by Colin Watson
‘that School of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature’
Alan Bennett, Forty Years On
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
1. ‘So many yards of stuff, sensation pattern’
2. Mr Smith, Mr Boot and others
3. A very decent sort of burglar
4. De rigueur at Monte
5. The Bulldog breed
6. King Edgar, and how he got his crown
7. Excitable Sydney Horler
8. The Golden Age of detective fiction
9. The Orientation of villainy
10. Amid the alien corn
11. Below stairs
12. Girls who kept cool
13. The little world of Mayhem Parva
14. Gifted amateurs
15. Smart but not arty
16. Driving like hell
17. ‘With thy quire of Saints for evermore …’
18. Licence to kill
Index
About the Author
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements and thanks are due to the following authors and publishers for the use of copyright material:
To William Collins, Sons & Co. Ltd. for extracts from The Deduction of Colonel Gore by Lynn Brock;
To David Higham Associates for extracts from Lord Peter Views the Body (1928) and Have His Carcase (1932) by Dorothy L. Sayers (Victor Gollancz);
To Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. for extracts from The Last Hero (The Saint Closes the Case) by Leslie Charteris (1930), and for extracts from Moran Chambers Smiled by E. Phillips Oppenheim (1932);
To Lord Oxford and A. P. Watt & Son for extracts from Solved by Inspection by R. A. Knox (Methuen):
The cartoons are reproduced by kind permission of Punch.
Preface
This second edition has been revised only in as much as one ‘revises’ yesterday’s date by adding one. Such is the durability of the public appetite for mysteries and thrillers, and such is the persistence of established forms, that in no other field of fiction is there so little risk of obsolescence.
Introduction
One of the most consistently busy of Britain’s home industries during the past fifty years has been the manufacture of crime fiction. Some three hundred writers now contribute, more or less regularly, to the satisfaction of the public’s appetite for books about murder, theft, fraud, espionage, arson, blackmail and kindred activities. The appetite appears to grow with the advance of what we call the standard of living.
More than half of these authors, one in four of whom is a woman, live in London or within a few miles of it. Their addresses include precious few manors or granges, but a host of numbered, semi-detached houses in Roads, Gardens, Avenues and Crescents. A handful of the most successful enjoy incomes comparable with those of chiefs of the Civil Service or of minor property dealers. But more than three quarters of the others depend for their living on wages from regular, non-literary, employment. They are authors only in their spare time.
These facts may seem odd to those who have been led to picture the typical thriller writer as a rich émigré, dictating his tales at luxurious remove beside some lido or lagoon. Yet the situation really has altered very little since the 1920s. Then, as now, the spectacularly successful crime novelist was a rarity. For every Phillips Oppenheim or Edgar Wallace, there were scores whose writing, even at a steady rate of a book every six months, brought in little better than pocket money.
It is doubtful if there has ever existed, outside the dairy industry, so large, so diligent and so easily contented a body of primary producers.
This book is not an attempt to catalogue them, to offer a Who’s Who of authorship or a comprehensive survey of the ‘genre’. Its purpose is to explore some of the crime and mystery fiction of the past half century – characteristic samples, that is, and not necessarily the best known or most widely approved – for clues to the convictions and attitudes of the large section of British society for which it was written.
History’s most frustrating pages are the many left empty of record of the thoughts and beliefs of ordinary men and women. Evidence of what ideas had common currency at this or that moment in the past is among the hardest to adduce. What a pity it is, from the social historian’s point of view, that there was no Ronald Knox in the monastery of the Venerable Bede; no Dorothy L. Sayers looking over Holinshed’s shoulder while he white-washed the Tudors; no ‘Sapper’ to echo in hearty prose the solid citizenry’s approval of Peterloo. Nothing would have been added to our knowledge of the old battles, usurpations and massacres, perhaps, but we should be much better informed about the tribal, class and religious dogmatism that motivated them.
CHAPTER 1
‘So many yards of stuff, sensation pattern’
More than two hundred years ago, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu declared of the writer of the popular fiction of her day:
Perhaps you will say I should not take my ideas of the manners of the times from such trifling authors; but it is more truly to be found among them than from any historian: as they write merely to get money, they always fall into the notions that are most acceptable to the present taste.
‘Trifling’ is scarcely the word that would occur to us in connection with the enormous eighteenth-century novel, but it would have been understood and approved by the contemporaries of Pope and, indeed, by several succeeding generations. It was not until the later years of Victoria’s reign – and then only with misgivings – that fiction, stories invented to entertain, was conceded to be anything other than a reprehensible invitation to waste time. It took the combined industry of Scott, Lytton, Trollope, Thackeray and Dickens to render the novel respectable. Their industry, that is, plus a shrewd appreciation of current taste, plus the good fortune to have been born to authorship at just the right moment to reap the benefit of cheap printing, big-scale serialization (Dickens enjoyed periodical prints of 70,000 and more), and the direct marketing and wide distribution made possible by the growth of the railways.
