolds. Indeed, her main character—a young and impressionable Tory Parliamentary Private Secretary at the lowest ranks of a ministerial career—is presented as utterly decent. No doubt Wilkinson’s own experience as a Parliamentary Private Secretary under Labour MP Susan Lawrence from 1929–1931 informed her portrayal of his character. Despite Wilkinson’s (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) assurance that “All the characters in this book are entirely fictitious,” there are clear parallels between Wilkinson herself and the Labour MP Grace Richards, as well as between Lady Astor and the formidable and bubbly society hostess Lady Bell-Clinton.
The setting of Parliament and the political intrigue that Wilkinson so powerfully depicts can be seen in Parliament today. Every day or so, I walk down the corridor by the Terrace leading to what Wilkinson refers to as the “Harcourt Room” (which I believe to be the Churchill Room—a grand dining room now adorned with paintings by the wartime Prime Minister), with its various small “alphabet” dining rooms inspiring the ill-fated “Room J” (where the murder takes place). One evening, a while after having read Wilkinson’s book, I was walking down the corridor late at night when most MPs had gone home, and I nearly jumped out of my skin when the division bell rang shrilly.
Wilkinson was a real character around Parliament, and her knowledge of the place comes through vividly in the book. Always in a rush, on the Parliamentary Estate she became known for her incredible propensity to fall over, hence why she dedicated the book to her friends among the House of Commons police and kitchen staff, who often helped her up. She was loved and admired across the party divide to such an extent that a group of Conservative MPs, distressed at how little care she took of herself, bought her an electric cooker (possibly to encourage her to cook rather than relying on her usual diet of cigarettes and chocolates). In 1935, she returned to Parliament as MP for Jarrow, and the following year, her status as a campaigner, a radical and a deeply passionate politician was galvanized by her role in organizing the Jarrow Crus
ade, a march of 200 unemployed men from Jarrow to London in protest against the 80% unemployment in the town after the closure of its shipyard and steelworks. Wilkinson would later become the second woman to enter the Cabinet as Minister of Education in Attlee’s government of 1945, when she championed the raising of the school-leaving age and the introduction of free school milk. In the winter of 1946, Wilkinson died suddenly from an overdose of Medinal, one of the many medications she was taking for her increasing ill health. It was a terrible loss for Parliament, for the Labour party, and a tragic end to a dedicated and productive parliamentary career. Wilkinson’s brother destroyed her papers, worried that her reputation would be damaged by the stories about her affairs—with illustrator Frank Horrabin and Home Secretary Herbert Morrison amongst others. But her speeches, newspaper clippings, articles and two novels survive. And what cannot be lost is her legacy, as a trailblazer for women in Parliament.
—Rachel Reeves
Member of Parliament for Leeds West
Introduction
Politics in Golden-Age Detective Fiction
Detective novels published during the Golden Age of Murder between the two world wars have long been undervalued. For many years, it was a critical commonplace to dismiss them as cosy, conventional, and conservative. This lazy stereotyping was (and, where it persists, still is) all the more regrettable because it led to the neglect of many enjoyable whodunits once they were out of print. Of course, Agatha Christie’s work enjoyed enduring popularity, and the work and reputation of a handful of other writers, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, also escaped oblivion. But until the recent revival of interest in Golden Age detective fiction—fuelled, in part at least, by the success of the British Library’s Crime Classics—most Golden Age authors were forgotten by all but a few diehard fans.
Yet the stereotype was not only facile, it was also misleading. There is nothing cosy, for instance, about the finale to Francis Iles’ Before the Fact, for instance, or the closing pages of E.R. Punshon’s Crossword Mystery. Or about Christie’s And Then There Were None or Five Little Pigs, come to that. There is little that is conventional about The Documents in the Case by Sayers and Robert Eustace, Sic Transit Gloria by Milward Kennedy, or Lonely Magdalen by Henry Wade. The examples could be multiplied.
Equally, the received wisdom (famously articulated by Julian Symons, the finest British crime critic of the second half of the century, in his seminal history of the genre, Bloody Murder) that “almost all” British writers of the Golden Age were “unquestionably right-wing” is very wide of the mark. Even the tiny band of leading writers who made up the membership of the Detection Club in the 1930s included Nicholas Blake, briefly a Communist, Lord Gorell, at one time a prominent figure in the Labour party, the Fabian Socialists Douglas and Margaret Cole, the former Daily Herald journalist R.C. Woodthorpe, and other left-leaning figures such as Punshon, Kennedy, Helen Simpson, and the Club’s first President, G.K. Chesterton. Among the successful Golden Age writers whose politics might today be classed as “far-left” were Bruce Hamilton, Raymond Postgate, and the Marxist critic and poet Christopher St John Sprigg, while the most renowned crime publisher of the era, Victor Gollancz, was also the founder of the Left Book Club. The term “the Golden Age of detective fiction” itself is generally attributed to John Strachey, a Marxist critic who served as Secretary of State for War in Attlee’s post-war government. In other words, Ellen Wilkinson was very far from alone as a detective novelist of the left.
Perhaps the explanation for the myth about the conservatism of Golden Age writers is that Christie, Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts, H.C. Bailey, and Wade, who were arguably the most admired detective novelists of their day, were indeed essentially conservative in their outlook. The crime writing careers of their radical colleagues tended to be shorter and much less celebrated. Sprigg and Simpson, for instance, died young, while Woodthorpe, Hamilton, and Kennedy were far from prolific. The preoccupations of politics in real life evidently (and regrettably) prevented Ellen Wilkinson from writing a follow-up to The Division Bell Mystery. Yet even Christie wrote one novel in which the “least likely person” murderer is a pillar of the political establishment, and the cricket-playing baronet Wade was not afraid to glance at police brutality and corruption in the course of his inventive and often highly sophisticated mysteries.
As politicians who wrote classic crime fiction, Ellen Wilkinson and Lord Gorell were exceptional, but reading detective stories seems to have been a favourite pastime of leading political figures on both sides of the Atlantic. The career of the prolific Yorkshire-born author J.S. Fletcher was boosted by publicity given to the U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s endorsement of his work. Conversely, Stanley Baldwin, three times British Prime Minister, revealed in a speech in 1928 that he regarded The Leavenworth Case, by the American writer Anna K. Green, as “one of the best detective stories ever written”. When invited to a Detection Club dinner as a guest speaker, Sir Austen Chamberlain, half-brother of Neville Chamberlain, and a man who had himself narrowly failed to become leader of the Conservative party, told guests that he was a “greedy, interested, and passionate” fan of the genre. Victor Gollancz even ran a short-lived imprint called “The Prime Minister’s Detective Library”, although why he thought such branding would have widespread appeal is itself a mystery.
In fact, the main contribution that political class made to the classic detective novel was to supply a reliable and plentiful source of victims. Together with rascally financiers, disagreeable misers, and rich folk unwise enough to announce an intention to change their wills, politicians crop up again and again in Golden Age novels—as corpses unlikely to be widely mourned. Titles of the era included Robert Gore-Browne’s Murder of an M.P.!, Alan Thomas’s Death of the Home Secretary, and Helen Simpson’s The Prime Minister is Dead (this being the American edition; in Britain, the book was called, more cryptically, Vantage Striker). Nor was Ellen Wilkinson’s sole detective story unique in its parliamentary setting; Anthony Berkeley’s Death in the House features an apparently “impossible crime” in the House of Commons.
During the 1920s, the Golden Age whodunit represented a reaction from the slaughter of the First World War. People amused themselves with puzzles as a means of escape from the horrors that had left few families in Britain untouched: hence the supposed “cosiness” of the classic mystery, with its focus on a battle of wits between reader and writer. But during the 1930s, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the grim realities of the international political scene, as dictators flourished, and the existing order came under threat. Golden Age writers did not turn a blind eye, and their work reflected the world in which they lived in a variety of ways.
Woodthorpe and Punshon poked fun at Fascists in books such as Silence of a Purple Shirt and Dictator’s Way respectively, while other authors grappled with a growing awareness of the fallibility of long-cherished systems of justice, not only overseas but closer home. The anxieties of the age are captured towards the end of Kennedy’s Sic Transit Gloria, a book he described in a dedication to Gollancz as an “experiment”:
“British liberties, fair trial, justice, freedom of speech—shibboleths were as easy as clichés…A jury could only have secured injustice. What did the law matter—if the law could not have secured justice? People talked of judicial murder; was not judicial failure to secure the just punishment of a murderer just as bad?”
Kennedy’s story deals overtly with the political dimensions of injustice, but his more renowned and conservatively inclined contemporaries addressed similar issues more obliquely, and more successfully. Christie integrated daring ideas about how best one may achieve justice with ingenious plots in two of her masterpieces, Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None. Berkeley approached similar themes with irony and flair in Trial and Error, and John Dickson Carr wrapped them up within the confines of a “locked room” mystery in The Reader is Warned.
Br
uce Hamilton’s Rex v. Rhodes: the Brighton Murder Trial was an equally inventive novel, highly political written in the dispassionate, factual style associated with the Notable British Trials series. Published in 1937, but supposedly written in 1950, the Foreword to his book begins:
“In these days of expansion and activity the eyes of Soviet Europe are turned towards the future rather than the past. The history of the revolution which a short three years ago began its enormous task of liberating the energies of the working masses are yet to be written…[the Rhodes trial] was the first occasion in England on which a clear-cut issue, of whether a man did or did not commit homicide, was permitted, with an almost disarming frankness, to be judged in the light of the political sympathies of the ordinary middle-class jury.”
Hamilton’s vision of the future proved to be as misconceived as his understanding of the Soviet economic system, but his novel—for all its naivete—illustrates the ambition, originality, and social and political awareness that was evident in much more Golden Age fiction than has generally been acknowledged. The books by Hamilton and Kennedy suffer in comparison with those by Christie, Berkeley, and Carr not because they are less interesting, or less well-written, but because the storylines are less well-balanced, and prioritize the message over the mystery.
This is not a mistake that Ellen Wilkinson made. Nobody who knows anything of her life and career can doubt that her political views were passionate and deeply felt. But far from being didactic, The Division Bell Mystery is highly enjoyable, despite a few flaws typical of a first crime novel—notably the incompetence of the original police investigation of the murder scene. To her credit, Wilkinson avoids falling into the trap of scoring cheap political points in her portrayal of the Conservative PPS and amateur sleuth Robert West. This avoidance of bigotry and narrow-minded sectarianism sets an example to other members of the political class in any age. And it’s one of the reasons why it is such a shame that this lively “impossible crime” puzzle had no successors.
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