Against the tide of fiction from the booksellers, the railway bookstalls and the ever-expanding circulating libraries, objections to its ‘triviality’ and to its degrading and enervating influence failed not because they were morally invalid but because they were economically inappropriate. Literature had joined the list of human products that the industrial revolution brought within the field of organized commercial exploitation. It had become a commodity.
There always had been profit in books, of course. Dr Johnson’s famous disavowal of altruism is applicable to the entire post-Caxton era. But Lady Mary Wortley Montagu showed perception of something beyond the basic principle that ‘they write merely to get money’. The interesting part of her statement is: ‘they always fall into the notions that are most acceptable to the present taste’.
Was this true of the fiction writers of two centuries ago? Of some, undoubtedly. The prospect of strictly limited circulation must have prompted conformity to fashion and the choice of themes known to be approved by potential subscribers. The opinions of patrons were important, also; the authors of those slavish dedications knew better than to undo their good effect by giving offence in the text.
Yet the section of society involved was small. By ‘the manners of the times’, Lady Mary meant the manners of a literate minority, an isolated and privileged minority. She cannot have expected even the most ‘trifling’ author to reflect the ideas and attitudes of the bulk of the common people, the labourers, peasants and artisans.
It was only with the development of
mass dissemination of books and periodicals in the second half of the nineteenth century that it became important for the ambitious author to acquaint himself with the views of classes of people other than his immediate social circle. And even then, there was no question of a writer seeking popularity at every level. What was later to be dignified in the language of the advertisers as ‘mass response’ would still, in Dickens’s day, have been called ‘the plaudits of the mob’. The mob did not buy books; it did not subscribe to libraries; it did not take Household Words or Chambers’ Weekly. There was, in fact, nothing to be earned by exploring the tastes and aspirations of the amorphous millions of non-consumers unless it was to provide ‘copy’ to shock or amuse one’s middle-class readers.
Dickens himself was an assiduous and gifted gatherer of copy. He was fascinated by squalor and depravity. His sense of the grotesque was perhaps the keenest of his age and allied with it was a gift for divining the curious mixture of guilt and complacency with which the Victorian middle class regarded the horrors spawned by the same industrial revolution that had created its own comfort and security.
It was reassuring for people who enjoyed the material benefits of the new age to be able to divide the poor neatly and without hesitation into three distinct categories: the brutalized, the comic, and the not-long-for-this-world.
For those such as Fagin and Sykes, there awaited the rope, an inevitable and satisfactory conclusion (though not in the view of Dickens himself, for he opposed capital punishment). Only the most fanciful would have disputed that ‘going to the bad’ was a purely voluntary exercise, albeit prompted in some cases by hereditary factors, that cast no reflection on society in general.
The comic poor, while not undeserving of sympathy judiciously expressed through approved agencies, were clearly happy folk on the whole. Their unconventionality, their bizarre tricks of speech and quaint mannerisms, lent colour to an otherwise dreary environment. They always had a cheery word and kept aloof, despite the deprivations natural to their situation in life, from the criminal classes. No problem there.
As for the third, the pathetic group, this also had its place in what a substantially religious community held to be the divine plan. It was an omnipresent example of fortitude in adversity and of suffering bravely borne. Noteworthy in the Dickens novels – and in those of his less celebrated contemporaries – is the uncomplaining attitude of the sick and destitute. They seem to have taken advice to make the best of a bad job with the literal-minded determination of ham actors at an audition. Even their dying becomes a demonstration so protracted as seriously to put diagnosis in doubt.
Not that the readers doubted. They knew what was coming to Little Nell, to Smike, to Oliver Twist’s mother, to Dora. It would be extravagant to claim that these fictional deaths were relished in a sadistic way, although there undoubtedly is a close relation between sentimentality and cruelty. What they did afford was a sense of noble sublimation. The Victorians’ capacity for being sustained by abstract conceptions such as nobility, refinement, virtue, redemption, and so on, was larger and more genuine than we sometimes are prepared to credit. It was, to some degree, a protective mechanism. The road society had taken was signposted to heaven, but the scenery included notably satanic stretches. The many who fell on that unattractive wayside had perforce to be stepped over – or on – and it was less distressing to do so in the persuasion that God was under firm contract to give the stragglers a lift.
High-mindedness was not, of course, the only ‘notion acceptable to the present taste’ conveyed by the popular novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century. The acquisition of money was a preoccupation scarcely less constant. There were sound reasons for this. Commercial and industrial expansion was proceeding at a pace that was immensely exciting to those whose efforts were dedicated to it. Profits were pursued with a zeal beyond mere cupidity; they were seen as a sign of progress, of man’s self-improvement. One of the significant features of Dickensian popular literature is insistence on ascribing wealth other than inherited possessions to the practice of virtues such as thrift, inventiveness, energy. There is seldom any suggestion of unfairness or illogicality within the commercial system itself. Fraud, theft, exploitation – these are featured as plot ingredients, but they invariably are represented as the misdeeds of exceptional individuals. The frequency with which these rogues happen to be lawyers seems to have matched fully the expectations of the Victorian public.
One simple fact of Victorian England which the inhabitants of a welfare state can appreciate only with difficulty is that life without money was literally hell. Pauperdom was a terror that haunted whole multitudes. It was the terminal stage of the illness of poverty and as real a possibility for the school teacher, the shopkeeper or the government clerk as for the seamstress or the furnaceman. Revivals of Victorian melodrama win easy laughs when the villain announces the foreclosing of a mortgage, but the audiences of the time would have been harrowed, not amused; they knew well what being evicted meant. ‘Ruin’ was not a quaint euphemism for a girl’s first tumble into sexual experience; it was a word no stronger than was justified by a system of economic servitude, iron-banded with moral strictures, that submerged scores of thousands into prostitution.
The most terrifying feature of being deprived, for whatever reason, of a means of livelihood was the high probability of the process being irreversible. Another phrase from the Victorians’ vocabulary that evokes a superior smile today is ‘station in life’. But it was a solemnly meaningful reference to what was felt to be a pre-ordained and permanent social structure. The optimists – and there were more of them about than pessimists – were convinced that things were getting a little better every day in every way for everybody, but only because society as a whole was allowed to progress slowly and steadily, undisturbed by any changing of places. Fortunes were to be made, of course, and men made them: sometimes in romantic circumstances, sometimes by dubious methods, most often by sheer diligence and the application of such advantages as technical education and ready capital. But the majority of people were to die very little richer than they had been born. They considered themselves fortunate if they achieved the modest ambition of always being able to ‘pay their way’.
In this climate of stern realism, lightened only a little by the spritely unorthodoxy of Micawbers, there was one source of benefit that figured perpetually in the calculations of every family in the land. This was the legacy. A measure of the importance attached to inheritance by the Victorian public is the frequency of its use as a motive, often the main motive, in contemporary novels. If wills were expunged from the works of Dickens, three-quarters of his plots would be quite meaningless. The fiction of the period could almost be described as the literature of probate.
It would not be true to suggest that obsession with inheritance began in the Victorian era. Property and its disposition were already a well-established theme by the time Jane Austen took her first cool look at her heroines’ financial prospects and set within the same descriptive paragraph a high, intelligent forehead and an income of twenty thousand a year. What had happened, though, in the forty-eight years between the publication of Pride and Prejudice and that of Great Expectations was a radical shift in what might be called the centre of gravity of the national wealth.
In 1813, it was still inconceivable that a Mrs Bennett would seek a profitable match for one of her daughters outside the ranks of the landed gentry. By 1861, the whole climate of social opportunity had changed. New wealth had been and continued to be created, and it was going into hands very different from Mr Darcy’s. The capitalist principles of Mr Gradgrind now prevailed. The new rich were the manufacturers, the traders, the bankers, the steelmasters, the shipowners and railway directors. The ancient laws of apportionment by tribal title did not apply to winnings from mine and factory. A Hudson could be king, if only a railway king, and the credulity of readers was not strained by the tale of a convict who made his pile and bequeathed it to his penniless boy
benefactor. Indeed, it was a story exactly attuned to the wishful thinking of the times.
The title Great Expectations is not only apt in the context of a single book. It epitomizes the attitude of a reading public that had seen wonders and believed them to presage continual social progress, with special bonuses in deserving cases, and every now and again a prize contributed directly by the deity as token of personal interest and approval.
The popular novelist’s understanding and response to the sort of yearning that found satisfaction in accounts of secret benefactors, long-lost heirs, frustrated frauds and the rest, did not remain uncriticized. As early as 1851 when a list of authors selling most readily on W. H. Smith’s bookstalls was headed by such unexceptionable names as Bulwer Lytton, Captain Marryatt, C. P. R. James and Mrs Trollope, The Times had complained:
‘Every addition to the stock (of the bookstalls) was positively made on the assumption that persons of the better class who constitute the larger portion of railway readers lose their accustomed taste the moment they enter the station.’
In 1863, two years after the success of Great Expectations, the following onslaught was made in a leading review, the Quarterly:
A class of literature has grown up around us … playing no inconsiderable part in moulding the minds and forming the habits and tastes of its generation; and doing so principally, we had almost said exclusively, by ‘preaching to the nerves’…. Excitement, and excitement alone, seems to be the great end at which they aim … A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop. The public wants novels, and novels must be made – so many yards of printed stuff, sensation pattern, to be ready at the beginning of the season … Various causes have been at work to produce this phenomenon of our literature. Three principal ones may be named as having had a large share in it – periodicals, circulating libraries, and railway bookstalls.
